You won't believe what Skype designers missed

Skype has been for many years like a tank. Kind of ugly but can get you through the toughest challenge. It just worked. Aside from more minimal rebrandings and a much nicer Windows 8 (and subsequently 10) version, the apps themselves didn't really evolve as far as design is concerned. In recent weeks Skype has finally stepped up their game and released a brand new iOS version of their app.

On first glance it's all there - trendy gradients, white backgrounds with good use of whitespace and nice typography. Stunning! It clearly shows that a lot of hard work went into making that app, so it's extremely weird their designers overlooked such an obvious problem. Here's how sending a message looks like in Skype.

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As you can see the SEND icon (airplane) is right next to a SHARE LOCATION icon that's below it. If you're right-handed then it's almost always easier to tap the icon that's on the lower-right side of the screen. I accidentaly sent my location instead of the actual message at least 20 times so far. This is so frustrating. iMessage (on the right) takes a different approach, with the action (photo/video etc) icons are simply opening up from the left and covering some of the main input. The right side is clear and easy to tap on without problems.

As you can see, there's a lot of little details that can negatively affect even the best product. Let's hope they'll fix it soon, as other than that the app looks amazing!

Michał

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