Last June, we noticed a new feature that we were seeing, a sidebar calendar in the Hotmail inbox. While some of you reported seeing it too, we learned today that it’s going away. We asked David Dennis, a Principal Lead Program Manager for Hotmail, for clarification:
“We recently tested the calendar in the inbox feature with a small number of our users. The results of the test suggested to us that we should take a different design approach. So, it’s back to the drawing board. Sometimes we evaluate features and make changes or remove them altogether depending on what we learn, but we do this with very small groups of users with features that don’t fundamentally change the product’s behavior.”
We checked, and as of the time of this writing, we still have the calendar:
but Dennis assured us that “(y)ou’ll stop seeing the calendar widget in the next few days”. And by the way, in case you’re wondering, the Messenger sidebar widget is staying.