Comments on: Want 700,000 HTML email templates?

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:21:37 +0000

I don’t know that “developer” would be the appropriate word for a DreamWeaver user or an email template designer. =P

MailChimp offers complete freedom over the overall design process, including plain-text view of the HTML and CSS. The automation is just an awesome, but optional bonus feature.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:45:37 +0000

Thanks, Jonathan. We used our supercomputer (nvidia tesla) for the first pass, then wanted human opinion (on a massive scale) for the 2nd pass. But yes, we are indeed using ec2 for some exciting stuff to come soon. Muahahaha.

By: jonathan

jonathan — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:16:05 +0000

I think that you could of computed it in the cloud really fast also. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

By: ANTJUAN.LASHAWN

ANTJUAN.LASHAWN — Sat, 16 May 2009 20:17:35 +0000

I think so as well. I think that this is going to allow everyone to be a mailchimp

By: Benji

Benji — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:01:02 +0000

On the opposite end of the spectrum from @Kali7, will you be making some of those filtered-out designs available for those who want to use them? I’m thinking for those who like a certain header, but don’t quite like the way the design came out, could they browse further through other designs with the same header? They may not want to tweak the colors themselves. Tweaking colors can make a monkey go bananas, you know.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:12:16 +0000

Hi Kali7, there are lots of options in MC for advanced designers. You can totally bypass the templates and the WYSIWYG if you want. Check out the “advanced design tools” demo on this page: http://blog.mailchimp.com/power_features/

By: Kali7

Kali7 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:07:55 +0000

Ok, I have to say it…. but I am finding the template thing problematic. Much prefer to do the lot in dreamweaver (and yes, know the e-mail rules).
I don’t want my stuff shoved into one of your templates, and I want to see ALL the source code.
Can we please have a developer section where we don’t have things handed on a plate for us? Please?
The automation thing keeps wanting to take control of most of the stuff I do for a university, to the point that we are contemplating building our own server to send e-mails.
I love having someone else do the marketing reports, host images, and send stuff. But the rest, great for some, annoying as all hell for the others.

By: Nicole

Nicole — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:51:53 +0000

WOW… this is amazing stuff. I am so jealous!

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:23:53 +0000

@Harry – I don’t think that we know yet. We’re still left with quite a lot of themes to sift through, and I think that the team wants to run them through a “March Madness” style bracket competition to pick a handful per header graphic. But I’m not really sure what the “target” number of options is (or if we have a target).

We’ve learned a lot from this experiment. Namely, just because you think some people might not really be looking, and you reject their data, it doesn’t mean you should reject *paying* them. Because if you do, they get really, really, really angry (apparently, it hurts their eBay-style turker-reputation). Oops. We just assumed that if we reject their data, we also reject their payment.

A handful of turkers really hate me over at the Turker Nation forum, and have been emailing me.

Oh, another lesson – don’t sign up for Mechanical Turk with your personal name. Use the company name. Heh.

We ended up just hitting the “approve all” button. No idea if it’ll be retroactive and pay the people we rejected, so we’ll see.

All in all, we’re super happy. We feel like we got about 90% quality results from the experiment, and according to the person from Amazon that we spoke to, people usually get around 75 – 85% quality on their first go at this (a lot depends on the type of tasks you’re asking turkers to complete, too).

We also learned about how to *word* your request. Since this was a subjective, “design” related task, we told people, “There is no right or wrong answer.” Some turkers took that as, “ok, I can just click anything i want, really really fast.”

The crazy thing was that there’s a little field where turkers can enter comments while they vote. We got an *amazing* amount of great feedback from people about designing headers, why they didn’t like certain ones, and even tips on how to conduct better mechanical turk experiments.

We plan to do some actual usability studies (on the MailChimp application) with mechanical turk, now that we know how it all works.

By: How Mailchimp turned to Mechanical Turk for their User Research- 90 Percent of Everything

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:21:19 +0000

[...] (the email marketing webapp people) have written about a really interesting piece of user research they ran using Amazon’s Mechanical [...]