Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Alert Outlook..!!

Isn’t it ironical to see that widely used mail application among all the Corporations - MS Outlook doesn’t give a good User experience to the same target group…!!
The basic rule while sending mails in context with any official mail – “Write an Appropriate Subject”, doesn’t hold good for MS Outlook.
For every time, I send a mail without giving any subject line, it never alerts me. The same is applicable for a mail without any content.

For mails without a subject, the solution can be as simple as this: Display an alert, something like the following Pop-up (which I made in MS Paint :)) along with the message - “You are sending a mail without subject”. Since, we are also giving an option of not showing the dialog box again, it’s the user’s call to decide if user would like to see the alert again or not.

However, giving that option is again debatable – what in case of a naïve user, who by mistake clicks on this option unknowingly. Would he be able to change this alert back in the settings? Do you think you have any solution for this? :)

Anyways, coming back to our focus point: Alerts in Outlook
You might have noticed the below displayed alert in Gmail, whenever you tried sending a mail without a body. It shows a popup with the message “Sending this message without text in the body”. Don’t you think it would be really good to have something similar in MS Outlook as well?

This actually reminds me of the saying “Winners do not do different things, but they do things differently”. Something for Microsoft to learn from Google. :)

Thanks to Divya, for putting my thoughts into words.