I've been developing software for over fort y years now, and was trained in usability design in the 1970s early in my time at IBM. Ever since, I've been intensely dedicated to the essential importance of product usability on top of functionality.

It can be quite challenging to come up with products that have both in equal measure, and it is is quite easy for a follow-on version of a product to be worse than its predecessor. The more complex the product, as with so many of the software applications that we use today, the easier it is to slip backwards like the frog climbing out of the well.

Looking through my software backups and e-mail archives, I see that I've been using Skype since Beta 0.93 in October 2003. I  used to conscientiously install every new release as soon as it came out, up to and including Skype 3.8 last year. But I decided to give the Skype 4 betas a miss (only because I have my hands full continually installing and testing all sorts of other software and version 3.8 was perfectly adequate, particularly with its voice quality enhancements).

I've written a series of iTWire articles about Skype, such as SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 4 (which has links to the earlier articles).

Yesterday Skype 4.0 was released, and this was well covered by iTWire colleague Stuart Corner in his story Skype 4.0 debuts Down Under

Others have written or will write at length about Skype 4.0 -- see the Skype Blog for example. so it's not my intention to go over the same ground. I have already assessed Skype 4.0 as being an excellent product, on the whole. Instead, I'll just give some cameo impressions, mainly concerning GUI items, gleane after a day or so using Skype 4.0, little things that irk me plus one omission that surprisingly seems to have slipped through despite such a long beta testing period.

Looking at Figure (1) adjacent the very first thing that I noticed, when interacting with the other members of the iTWire team, was that I inadvertently kept clicking the green Call Group button and annoying the others when I had no intention of starting a group Skype call.

I didn't do it just once, but a number of times. For some reason, this button is oversized and I found it getting in the way all the time, with no way of moving it or hiding it. Most irritating indeed.

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