What does CC mean, and why does it matter?

I recently asked one of our college interns at work why she CC’d a particular person on an email.

“I don’t know what CC means,” she said.

Wow.  So I explained it, in pretty rich detail.

Then I asked what she thought “BCC” meant.

“Before Carbon Copy?” she replied.

So I explained BCC, and that I never use it, for two reasons:  Ethically I think it’s wrong, and it opens you up to the inevitable time when the person BCC’d replies to everybody and then you’re outed as the person who BCC’d them without letting people know in the first place (it’s always simply better to re-forward the email to the person who  you want to know what’s going on).

What did I learn from this?   And what are the opportunities?

• Your users may be insanely unfamiliar with any acronym you take for granted in your UI, especially new / younger / foreign users.
• Instrumentation about every feature in your application & frequency of use might be really valuable.  Then you could actually tell your users “we’ve noticed you’ve never used XYZ, which is useful for ABC”.
• Young people don’t use or care about email anywhere near as much as their older co-workers (I validated this with this intern, and it’s obvious with my kids).

A few more things come to mind, but I’m trying to get better with shorter, more frequent posts, so I’ll stop here 🙂