Photo Printing Wizard

I wanted to take a printout of one picture from a folder containing six pictures. So I right clicked on a picture, selected print from the menu and photo printing wizard launched. All the pictures of the folder were shown and that particular picture was checked as selected (as shown in the figure). It’s a good idea to show all the pictures of the folder in the photo printing wizard as a user has the option from the wizard to print other pictures of the folder. But I think the only thing missing was the filename below the thumbnail view of each picture. This would be great help so that a user could easily locate the exact file.The next time I tried to print multiple pictures; I saw the print wizard window with the selected pictures rather than all the pictures of that folder.
Hmmm…now that’s what I call “Inconsistency”!!

Inconsistent Outlook Message Dialogs

I wonder if you have noticed this in Outlook. If you try to send a mail without a recipient, it shows this dialog,

whereas, if you do the same thing with a meeting request, this dialog shows up.
I'd expect the same message dialog to show up, not only because it is consistent, but also efficient. No extra program management, developer and QA effort.

I see this more as problem with the Org structure in the Engineering team rather than oversight by the Program Manager. There probably had different Project Managers :)

p.s. click on the image for a clearer view.

Air India: Pushing the wrong Buttons

I was trying to book my ticket on Air India website (https://www.indian-airlines.org/internetbooking/ialform1.aspx) and realized the importance of the placement of buttons.

I filled up the flight details and subconsciously clicked on the Reset button instead of Continue button. Then I realized normally the button which is more likely to be used is placed first followed by the less likely one. E.g. Ok, Continue, Submit followed by Cancel, Reset.

On the second page the Continue button is followed by Reset button whereas on the first page Reset button is followed by Continue button. This even shows the consistency in the placement of the buttons on the website :)

Figure 1: To enter the journey details

Figure 2: Shows the flight information

Crtl + F in MS-Outlook

Ctrl+ F is a standard keyboard shortcut to search in MS- Office, browsers and most of

the standard applications.

But have you ever tried to search in a read mail window in MS Outlook?

Just try it out….

You will see the forward mail window rather than the ‘Find’ pop-up/ search box, the read
mail window will remain open in the background.

So in MS – Outlook, one of the Microsoft applications to search you need to press F4 and
not Ctrl+F…!! :)

Apart from that just press Ctrl+F …

• On the mailbox (root for inbox etc...); you will get a find box.
• On the inbox (root for folders), you will not see any response.
• While browsing through your mails in a folder, you will see a forward mail window for the selected mail.
• In a new/forward mail window and the find pop-up will come up.
  

So here I can see four different functions of Ctrl+ F within the same application MS- Outlook.
This is one of the biggest examples of inconsistency..!!

MS Office Consistency..!!

When you select different words in MS Word of different fonts what would you see in the font details drop down box?

- You would see the font details drop down box is blank as the fonts are different which is expected behavior.







Try doing the same in MS Excel and you would find that it show the font of the first cell you started selecting from. Being consistent with MS word the font details should be shown as blank.







I found that this is the not just the problem with word 2003 but even the Microsoft's latest release word 2007. That’s the consistency in MS Word and MS Excel…!!