I got invitation to use Live Mail (beta) last week. And after playing with its UI and exploring all of the new features, I have discovered lot of usability issue with UI. Its seems to me that Microsoft developers is more interested in showcasing latest mechanism (or technology) like AJAX to display content on page and they just wanted to forget that user sitting at other end and struggling to read/manage his mail.
There is lot of scroll bars in mail page now. Scroll bar for mail listing panel, scroll bar (count two here) for actual mail content panel and there is a scroll bar for main page.
And because of these scroll bars, there is very limited space for actual content. Notice the small “window” for mail listing panel. And notice the small “window” for your actual mail content. Even for reading smaller mail you really have to scroll many times. Only 50% of the space has been utilized in the page and rest of the space is full of margin and scroll bars. And some time I feel like I have opened text documents in two PDAs placed next to each other. Very very limited space to work!!
If Live developer, really wanted to get out of these scroll full page then they have to remove those bottom margins, right margin and also top margin of the page. May be they are placeholder for advertisement content..but bottom margin??? And also I think they have to remove the scroll bar of main page. Its really leads to confusion for average user who wanted to use scroll wheel to scroll mail.
I still like the distribution of panels in Outlook Web Access then this Live Mail, if you wanted to show mail listing and mail content in the same page.