Outlook Annoyance: Consistency
on 03.04.05, 07:06am in art of software • comments (5)
I have a minor annoyance with Outlook. Why is it that every other Windows application uses Ctrl+F as an accelerator for "Find", but Outlook uses it for "Forward"? Even the ‘Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers‘ and the ‘Accessability Guidelines‘ state that Ctrl+F should be used for ‘Find’.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally opened a forwarding email message when trying to search for some text in an email.
However (and this is the worst part IMHO): I have Outlook configured to use Word as my email editor (Options->Mail Format). This has the unfortunate side effect that when I’m in the ‘body’ of an email, Ctrl+F now magically switches to "Find", and F4 is ‘Repeat Last Action’.
This breaks a pretty basic rule surrounding the ‘pleasure and experience‘ of software: Consistency, consistency, consistency.
Providing consistency within an application (as well as) consistency with the rest of the ‘experience’ associated with the operating system is crucial, IMHO.
Jason Silver (March 4, 2005 @ 10:59 am)
Hear, hear!
Outlook’s control-F fiasco has bothered me more than once, as well. In fact, there are a few menu issues, and layout issues that break protocol in Outlook. Especially dislike the options menus. It’s hard to find the options I’m looking for.
~Jason
Brian Hampson (March 4, 2005 @ 5:04 pm)
I’m not sure who the brain-dead PM at MS was that let that out the door. REALLY annoying
Joe (March 4, 2005 @ 9:52 pm)
I think this is a perfect example of how segregated a huge company like Microsoft gets and, as a result, there are bugs and inconsistencies. You’d think with all their fancy pants software they’d have a program to remind them to check for these things. Put it in your tasks list, friggin idiots!
ARRRG (May 13, 2005 @ 12:33 pm)
ArrrG! got me again M.S. There must be a way to disable this frikin thing.
particle (May 16, 2005 @ 5:48 am)
how ’bout this windows “feature”….sometimes when you go to Save or Save As the dialog says Open instead if Save. you’d think they would fix this by now. i think this has been around since win95 maybe win 3.11.
newbies are especially confused by this and don’t understand how it came to be form a company like ms. i can’t tell you how many times i have been asked this question in tech support calls….