Thanks again to all of you who have passed along your feedback about Hotmail’s fall releases. We’ve used your feedback to add some key updates quickly before the new year.

It is very important to us that you are happy with our updated Hotmail experience. We heard many users say that they had trouble navigating through Hotmail, especially if they had a smaller monitor. We’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing how users at various monitor sizes and resolutions were using our product. We’ve decided to make a significant change in our product: Hotmail will scroll like classic Hotmail.

To make your Hotmail scroll like classic Hotmail, you’ll need to turn the reading pane off:

  1. Click the Inbox folder.
  2. Click Options (upper-right, below the sign-out link).
  3. Under Reading pane settings, click Off.

We’re also including other fixes. Here are a few highlights, and thanks for suggesting them:

    • When you’re done choosing contacts to send your message to, click anywhere outside the contact picker window to close it and go back to typing your message.
    • We fixed an issue where some users couldn’t select the last contact in the list.
    • Holding down the Shift key and clicking a message in the inbox now opens that message in a new window, as it did in the past.
    • We’ve changed the links in the header at the top to match the rest of Windows Live and point to more great Windows Live services.

If you haven’t seen these changes in your account yet, you will soon!

None of this would have been possible without the great feedback from you, our users. Your feedback affects how we develop our product by helping us understand where we need to focus our energy. We appreciate everyone who has taken the time to work with us in tracking down issues, providing steps to reproduce problems, and giving constructive feedback on how Hotmail can be better for you.

Although you can leave comments on the blog for others to see, here’s how to communicate with us more effectively:

    • The best way to give us feedback about Hotmail is through Windows Live Feedback. (Click the (?) icon in Hotmail (top-right), and then click Feedback).
    • The best place to get answers to problems with Hotmail is in the new Windows Live Solution Center.

More improvements are coming up in early 2009, including things we’ve mentioned before like Messenger chatting as part of Hotmail, moving the ad to the side, increasing the number of messages shown at one time, and other stuff. Thanks for all of your valuable feedback, which has helped make these changes possible.

– The Windows Live Hotmail team

 

Announcements

December 18, 2008

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