I was notified that MyPostalMail has overhauled their entire online postal mail management application user interface to run faster. They have written a more in-depth tutorial to their new interface, which you can read here.
MyPostalMail (MPM) is an online postal mail service, which I wrote a quick summary about in an earlier post. In their words, MPM allows you to receive postal mail offline and then view and manage it online. The service is great for checking your postal mail in your PJs. And in this current gas situation, you save money from driving to the local postal mailbox store to pick up your mail.
I couldn’t help but give their service a try to see what’s new. Overall, I’m quite pleased with the new functionality.
What’s Good?
I must say that the first impression I have of the demo is the speed that this new application runs. First, it loads much faster than before. The second thing I noticed is the new interface. It seems much simpler and cleaner. Before, the look and feel seemed a bit bareboned, but his one is much better thought out and complete than the previous one.
Navigating around is also fairly easy and definitely very responsive. One thing I don’t usually like about Web 2.0 user interface is the occasional heavy use of Javascript/AJAX animations that slows down the user interaction. MPM has done a good job to keep the interface responsive.
What’s Bad?
Viewing the mail is now separated into three stages – listing the mail, listing the pages in the mail, and then the detailed one-page view. What I annoying is that there are only two zoom modes when in the one-page view mode – fit to screen and full size. Fitting the page to the screen is good, but it’s difficult to read the text in the mail. So in order to read the text, I have to zoom in. Well, the actual size is way too large. I have to “drag” the page around just to read the text. Very very inconvenient. A variable zooming bar would be much better.
The final thing that I noticed is that the new interface uses double-clicking for certain functions. Double-clicking is not a very familiar thing to most web users. But it does make the application seem more like a desktop application. It takes a little getting used to but is actually fairly intuitive once you get used to it.
What’s Next?
Well, I still can’t talk much about their real mail processing service since it’s only open to students, military, and nonprofits. They did announce that their pay account will be coming in November and will be available to everyone. Come on guys. Can’t it be sooner?
For those of you who are looking to find out more, you should check out their demo, their pricing, and definitely their forum, which contains more information on their services.
Overall, it’s a big step for MPM to change their UI to something more refreshing. I hope to see more improvements. I’m definitely interested in how this social mail sharing that they talked about works.
