Outlook.com: How They Managed to Make Metro Not Make Any Sense
We’re living in weird tech times, don’t you think? Every single tech company wants to compete in everything – take a look at Google for example – it’s dying of trying to get on the ‘social train’. Being the best search engine in the world and having access to over 400 million users emails just isn’t good enough. Microsoft also had its attempts, especially with the Live platform.
Nowadays, Microsoft decided to do something about its famous Hotmail webmail service. It was shut down and it’s replaced by a brand new, Metro-styled Outlook – Oh sorry, I meant “Windows 8 style UI”. Yep, Outlook.com is now the new Hotmail and it’s a Microsoft’s attempt to get you away from Google’s Gmail. Will the new interface be enough?
@outlook.com
Once you log in and choose your new @outlook.com email address, you’ll get to the main interface, your inbox. Looking at it, as a designer, you might like it – it’s minimalistic, there’s a lot of white space etc., but looking at it as a user, it’s a nightmare! Let me give you an example – the send button – where is it? Aha, nope, it’s not in the sidebar. Somewhere at the end of the compose window? Wrong again. It’s placed in the top left corner, where 99.99% of the time developers place their menus.
Of course, it’s not even highlighted. If you compare this to Gmail’s interface – when you’re in your inbox, the compose button is bright red – it’s visible. When you’re done writing an email, the compose button becomes gray and the send button, which is at the top of the message is red – so you know where you need to click. And it’s a button, not a pile of letters.
Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer funcionality over design. Especially with tools I’m going to use all day, every day. And why is that recipient left part of the interface so huge?!
Habits Are Bad
Another reason why you won’t not move to Outlook.com is that you’re stuck with your current webmail. Gmail, Yahoo!Mail or something else – it worked fine for you for years now and you actually don’t have a real reason to move, right? Think of all the time you’d spend on moving several gigabytes of email (thx Gmail!) into a system which isn’t even fully grown up yet. Gmail is a strong webmail system not because it’s owned by Google, but because of the Labs features. Where else do you get the “Undo Send Mail” option? Or strong filtering and labeling system like that?
Outlook.com might get some users from people who didn’t have any webmail experience so far, but for the rest of us… it’s just email, it’s not worth the trouble. And when you just think of how many contacts you’d have to notify about your new email address, and spend the next year or so reminding people that you’re not using your old @gmail.com address – and just when everything settles and you’re happy with your Outlook.com email, Microsoft will change its name. Don’t believe me? What were the names of that Dropbox-like application?
