Its the same age old problem.
I am fine with this blue styling for the first 2 emails I ever get from any Discourse instance in the world. After that the styling suggested by @DeanMarkTaylor is significantly less annoying to me. And I can find the link every time when I look at it.
So the question is… who are we optimising for.
- The person who get the first response ever from Discourse
- General users of Discourse that got more than 5 emails.
The correct thing to do here is an A/B test, that is what really was recommended by the UX ninjas.
- Add a tracking link like ?open_from_email to the end of the “visit the topic”
- 50% of emails go out in grey styling
- 50% go out with the blue styling
- See if there is a significant change in “visiting topic from email” on either.