While anxiously forwarding iPhone photos of my Expert drumming skills on the new Rock Band Boston DLC, I noticed something:

What surprised me was the inclusion of the MIME type adjacent the attachment name and size. Actually a few things were surprising…

Let’s just take on this entire part of the interface:

• The entire attachment doesn’t need to be a link, as the link should target the canonical form of the content - the attachment name itself. Who is going to click on the size of the attachment to look at it? Increasing the size of the click target isn’t an issue here - attachment names are of generally sufficient size that this isn’t an issue.
• The MIME type is obviously excessive.
• I’ll go one step further and say that the attachment size isn’t important either. If the user won’t modify their behaviour based on the size of the attachment, why bother displaying it?

If Google’s objective is to translate the meaning of the .JPG extension, why not really commit and just call it an image? And rather than report the size, why not abstract that away as well?

Now we can concentrate on the actual attachments instead of the metadata.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.