Problems with Hotmail
First off, I really like Hotmail's UI, and am glad that I made the switch from Gmail (especially in light of Gmail's current UI, which I find rather irritating). I love being able to see the email conversation in the bottom pane and seeing a list of inbox messages in the smaller top pane, and most of all I love the combined functionality that folders and labels have with each other! There's no reason why you should only have one or another.
But there are a few things that really bother me about Hotmail's UI. They're small things that can be corrected easily, but small things add up, and these really wouldn't be that difficult to fix.
First, hitting "Reply" to your own reply to a message someone else sent you makes you reply to yourself.
I know that sounds kind of confusing, so here's what I mean. Let's say Joe emails me about lunch tomorrow. I hit reply and say "that sounds great, let's meet at noon". Then I hit send. Then I realize we didn't decide on a place yet, so I hit reply on the message I just sent (which is now the top, most recent message in our conversation) and I write "what kind of food do you want to eat?"
Makes sense right? Except in this case, the "what kind of food do you want to eat?" message gets sent to me, and not Joe. This is kind of silly; why would I want to message myself in a situation like that? All they need to do is set it up so that if the reply button results in a message directed at myself, it gets directed at the recipient of my last message instead (i.e. Joe). Not that hard, would make much more sense.
The next thing is a bit more irritating because it happens more, and because I can't just avoid it by hitting "Reply" on the previous message. The problem is with the Facebook chat integration; here is a screenshot.
So the problem is that here I have 3 different Facebook chats open, because I'm chatting with 3 different people, but now that I'm done chatting with all of them I can't ex them all out simultaneously. Nope, I have to do it one by one.
This is made even more irritating by the fact that there are already buttons on the side that let you minimize all three of them or pop out the entire chat, so it isn't even because of the aesthetic reason that "oh we don't want these buttons outside the individual chat tabs because they look bad". No, there happen to be other buttons outside the individual chat tabs that look fine, they just didn't include the most useful button. Silly.
When I was thinking about this post I had a third UI thing that I had problems with, but I forgot it. In any case if I find it or any other UI problems I have with Hotmail I'll post it here. Currently though Hotmail is not without its faults it's certainly a huge improvement over Gmail.