Reinventing User Interfaces

Hey man, isn't software boring nowadays? I mean you press OK and you know what will happen, you press Cancel and you once more know what will happen. Boring boring booooring.

Thanks to the Allmighties of this world, some guys still get enough inspiration to make our user experience worth our while.

This comes from a web mailer I use. For one thing, these guys thought about reinventing date sort order. As far as I can remember, ordering my email by date-descending means "newest mail first".
Well these guys have a different opinion. They define date-ascending as "newest mail first".

Here is an excerpt from my settings page:

And here is how the date column looks in my inbox (note the UP arrow indicating ascending order):

 

In constrast, here is what Microsoft Outlook thinks about date sorting:

Anyway, I don't know, may be some other famous mailer has the same kind of date sorting and these guys decided to adopt that one. I don't know. It's too much to attribute to stupidity...

Another cool side effect of the behaviour that they have implemented is the following: When I am reading an email, there are two buttons available Previous and Next. Say I am reading an email I got on Thursday and I press Next. Can you guess what happens? In front of me I see a mail I got on Wednesday. Next moves me to an older email, and Previous moves me to newer mail. Isn't that cool? Previous and Next are extremely bad names for this purpose. That's why MS Outlook has an UP and DOWN arrow, so you know what to expect.

But date sorting is not the part where these guys excel. They also redefined timezone-sorting. When I tried to configure my timezone I got a huge drop down list that looks like this (click to enlarge):

Super Cool! Completely random sorting. Neither geographical, neither timezone, nor alphabetic sorting. And it is a HUGE list containing an entry for all major cities on the globe (not just the capitals).

After trying a bit to locate my city I paused and thought about it. Then I selected the first entry, closed the drop down and moved the keyboard focus in the list. Then I repeatedly typed E (for Europe) until I saw my city appear in the selection. Now that's what I call "Software that Makes You Think".

Have fun and Merry Christmas (where applicable)!
Dimitris Staikos

Comments

[Thanasis K]

Name and Shame! Name and Shame!

About the Ascending and Descending bit perhaps it was a poor grasp of the nuances of the English language from the developer? Cultural differences? Not professional enough to do their homework? After all, semiotics are just a convention :)

Merry Xmas