"Hotmail UI Junk to Joy Ratio Considered Appalling" by jerryk

Thu, 25 May 2006 07:25:00 PDT

A friend who has been having experiences of great joy with Hotmail realized this morning where some of his intense user satisfaction comes from… Presented for your consideration, his visual analysis:

He’s also been a bit generous about what he classifies as non-junk. I’d be fascinated to know if any living entity has ever clicked on the “Free Newsletters” link.

I’m faintly curious about how long it’s been there since I apparently dismissed it with all the other visual chaff of flavors like “Ten Hot New SUVs for Fall” and “Two ways to make your bourgeois, pretentious, luxury-consumer-twit furniture smarter.” Even having had my attention drawn to it by this marked up screen leaves with me with somewhere less than no desire to click on the thing.

Does anybody measure the effectiveness of this UI at getting click through to ads and content? Does it really produce mad revenues of a magnitude that justify its being such an awkward, homely, noisy, distracting, unusable eyesore?

But what do I know? I’m not a free webmail baron that paid $400MM for this thing before I grafted it into an also-ran, money losing sump of a brand.

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"Hotmail UI Junk to Joy Ratio Considered Appalling" by jerryk