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Adding an Attachment to an email

By Karandeep Dhillon, Date: 12/01/2022

My university (CSU Chico) has been making many changes to the software services we use. One recent change has been the switch from using Gmail to now using Outlook mail. All my personal and school email accounts have been Gmail accounts. I have always liked Gmail’s minimalist design and had never had any problems with its effectiveness or efficiency. From my experience using Gmail, I expected Outlook to be nearly the same in its functionality and interactions.

I needed to email a PDF to one of my professors, so I logged into my Outlook account for the first time. I immediately noticed that Outlook had far more buttons and other things grabbing my attention. From my first impressions of Outlook, I found it too distracting and attempting to serve too many purposes. They layout of everything also divided my attention and I was not sure what areas are for email and what areas were for other tasks. After I looked around the home page, I eventually continued my task of creating and sending an email. I clicked on the blue “new mail” button and was prompted with an empty email form in the bottom right corner. This step and interaction were memorable since it was exactly the same as it is on Gmail. This also led me to believe that I was making progress toward my goal. After clicking “new mail” (red outline is what is memorable to me from my experience with gmail):

I filled out the recipient, subject line, and body. All I needed to do now was add the PDF and send the email. However, I found myself lost and stuck since I could not see any button to add an attachment. From my previous experience, there would be a paper click icon/button that I would click to prompt me to add any attachments. I began looking for a paper clip icon within the email form area. I gradually expanded to looking at all areas on the page for the paper clip, but as the image above illustrates, there was no paper clip icon.

After clicking around, I was convinced that if I was going to add an attachment it would be through the heading area on the page.

I started to just go through all the tabs one by one from left to right. I clicked on the “view” tab, then the “help” tab, and then eventually found what I had been looking for in the “messages” tab. I saw the paper clip and was finally relieved that I was able to add an attachment to this email. Despite being a short and simple task, it took several minutes to locate and complete the task. I realized afterwards that I could have also clicked the “insert” tab right next to the “message” tab to do the same thing. During the time I was doing this, my mind had gone blank and I just resulted to clicking around until I found what I was looking. The “insert” tab had not clicked in brain and I believe it’s because of the layout of page. In Gmail, everything relating to the email is available within the email form box in the bottom right corner. In Outlook, all the options and settings of the email are outside the email form box and are instead in the heading area above the email section. Because of this, I was unsure if the heading was relating to the email form or was the main way of completing the task. Having used both services, I prefer Gmail’s design since it narrows the scope a user has to focus on to complete the task and is very concise. Outlook’s design is more complex and requires more searching. I think Outlook can improve by moving the header area closer to the red box I highlighted in the first image. I think this would bring all the attention into that one area and make it easier to know that the header area is for the email. I think it would also make it quicker to send emails since everything is closer together.