I recently got an invitation to use Live Mail beta. After playing with interface and exploring new features for sometime, I discovered many usability issues with UI. It’s seems that Microsoft developers are more interested in showcasing latest features and technologies and they forget that thousands of average users sitting at other end and struggling to manage their mails.
There are lot of scroll bars in mail page now. Scroll bar for mail listing, two scroll bars for actual mail content and there is another scroll bar for main page as well. Because of these scroll bars, there is hardly any space for actual content.
Notice the small “window” for mail listing panel and your actual mail content. Even for reading short mail, you have to scroll many times. With just 50% of browser space utilized properly, rest of the space is full of margin, padding, and scroll bars. It feels like opening text documents in two PDAs placed next to each other. Very very limited space to work with!!
If Live developer really want to get out of these scroll-full dilemma then they must remove those bottom-right and top margin in the page. May be they are just a placeholder for advertisement, but why bottom margin??? I also recommend removing all scroll bars in the main page. It’s create confusion to users who uses scroll wheel to scroll mails.
I still like the distribution of panels in Outlook Web Access more then Live Mail, if you still want to show mail listing and mail content as well in same page.
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