Users Being Migrated To New Version of Hotmail 215
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has started work on migrating Hotmail users to a new version after testing the new system on select customers for almost two years. Microsoft stated in the article that more than 20 million users provided feedback to the new-look Hotmail. 'For now, Microsoft will give Hotmail users the option to continue using the old version if they don't want to switch to the upgraded version. However, at some point, everyone will be unilaterally migrated over to Windows Live Hotmail ... New users will be automatically signed up for Windows Live Hotmail but, like any user of the new service, they will get to choose from two user interfaces: a "classic" layout that closely resembles the old Hotmail; or the new interface, which was designed to look like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail and calendaring desktop application.'"
20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:5, Insightful)
Dropping the Web-based E-mail Ball (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime between a year ago and today, it's become fully compliant with Firefox 2.0--I'm pretty impressed and actually don't mind using web-based Outlook when I'm out of the office.
Why did Microsoft sit on their hands as Google slowly built up their capabilities to match those of Outlook? Why didn't Microsoft work on porting what they had done for Outlook to their Hotmail servers? I guess server load could always be the answer to those questions but I'm starting to think that Microsoft thought Hotmail would always be number one in personal e-mail. Thankfully, it looks like the competition is putting the pressure on them to improve their service.
I used this tool two years ago, way to drop the ball, Microsoft. You could have beat Google to a calendar application and solidified Hotmail.
Re:20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dropping the Web-based E-mail Ball (Score:5, Insightful)
People still use hotmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
pocket msn (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:From the article (Score:3, Insightful)
I also do not try to juggle my life via some online calendar that can crash/die and leave me all a twitter where I am suposed to be at 10:00.
Mail is mail. you toss the junk mail, you read the interesting stuff, grimace at the bills, and rememeber you need to send that birthday card to Mom.
Online is no different then the paper kind. Hotmail's change of interface is like when the Electric company changed to smaller envelopes (and didn't bother to adjust their sorting machines). Better eye candy means more annoyance, Big Deal, Somehow, in spite of it, I supose I can still delete the spam. Thanks Microsoft for all the improvements.
Re:20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that there is a mechanism for this does not refute the previous poster's point. Right-clicking should never, ever be the only way to get to some functionality. I'm not sure I've ever seen a interface design or usability book that did not mention this. I think even MS's own UI design guidelines mention it. Right-clciking and selecting a menu option is a lot slower and less learnable than a button, but aside from that the important thing is relying upon multiple buttons breaks the interface for a wide variety of alternative input methods. Try doing that using a screen reader for the blind, or a stylus on a tablet, or even using MS's own voice recognition interface. Try it on a touch screen kiosk, using a control stick for people with palsey, or using a browser that does not support that function for one reason or another.
When people are lower level developers and don't have any real UI training and are creating an application for internal use or for a special purpose with limited audience, I can forgive this sort of thing. When one of the largest software development houses on the planet does it for a program they plan to roll to millions of the general public it is just fucking absurd. I want to know. Where does MS hire their UI people and why can't they manage to avoid basic mistakes that have been known to the industry for decades now?
Re:20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:2, Insightful)
The original Mac OS UI standardized on a single location to find actions: The Menu Bar. Whatever you had to do, you knew where to look. This was in direct contrast to command line applications where you either had to keep the commands in your head, or look them up in documentation. Now, we have a proliferation of places to look for actions in a graphical interface: Menu Bar, multiple Toolbars, contextual menus, etc. This proliferation of places to look for actions is leading to greater UI confusion, and back to the UI problem of command line applications, as evidenced by the poster who didn't realize there was a way to mark an email as 'read' in the new Hotmail. The graphical interface is supposed to show you what you can do, you're not supposed to have to 'just know'. I find contextual menus particularly egregious, as there is no 'affordance' to indicate to the user that there's anything to look for. Does one just randomly right-click on everything to see if it has a contextual menu associated with it? Bah. UI design at its worst.
Unfortunately, due to the monopoly position of Windows, even the Mac OS has been forced to go down this path of providing toolbars and contextual menus. One mitigating trend I've observed in some (not all) Macintosh software is the use of contextual menus to duplicate operations presented in the menu bar.
UI design needs to return to a single canonical location to find operations (the Menu Bar). If UI designers want to use Toolbars and contextual menus, use them only as shortcuts for operations that are already presented in the Menu Bar.
Re:20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hotmail Vs. Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Only got my gmail account now (webmail wise) and haven't had hotmail for about a year.
Spam: Gmail doesn't spam like hotmail does, IIRC. Hotmail announcements and crap like that you can't block.
I mean, really. I don't give a fuck, and don't wanna see that trash. I think I had a filter that moved them
to trash, but sometimes they'd still be in the inbox for one reason or another.
Uptime/Access: Main reason I don't have hotmail is I checked it once every 3 weeks, and hit the "system down
for maint" blather several times over the past several years (can't recall how long I had it, but I hated
the interface after MS's purchase...that's how long). All it took was forgetting for 30.1 days, and all the
mail was gone and account still active. You gotta be kidding me...fucking assholes.
Gmail, IIRC, allows for 9months before action such as above. 30days vs 9months.
(Is it odd that I just now notice MS's time frame is a menstrual cycle, and Gmails is a human's gestation
cycle? Oddly says a lot about MS Hotmail, doesn't it? Considering how often MS is plugging holes...ok
I'll stop now)
Folders vs tagging/labels/conversations: Personally I'd like folders in gmail, to sort conversations in a less
confusing way...heck I had to explain to a gmail user how to use "conversations/threads/whatever they call them"
a while back...they're like folders, but they're not. Say you have a few listservs that you pay attention to.
Seperate folders for each vs "listserv tag(s)". IIRC, you can make subfolders, but not sub"tags" say for
win/lin administration. Folders are easy for sorting, not so much filtering, but the opposite is true for
labels/convo's (IOW "thread view").
All 3 together would rock the email world, I think.
Easy way to archive: Gmail wins, IMO. Pop, Thunderbird and (text).mbx format vs OE integration/tricks and outlook's binary format (not easily shifted to other clients).
See uptime/access time; granted I didn't lose anything I would miss terribly (now ex-gf's email included, for
amusement only/reminder/spank bank material) but the principle of the thing; Short sighted, tight fisted,
unyielding rules they'll blast your mail away in a heartbeat, vs 3/4 of a year? If you can't think to
check email more than once every 3/4 of a year, stick with snail mail and DVD/USB thru the post.
Prestiege/Spam(again): No kidding, the gmail invites *increased* the desire and heightend the profile.
Hotmail, in addition to spamming itself was spamming everyone else and the spam was increased by the
likes of aol/yahoo/msn and such. Before spam filtering in hotmail was added (much less worth a damn)
the first thing I did was use the regular filters to send *.yahoo.com, *.aol.com and *.msn.com and
the like to the spam, and then whitelist the one or two people with those addresses that I'd care
to hear from.
It all comes down to what if I lost my account for either?
Hotmail: Mumbled "Fucking assholes" and moved on, not even bothering to reinstate the account/name.
Gmail: Would not be happy, but would think similar to what I stated above. MY FAULT for waiting more than
3/4 of a year, barring coma, abduction, or being stuck on an island with a bunch of fedex packages, there'd
be no excuse that would not sound hollow.
Re:20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:2, Insightful)
Btw. If you switch the interface to "Classic" the Mark As Read buttons are placed up in the toolbar , obviously since you can't use the right mouse button. Good enough for those other cases when you don't have a choice in the matter.
Re:Hotmail Vs. Gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Google realized they're in the business of extracting cash from advertisers. To do that, Google mines data. They scan emails and search for patterns so they can sell ads to those who are most likely to want to see them. In order to mine this data, it benefits Google if they see as much email as they possibly can. I think that's what explains the original 1GB size limit while others were doling out a measly 2-4MB: with all that space, you're encouraged to horde mail, and Google is free to mine information from it.
Same goes for your mail forwarding. Google sees every single message that is forwarded through their servers. They can keep that data and use it for marketing. Even if you're not using Gmail and seeing those ads, they might one day use that data to give you ads in another context.
Perhaps this is not a bad bargain, but few seem to realize that Google's goals are not altruistic here.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:20 Million users contributed feedback (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't buy that. Context menus allow you to pare down the available functions to what's appropriate. Buttons are always there, so there's going to be a lot more of them, most of which are irrelevant. They could also be anywhere on your screen, a context menu is linear. So it's going to be a lot easier and faster to find the option on the context menu than pretty much anywhere else. As for less learnable, how do you even quantify that?
Some of the stupidity of Hotmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Messages in the Junk folder never get opened automatically.
and invites me to click an "Open message" link to have the message load in full. I do so. This presents the message, but any links contained therein are disabled. This is indicated by another yellow bar at the top of the e-mail saying:
Attachments, pictures, and links in this message have been blocked for your safety.
with a link saying "Show content", which finally brings about the message how I desired it, which should have happened in the first place when I clicked on it.
I don't like being treated like I'm a severely brain damaged five year old.