For novices, fix reliability and usability
For novices, fix reliability and usability
Posted Jan 29, 2008 8:54 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643)Parent article: The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning
The one absolutely critical thing to fix for Thunderbird is reliability of data storage and particularly indexes. I support a few friends/family who use Thunderbird and they frequently find that messages seem to disappear - this is usually fixable by deleting *.msf files, but try talking this through with someone on the phone or IM! Thunderbird needs to prevent such problems completely if possible through more reliable storage design, or at least recognise such problems and automatically fix them. The other important usability item is making it possible to lock down Thunderbird for use by novices - e.g. disabling the search/filter field (which makes messages 'disappear' again, have now figured this out), and disabling drag/drop of folders (too easy to lose a folder within another one). This is for people who have trouble with Windows Explorer folders, but can cope with email programs - one of them is 82 and has been using computers and Internet email for 20 years plus, but doesn't get on with folders. These issues are based on Windows users, but until people start using some key open source apps on Windows it's hard to move them to Linux, and the same thing would affect true novices who use Linux on a low-end PC. Firefox is far, far more usable than Thunderbird, probably due to greater investment by the Mozilla people. I hope Thunderbird can get up to this level.
Posted Jan 29, 2008 9:22 UTC (Tue)
by grantingram (guest, #18390)
[Link] (1 responses)
Whilst I am all in favour of easy to use interfaces - I can't help feeling that the reason Firefox is easier to use is that fundamentally browsing the web is much simpler than managing your e-mail in Thunderbird. In the first you are essentially reading text and in the second you are writing text and managing other bits of text people have sent you...
Posted Feb 1, 2008 9:39 UTC (Fri)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2008 9:37 UTC (Tue)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2008 9:42 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
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Posted Jan 30, 2008 14:35 UTC (Wed)
by dank (guest, #1865)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2008 18:09 UTC (Tue)
by dank (guest, #1865)
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Firefox is far, far more usable than Thunderbird, probably due to greater investment by the Mozilla people. I hope Thunderbird can get up to this level.
The task not the program
The task not the program
It's not just the task - it's the fact that the Thunderbird interface is stateful.
Take the message filtering box - a nice feature for power users, but confusing to novices, who
will type something in here and then later on wonder why all their messages "have been
deleted" or "have vanished". This is truly a panic-inducing prospect for someone who is a
novice at Thunderbird and not very confident with computers. Making it really obvious how to
"show all my messages again" would help solve this - or have a "progressive disclosure" model
where this feature is not enabled initially but can be turned on with an "I am a power user"
toggle set by the user.
I'm not a usability expert so there may be much better solutions to this, but this just shows
that there can't have been much usability testing of Thunderbird.
For novices, fix reliability and usability
Data storage reliability could be dramatically improved by dropping mbox for maildir at last
(it would make imap support more natural too BTW)
maildir support has been requested since 2000 but unfortunately it seems not to be on
thunderbird authors radar, even after all the mbox robustness problems people predicted then
materialised
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58308
Every thunderbird user with data storage problems should vote on this bug.
For novices, fix reliability and usability
If thunderbird would start using Akonadi, a lot of the reliability problems would be solved.
For power users, fix reliability
OMG yes. Thunderbird crashes monthly for my wife,
and when it does, she has to remove upwards of 10,000
duplicate messages from inbox, and go through a
complicated ritual of compressing mail folders
and resetting every single fucking folder's sort
options by hand. This is a serious pain when you have
200 folders. I swear to god she loses 8 hours of work
each time this happens. And she's no novice.
I think one key to this is to get more forceful about
enabling the crash feedback widget. If Thunderbird
notices it has crashed three times without that turned on,
it should get very persuasive about enabling it.
If gmail ever gets folders, Thunderbird is so toast for users
like my wife.
Finally filed a bug for my wife's recurring thunderbird crash...