Why moving the delete command was a bad idea
In the new Windows Mobile 6 Professional, the menus for the Messaging application have been changed a bit. The most obvious is that the left softkey has been changed from “New” to “Delete”. The reasoning behind this is that most people have to delete a lot of spam on their phones and they wanted to make deleting messages easier.
I don’t know who was surveyed for that data, but in my opinion, this was not thought out very well at all. Personally, I never delete messages on my phone. I get maybe 1 or 2 spam messages in my personal Inbox per week, and about the same in my work email per day. Not a big deal. My emails have server side filters to handle spam. Making it easier for the user to delete messages by themselves is not helpful, especially when it removes a much more important function. If they wanted to add spam filtering to the Windows Mobile Inbox, that would be helpful.
The primary reason this was a bad idea is that it makes creating new messages twice as difficult. This is a HUGE usability mistake. I use my Windows Mobile device to write new messages both as email and SMS very frequently. Take a look at the following step comparison also illustrated by the graphic below.
Windows Mobile 5 new email
1. Open Messaging app
2. Press Left softkey
3. Write new message
Windows Mobile 6 new email
1. Open Messaging app
2. Select Messaging account
3. Press right softkey
4. Press action button on pre-selected “New” command (For text messages, the “New” command has another sub menu with SMS and MMS options, adding another couple steps to this process)
5. Write new message
So that’s 5-7 steps in order to start a new message to someone in Windows Mobile 6. You can turn off the “Select messaging account screen” but that doesn’t help a whole lot. Now assuming you are one of those people who does get a lot of spam and deletes messages a lot, let’s look at how the delete process has changed.
Windows Mobile 5 delete message
1. Select message
2. Press right softkey
3. Press action button
Windows Mobile 6 delete message
1. Select message
2. Press left softkey
3. Press action button on “Yes” button confirming the deletion
Both operating systems offer the exact same amount of steps for deleting messages thus offering zero advantage to the change. By default, Microsoft turned on a delete confirmation probably because having the delete command assigned to a hardware button made it way too easy to delete emails accidentally… For example, while the device was in your pocket.
So as you can see, this new change has only made using the Windows Mobile Messaging application more difficult and frustrating. Heck there isn’t even a keyboard shortcut for creating a new message!! If you’re big on sending messages via email and SMS like I am, then this is probably going to be annoying enough to stick to Windows Mobile 5.0. I know that I’m seriously considering not upgrading my P3300 when Windows Mobile 6 becomes available for that. If anyone knows a registry tweak to put the “New” button back, let me know.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks this new menu layout was a mistake?
And does anyone want to start a rant about where the “Reply” command got buried?
No related post found.
