A petition for outlook.com users!

[dlalonde]

So I'm sharing this here because right now, outlook.com is subpar. I know most outlook.com users are free users and Home Microsoft 365 users, but that doesn't mean that UX should be less important, especially with a competitor like Gmail that works flawlessly whether you pay or not.

So I'm hoping this will gain traction: https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-microsoft-please-fix-outlook-com

 

[me just saying]

never had a problem with Ouitlook.com when checking my email from there. I am a free user but not a Microsoft 365 user. As far as UX I see nothing wrong with it. maybe not as fancy as others but as long as it as the features I need, it does not bother me. Maybe you need to be more specific.

 

[dlalonde]

never had a problem with Ouitlook.com when checking my email from there. I am a free user but not a Microsoft 365 user. As far as UX I see nothing wrong with it. maybe not as fancy as others but as long as it as the features I need, it does not bother me. Maybe you need to be more specific.

I do explain in my petition text what is wrong right now:

- Contact pictures not working on the desktop version of outlook.com (the website), they return a 404.
- The profile picture disappears randomly.

But my problem is more the fact that those issues happen and take forever to get fixed, if at all. As if outlook.com users were not as important.

 

[me just saying]

I do explain in my petition text what is wrong right now:

- Contact pictures not working on the desktop version of outlook.com (the website), they return a 404.
- The profile picture disappears randomly.

But my problem is more the fact that those issues happen and take forever to get fixed, if at all. As if outlook.com users were not as important.

I don't have those problems. did you try to get help with those problems or are you just assuming that everyone is having the same problems. maybe try clearing your browsers cache/history. or try another browser and/or another computer to see if the same thing is happening.

 

[dlalonde]

I don't have those problems. did you try to get help with those problems or are you just assuming that everyone is having the same problems. maybe try clearing your browsers cache/history. or try another browser and/or another computer to see if the same thing is happening.

Believe me if I'm starting a petition it's because I've done everything else I could before.

I'm a Web developer. So debugging is something I do regularly. Clearing cache and history, checking on more than one browser and computer was the first step.

I've had these issues, at least the one about the contact pictures, for nearly a year. I spent literally hours debugging with support, screencasting the console results, checking network traffic with a tool called Fiddler and they even sent me to a version of outlook.com they use for debugging purposes. After that, I found that, on both the list of messages and the contact list, the images returned a 404 error with this URL:

https://outlook.live.com/profile/v1.0/users/[This is the email address of the contact]/image/$value

which of course returns a 404 error. There seems to be an error in interpreting the $value variable when it's concatenated with the rest of the URL.

And that only happens on the desktop version of outlook.com (not office365.com). If you go on a mobile browser, there's no problem.

After those hours of debugging, the person wrote me an obviously prewritten message saying this is a known bug and that there's no ETA for a fix.

So, you're saying that if you upload a contact picture you see it on the desktop version of outlook.com? By desktop version I mean the version you see on a computer through a regular browser.

But the point of this petition is that I want Microsoft to up their game with support on this platform. Because user experience is important and it goes beyong pretty icons and changes in design language. When you use Gmail, those kind of issues don't happen and I've had no bugs with the platform, ever (except a bad translation in French in a confirmation box). Outlook.com does not exist in a vacuum.

 

[dlalonde]

Alright, well my general feeling both from here and Twitter are that people don't mind those bugs... I guess I'm just nitpicky... so I closed the petition.