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<div id="newHeader"> <b>To: </b>"tb-planning"<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tb-planning@mozilla.org"><tb-planning@mozilla.org></a>
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<b>From: </b>"Joshua Cranmer"<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:pidgeot18@gmail.com"><pidgeot18@gmail.com></a><br>
<b>Sent: </b>Friday, 14/09/12 22:20:55 22:20 GMT Daylight Time
{GMT DT} +0100 [Week 37]<br>
<b>Subject:</b>Re: Philosophy of minimal disturbance of existing
users </div>
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<blockquote cite="mid:50539FB7.6010008@gmail.com" type="cite">On
9/14/2012 12:49 PM, Kent James wrote:
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Why not instead adopt a philosophy of
minimal disturbance of existing users? Couldn't we instead
enable the menubar by default for existing users, and only
disable it by default for new users?
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
There are several problems with this approach:
<br>
1. If we had been following this approach for the entire history
of Thunderbird, we would have to be maintaining the UI consistency
of Netscape 6. Here's a link to a page with pictures:
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.lazerlink.com/netscape6.html"><http://www.lazerlink.com/netscape6.html></a>. </blockquote>
Ah, the memories. It wasn't a bad user interface, wasn't it?
Everything worked, was snappy, you could collapse items out of the
way, and it was clean... getting nostalgic :)<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">2. Testing and QA. One of the things we
would have to do is start trying to figure out which version of
the UI people were using to figure out what broke (doubtless,
there will always be one of the UIs broken), and it's not clear to
me that this is a simple task (getting version information can be
surprisingly hard).
<br>
</blockquote>
I think that is a BIG point. But it is an argument for less change,
not more?<br>
<blockquote type="cite">3. Migration. I migrate computers by copying
my profile from computer to computer. But others may decide just
to download Thunderbird and create a new profile--to your
approach, this is a "new user" instead of an "existing user."
Thus, the UI they see could be drastically different (especially
when you consider the long-term implications: people seem to be
working with a ~5yr upgrade cycle).
<br>
</blockquote>
That's why we need a "sync" feature.<br>
<blockquote type="cite">4. The press may talk about cool new UI
features (positively, I'd hope). Then the user would look forward
to the change, download the new version... and see no change.
Oops?
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Like I stated before, removing UI elements doesn't equal reinventing
/ innovating them. Let's come up with something better, instead of
stripping everything down. To an ordinary user it is hard to
understand how "removing a toolbar here or and addon bar there"
constitutes an innovative new feature? It is more like turning back
the clock to when there were no common UI standards.<br>
<br>
I think when developing innovative UI we have to build on elements
that are already well known to the users, and make something that
"works as expected". For instance, I think the "Ribbon" interface
could work for the preferences dialog; it is a subtle change but
would make the subgroups (sub-tabs) and main options (now buttons,
but could be big tabs) more cohesive.<br>
<br>
Axel<br>
<br>
<br>
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<b class="myName" style="text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px
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-moz-transition-duration: 0.5s;">Axel Grude</b> [T]
<br>
Software Developer
<br>
Thunderbird Add-ons Developer
<span style="color:#666666; font-size:xx-small">(QuickFolders,
quickFilters, QuickPasswords, Zombie Keys, SmartTemplate4)</span>
<br>
AMO Editor </div>
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