
As part of a money-saving exercise, at the moment I’m looking to move away from using a hosted Microsoft Exchange account for my email, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks. I know that I won’t get one application that will cover all five elements, but I’m okay with that.
My two main criteria are that the applications I choose should be:
- Free
- Able to synchronize between PC, Android and the web
For tasks I’m now beginning to trial the free version of Wunderlist, a to-do list application for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Mac and Web. It’s really rather good.
Being involved in web design professionally, and often called on to assist with web application user-interface (UI) designs I frequently find myself analysing other people’s application interfaces and asking myself why certain elements have been laid out in a particular way.
I found myself considering these things when using Wunderlist for the PC this morning. I wanted to change where new list items were added, from the bottom of the list to the top.
Curiously, on the application menu I selected “Preferences” (4th item down):
But it opened a dialog window called “Settings”. Why not keep the two terms consistent?

On the first panel, which is open by default, I found the option I wanted: where to add new items. However, I was a little surprised by the order.
Why is “Bottom of List” at the top of that two option list, and “Top of List” at the bottom?
I would have thought it would be more intuitive to users—in a Steve Krug ‘don’t make the think’ kind of way—to list them in the order that the words themselves suggest:
- Top of list
- Bottom of list
What do you think?