I had to deprive my wife of Outlook 2003 and help her get used to some other email application. Now, you know how non-techies are, their habits are extremely hard to change. She is not totally ignorant though, I have taught her about the way computers work, she has even read Code (by Charlesh Petzold).

Anyway, I tried with Outlook Express first - another MS product, should have relatively similar UI and it fits fine her needs (at most one or two email per day on average). Soon she told me her email app is (and I quote) “shitty” :) Knowing that she cannot possibly know real reasons why OE is shitty, I demanded she explains why.

It turns out that OE did not look as good as Outlook 2003, and that was basically it. So I installed Mozilla Thunderbird (bold move, I know) and after doing some simple configuration, I just left it for her to figure out the rest. I'd say this is an ultimate test of usability ;)

She had no complaints to how Thunderbird looks (as expected) and had only one problem since - she did not figure out how to handle attachements. When I sat down and tried it myself, I saw why - some genius decided to put the attachment handling to the bottom of the mail message, way out of sight. OE does it better, and Outlook even better - in both cases attachment is clearly visible close to the “From” and “Subject” lines, at the top of the message.

I guess if my wife can use Thunderbird without help, so can many other non-techies out there. Few more usability improvements are still needed, though.

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