On the Redesign of Windows Live Hotmail

15 Nov, 2008.

[An open letter to the Windows Live Hotmail team about my experience with the latest redesign.]

Hi Windows Live Hotmail Team,

Just want to share some feedback on the new redesign.

For me the redesign has been refreshing and frustrating all at once.  I think the design of the main mail area is much better and I really like the rework of the typography.  Overall I think it has made the application more usable.

However, there are several things that are very frustrating. 

Multi-Select

First, multi-select is gone.  This, in my opinion, is a show stopper and a feature I really liked in Hotmail that is missing from Gmail.  During my first experience with the new design, I selected a mail item, pressed SHIFT, and then clicked on another mail item.  Well, as you know, instead of selecting all of the mail items as I expected, a new window opened with the mail item.  Argh.  This was very frustrating as it a key feature that I use regularly to organize and clean-up my inbox.

The Giant Banner Ad

When I first learned of the new design, one of my biggest hopes was that your team would get rid of or at least fix the placement of the giant horizontal banner ad at the top.  This has bugged me for a long time. 

It is horrible roadblock to improving the user experience and just destroys valuable screen space.  As a user of a free service, I understand that you may need to generate some revenue with ads.  However, I am also not foolish enough to think that this is the only or best approach.  You guys are smart and very aware of other ways to creatively place ads.  Please make it happen.  This isn’t 1990.

Feedback Experience

The little help icon on the top right is nice, and the Feedback link that shows up in the menu is useful but what happens after I click it is not. 

Having a static feedback form that will disappear into a black hole (as far as I the user am concerned) is more or less useless.  As a user of modern web applications I have come to expect a feedback experience that involves real human interaction.  A way to both see that my feedback is being heard and to interact with other users of the application.  It doesn’t have to be fancy or even a full blown community – but when I take the time to submit feedback I would at least like to see an acknowledgment from a human and it would also be nice to see the feedback from other users.

That’s it for now.

Regards,

Kyle

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Comments

  • Leo said:

    I agree with your points regarding feedback experience. I sent an e-mail to the team asking for the ability to track feedback - no word on that yet. A connect.microsoft.com for support/ feedback requests would be awesome. I truly believe that customer loyalty is built with great customer service and even better customer relationship management. Hoping they see the same vision too.

    15 Nov, 2008 @ 12:59 PM

  • M said:

    The banner ad at the top is going to the right the next upgrade in the next few months. January I think.

    As for feedback, everything submitted gets reviewed and logged. I don't know at what point they get turned into actionable items though.

    15 Nov, 2008 @ 07:56 PM

  • Justin said:

    Another one you forgot is right-click support for folders is gone.  I liked right clicking on my Junk mail folder and selecting 'Delete All'.  Now I have to open the Junk mail folder, select all the messages, then press Delete.

    19 Nov, 2008 @ 11:26 AM