Twitter email notifications on the iPhone: FAIL

Twitter unveiled new email notifications. The good news? On a computer, it looks great. The bad news? On the iPhone, it looks like crap.

As you can see below, the design on a desktop looks much better than what it used to. The design is sleeker (for example, the world map behind the logo has replaced the plain blue bar) , the new colors resemble those of the new homepage. I also really like the fact that the email now tells you how may users you follow who also follow your new follower. This is a very useful added feature instead of the following/follower lines in the old design.

New design:

Old design:

Don’t get too excited. Twitter managed to screw this up on the mobile.  This is what the same notification looks like on my iPhone:

I don’t understand why Twitter hasn’t tested the new email notification on the iPhone before rolling it out to everyone. Also, why hasn’t it been fixed already? Now I wonder if it is just on the iPhone or if it could be on the Blackberry or Android as well?

What can we learn from this?

• Before sending a newsletter, check that the email (the formatting, the layout and so on) looks good on a range of devices.
• Do not forget mobile users:  a great number of your customers already checks their emails on their phones.
• Do not roll out a newsletter before doing a pilot test.
• This extra effort will be a great return on investment in the future, as the trend (users checking their emails primarily on their phones) is likely to increase in the near future.

If you have an iPhone/Blackberry/Android or any phone with an access to the Internet, let me know below if the format of Twitter notifications has changed and if it has changed for the worst…!

UPDATE: 25th of May: Twitter fixed the formatting of the email notifications. The lesson from this? Do complain in a blog post when things go wrong, you never know who could be listening!