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SKYPE, I THOUGHT YOU WERE PERFECT

This week will turn out to be quite disturbing for me as a user, but this also means that there will be another blog post with my latest usability experience. I have been using Skype for quite some time now and have always been extremely happy with its design and simplicity. However, nothing is perfect, which was proved to me by Skype this morning. Every now and then I have to send a file to someone and usually do it in Skype. I also regularly send the same file for feedback to a colleague or two and thereater make the necessary changes to get further feedback. I sent one file a couple of days ago and it was approximately 30MB. Today I decided to send the same file within a group chat to two of my colleagues. Upon dragging the file in the conversation window here is what I saw:

The file somehow inflated to around 55MB with just a few minor changes I made. I was shocked and ran to a few other colleagues to ask whether they also made some changes. Finally, I went to one of the recipients and asked her with disturbed voice what was going on with the file. She didn't seem to understand me and after explaining the situation, she said in a calm manner: "But it shows to me 28MB". I didn’t believe at first but then I realized what happened. For some reason Skype decided that when sending the file to more than one person, it should multiply its size by the number of receivers. I don’t like to label things but this is a complete nonsense and the way I reacted to the situation supports this claim. If you look at the screenshot once more you can see that the sending interface occupies more than enough space to place two progress bars, one for each receiver. This would not only eliminate the possibility for confusion, but furthermore, give the sender additional information about the progress of each transfer instead of the accumulated progress that is quite useless. That is also my suggestion for correcting the error they made at Skype, so please do so in the next version.

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