Missing Chrome alert

Its been a long while that I am using Google Chrome, and I have made it my default, permanent browser.

So, like everyday I was using Chrome today and had opened multiple tabs. I wanted to close a tab and instead of pressing Alt + F4 for closing that particular tab, I pressed Crtl+F4 and entire window closed with all the tabs. One simple message or alert could have improved the User experience drastically - "Do you want to close all tabs?". Below are the screen shots of the alerts by IE7 and Firefox.

I tried to recover the closed tabs by opening Chrome again and looking for closed tabs in "recently closed tabs", by unfortunately couldn't find any information. I also tried to browse through the history, but it didn't help as the history is displayed according to the time you open the pages rather than the time you close the pages. Displaying the history according to the time you open the pages makes sense, but adding a small alert can improve the user experience. You can also read about similar missing alerts in Microsoft Outlook.

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.

Print random pages in Adobe Acrobat

In Abode Acrobat 7, the feature of printing the random pages was missing which they added in version 8. Compare the small change in "Pages" field in the pictures below which enhanced the feature.

Acrobat Reader 7 print window

Acrobat Reader 8 print window

It seems Abode and Google are tracking my blog and adding the posted missing features ;)

Finally Invisible mode on Gmail Chat

Last weekend I saw that Gmail Chat added invisible mode feature. It gives flexibility to the user to be in invisible/visible mode.

But this feature wasn’t added to Gtalk which is almost the replica of Gmail chat. So, if a user has logged in to Gtalk and Gmail chat simultaneously then Gmail chat doesn’t allow user to change the mode to invisible mode. I hope soon Google would add this feature to Gtalk also.

You can also read my earlier post written on invisible mode on Gtalk.

Parent Outlook closes its children…!!

In case a user has multiple read mail messages opened in MS Outlook and user closes the main outlook window, all the read mail messages are closed without asking for the permission from the user.

They can show a dialog box as shown below to the user similar to IE7.

Try Printing random pages in Adobe Acrobat..!!

Adobe Acrobat print window doesn’t have an option of printing random page numbers (like 1,4 and 9) from a document.

Please compare it with the MS office print window which has this option.

Photo Printing Wizard

I wanted to take a printout of one picture from a folder containing six pictures. So I right clicked on a picture, selected print from the menu and photo printing wizard launched. All the pictures of the folder were shown and that particular picture was checked as selected (as shown in the figure). It’s a good idea to show all the pictures of the folder in the photo printing wizard as a user has the option from the wizard to print other pictures of the folder. But I think the only thing missing was the filename below the thumbnail view of each picture. This would be great help so that a user could easily locate the exact file.The next time I tried to print multiple pictures; I saw the print wizard window with the selected pictures rather than all the pictures of that folder.
Hmmm…now that’s what I call “Inconsistency”!!

MS office 2007 UX

I really liked MS office 2007 self explanatory menu for the end user giving much better UX(User eXperience). Pasting below just one instance out of the whole big pool of good UX.

User just needs to select the number of rows and column required and it shows a preview to the user by generating a table instantly.

I recently attended Microsoft Expression around the Clock, Global Designer Conference at Bangalore and saw the demo of MS new product Expression. It’s launched to ease the collaborative work between designers and developers. I even met Ram, Umesh and Harish and had a discussion on various aspects of user experience.

Gtalk chat windows...!!

I was reading the Kiran's blog on Gtalk and Gmail chat synchronization problem and found out one more problem in addition to the stated problems.

Follow the steps listed below:
1. Signin to Gtalk, open two chat windows and then minimize both of them.
2. Minimize the main Gtalk application to the system tray by clicking on the cancel button.
3. Now to chat with one more user, restore the Gtalk application which is minimized on the system tray.
4. All the minimized chat windows will be automatically restored as soon as you restore the gtalk application.

So now this is an ignorance by the QA or the program manager?

Spot the file name!!

When I installed Microsoft Office on my machine, it set Microsoft Picture Manager as my default viewer to open images. I wanted to take a look at the picture’s filename and after a whole lot of looking around, I figured out it was at the bottom left corner. The application title bar just shows “Microsoft Office Picture Manager” and not the filename as if it is the name of every file which was being opened. :)