<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">Before I reply point-by-point, I'd like to underscore something that I might not have made clearly enough in my original message: I'm *not* proposing that we keep old code around just to satisfy especially-conservative users. I'm only proposing that we improve our process for changing *defaults*; that is, cases where we've already decided we'll keep both ways around. While I think we should also think carefully about removing features/behavior just because we don't see a use for them, that's a separate issue, and one I don't have a good answer for at the moment.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Per this thread, my current plan is to work on a set of guidelines for UX reviewers in these cases so that we ask the appropriate questions before release. Even if we don't satisfy all of the conditions in my original message, I think we should be checking them and ensuring we have a good reason if we violate one of them.<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><br>On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 2:34 PM, Jonathan Protzenko <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jonathan.protzenko@gmail.com" target="_blank">jonathan.protzenko@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p>I'm extremely confused by this proposal. What other piece of
software runs a poll when there is a proposed change? Does Gmail
run a survey everytime they change their UI? No. Is Gmail
"mission-critical" for many people? Oh, yes.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>I ran a poll among people who contribute to Thunderbird (or at least follow closely enough to know about tb-planning) because I wanted to get a sense for what people liked in terms of icon shape. The main reason I did this is because opinion was split about 50/50 in the bug. That doesn't imply that we'd do this for every change (or even 10% of changes). The only time I'd see merit in a poll is when - like this case - several core TB developers disagree on a minor issue (icon shape) and we're just going in circles. Heck, we could probably have just flipped a coin.</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><p>If you're trying to modernize Thunderbird, then this is not going
to help. What you're proposing is basically that everything be set
in stone, and that we cater to an audience of users who want their
email client to remain exactly the way it was in 1994.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>To be honest, if I really wanted to create a modern MUA, I'd just go work on asuth's "glodastrophe" client. Having worked on its internals when it was the Gaia Email client, it's miles ahead of Thunderbird in terms of maintainability.<br><br>While it's hard to say anything about Thunderbird's userbase with certainty (we don't have much data), I think it's safe to say that Thunderbird's continued relevance is deeply tied to its legacy. We should recognize that and work to preserve a continuity of user experience (within reason). We might be able to improve on it in some ways, but I think attempting to modernize Thunderbird is a distraction from more important tasks[1]. We don't have a lot of resources, and I would much rather see us using the resources we have to polish *existing* parts of Thunderbird. There are tons of half-finished bits sitting around, and I think we overprioritize new features compared to finishing the ones we already started. Gloda is a great example of this: overall, I think Gloda is pretty great, but there are still - almost 6 1/2 years after its initial release - significant gaps in it.<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><p>- People who are upset are people most likely to navigate the
communication channels of Thunderbird, find out about this mailing
list and figure out how to make their voice heard on every single
possible bug in Bugzilla. I claim that the feedback you're hearing
about the Correspondents change is not representative of the
general userbase.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>As already mentioned in this thread, the number of people complaining isn't especially important to me, since it's practically impossible to figure out how many people are happy or not. I care a lot more about the *content* of users' complaints, and in this case, those complaints made it clear to me that we failed to understand all the implications of our upgrade code. This is what I'm trying to solve.<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><p>
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<p>- Who's going to test the 2ⁿ combinations of options? Options
have a cost. You're increasing the technical debt and complexity
of the software because a handful of people have been very vocal
on Bugzilla.</p></div></blockquote><div>No, I'm not. We never even *proposed* removing the From/Recipients column when we added the Correspondents column. If anything increased the complexity of Thunderbird, it was the automatic upgrade code. As mentioned above, I'm not proposing that we keep around literally every old feature in Thunderbird; you may recall that I argue harder than most to *remove* obsolete parts of Thunderbird. But if we're already keeping around the old feature and only changing the default, as we did in this case, we owe it to users to ensure that we change their defaults with care.<br><br>While you might argue that we needed the upgrade code in order to make it worth landing Correspondents, that's making an assumption that we know enough about our userbase to say that the majority would prefer Correspondents to From/Recipients. To be rather blunt, we don't know a damn thing about how the average user uses Thunderbird. To my knowledge, we've never actually studied that. Years ago, I ported Test Pilot to Thunderbird so that we *could* learn what our users like. I think we made one study that was never actually completed before the project petered out.<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<p>- You're deterring potential contributors, because in addition to
the technical burden of making things opt-out, now contributors
will have to manage politics and make sure they don't end up
starting a flame war because they changed some people's habits.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>I don't agree. There are a great many things that contributors can work on that aren't particularly controversial, and even in cases where a change might be controversial, it's the job of the core Thunderbird team (submodule owners, UX peers, etc) to manage the politics and make (hopefully!) intelligent decisions about how to change Thunderbird. A new contributor should feel that the core<br><br></div><div>- Jim<br><br></div><div>[1] "Modernize" is vague enough that almost anything we do could be called "modernizing", but here I specifically mean working on new UX features (as opposed to architectural cleanup, finishing existing features, etc).<br></div></div></div></div>