Repetitive Stress Injury

It’s been while since Hotmail has changed its UI and it looks a bit cleaner now. I regularly check my mails on hotmail, but don’t send many mails nowadays because of gmail. Let me explain.

A few days ago, I sent a few mails on hotmail and I realised that there was a major issue with it. When creating a new mail, we write the content, put the address of the receiver, the subject (not necessarily in that order), and then click on Send. Well, when I tried sending two mails on Hotmail, I realized that I kept clicking on the Send button and it kept displaying a list of addresses. That’s when I realized that I had clicked on the To button and not the Send button. Why? Well, it turns out that the most important action button to send an email according Hotmail guys is To and not Send.

“To” is the only element in the mail area that is big and therefore, it attracts the most attention.

For visual design consistency, they have converted the Send button in to a hidden link. Since the Send doesn’t have any affordance of a button, so I keep clicking on the only button that’s visible. Why not just make it a clear button as Send is the most important action to send an email. I guess this is the reason why I continue using my Gmail account. Gmail guys clearly display the most important action of Send as a button.

‘Send’ is clearly made the most important button by making the label bold.