#4 Highlighted Questions

What are Highlighted Questions?

During user interviews, we found that one of the main reasons you write an email is to ask questions. However, occassionally people forget to answer the question you have asked.

To help solve this problem, we have come up with Highlighted Questions.

Put simply, highlighted questions emphasise the question you are asking.

Plum Mail does this by placing the question(s) you ask at the top of recipient's reply box to make them really obvious a reply is needed. We actually provide a specific text box in which to answer the question(s).

There can be no doubt you have a question you want answering!

Why is this useful?

Your question is made really obvious to the reader. It is very clear there is a question that you need an answer to and a reply is expected.

We're all busy. When you're processing an email and working out how to reply, highlighted questions are designed as a simple helper.

Emphasising the question makes it really easy to know how the writer wants you to respond and the simple act of placing the question text where you can easily reference it while you're typing is another small but powerful win.

This is what Plum Mail is all about, supercharging your communication with powerful features so you can enjoy better quality communication with less effort.

How do highlighted questions work?

Whenever you type a question mark, Plum Mail asks you if you want to turn your normal question into a highlighted question.

Plum Mail does this with some custom markdown syntax which you can also write yourself:

We made a quick video demo which shows how to create, reply to and read responses to highlighted questions.

Unexpected Benefits

During testing, we realised highlighted questions offer more structure and clarity to a conversation.

This is especially true in group conversations.

Take the example that you would like to ask your team for feedback on a design idea. You present the idea and ask: What does everyone think of the new design?

Everyone in your conversation gets the same highlighted question and can send their own answer.

Underneath your original question, Plum Mail collates all the responses in one place.

Turns out this is amazingly helpful for the simple fact you can read and compare feedback in one place on the screen rather than having to try and read through all the responses to access the information.

Use Highlighted Questions Today

We would love to get more feedback from you on Plum Mail's highlighted questions feature. If you would particularly like to try them out, let me know and I can onboard you to Plum Mail today. [email protected]

Those of you already using Plum Mail, go ahead, type a question in Plum Mail. How did it go? Was it useful? What problem did highlighted questions solve for you? Wouldn't it be great if all these questions were highlighted questions in Plum Mail?!

Cheers, Peter & Richard

p.s. If you have a friend who you think would be interested in our journey, please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)