Your Hotmail Has Been Upgraded To Outlook.com

microsoft outlook image

by Aryeh Powers

“Your Hotmail has been upgraded to Outlook.com”. These were the words that I recently viewed on my screen, after switching over to the new Outlook interface for my old Hotmail one. I recently found out about the new Outlook email offering from Microsoft from my brother Joe, and only recently took advantage by getting a new email address. So I only recently got around to testing out the new Outlook UI and features this past week.

After setting up my new email account and doing a little research into the new product, I decided to change my Hotmail account to function with the new Outlook UI, as well. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend you switch your Hotmail or Livemail UI to the one. It’s really easy to do. All you need to do is sign into your email account at outlook.com instead of logging in at the usual hotmail.com or live.com Web site.

There’s really a lot to like about the new interface, but here’s a couple of features that resonate with me personally:

1.  No more annoying flashing banner ads on the side of my screen.

2.  Less clutter of unnecessary email options

3.  More intuitive design (less colors and less options and bigger sized buttons for more important functions)

4.  You can now view entire threads or discussions, instead of having to sift through individual email’s

Now that Microsoft has rolled out the new UI, it will be interesting to look for the following metrics:

1.   Can Hotmail, Outlook and Livemail can take a bigger piece of the email subscriber and visitor pie. Right now, Hotmail comes in third place for the most popular email platforms (with 41 million monthly unique visitors to the email service), behind Yahoo mail (84 million unique visitors) and Gmail (68 million unique visitors) (Source: Comscore).

2.  Whether or not email ads will have higher or lower click through rates with the new UI

3.  Whether or not SkyDrive becomes more popular and whether or not, Outlook users will be prompted to use SkyDrive as part of the new email process

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