[horde] Interface design Horde 4.1/5.0

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Gunnar Wrobel <wrobel at pardus.de>:

> My own experience has been kind of desastrous in that regard: Kolab  
> Systems is currently trying to move the Kolab ecosystem from Horde  
> to Roundcube. To a large part due to the fact that is is being  
> considered "to look slicker".
>
> Roundcube is not the only contender in that area. Google, Tine 2.0,  
> Open-Xchange, Zarafa all offer frontends with a more consistent  
> interface than what we provide at the moment.

Not to sounds whiny, or trying to start a flame war, but Roundcube's  
interface is terrible.  The folder navigator is absolutely unusable,  
the icons look like they are from a 1980's XWindows interface (and are  
confusing as hell), and the message list and preview windows are both  
difficult to read and have major issues in UI.

I know I am partial, but there is no way you can tell me that our  
interface is more difficult to use.  I understand our displays aren't  
wholly consistent between views, but most users won't even notice that.

> Several packagers and resellers mentioned Horde usability as an  
> issue when we went to LinuxTag last year. Another large German  
> packager deactivated the calendar because they considered the  
> interface to be too different from the webmail frontend.
>
> That sounds like it is pretty much along the lines of what we want.  
> During the Hackathon we discussed the different modes the top  
> navigational bar should support. While it should allow to replace  
> the sidebar, a bare-bone variant would simply list the various  
> applications. And would thus be somewhat similar to the current top  
> bar we have. We felt it just does not make too much sense to have  
> both - as your users seem to see it as well.

I will defer to the conversations that occurred at Hackathon for  
future direction.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]