[imp] Attachment interface confusing to users

[Edward Glowacki]

On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 17:08, Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:
> Quoting Edward Glowacki <glowack2@msu.edu>:
> 
> > After some more pondering about screen real estate, I started
> > experimenting with the layout of the compose screen using a static HTML
> > page ripped from imp.  The original goal was to figure out if I could
> > safely remove the "attachments" button and some of the other things on
> > the screen that I wasn't sure needed to be there, but I ended up messing
> > with almost every part of the screen.
> 
> All of these, at a glance, rip out things that are essential (Expand 
> Names), or that should be there (the help, which does indeed work fine), 

I double checked this morning, and help appears to work fine on IE 5.5
on Windows, but it does not work with Netscape 4.79, Mozilla 1.0, or
Galeon 1.2.5 (which uses the mozilla rendering engine) on FreeBSD.  All
three of those browsers only link to the help index.  

> and most look a lot less intuitive to me than the current model. Just 
> making things smaller isn't necessarily a good thing.

I agree, smaller in and of itself is not necessarily better.  But a
*simpler* design is often better.  Though I started out trying to fix
our user's complaint about the attachments button, I ended up trying to
simplify (and organize) the rest of the screen as well.  I'm not sure if
any of my changes were really successful in achieving those goals as I
have not tested the changes on any users.  Also, there is a lot of room
for improvement in what I did, because the pages were all rough hacks
designed to mess with placement rather than create a polished product.  

I do think that some of the changes I tried might actually be useful
(after some more refinement obviously), and that some (taking away some
of the help and the expand names button for example) may be entirely
wrong.  The only way to really know is to test it on some users.

-ED


-- 
Edward Glowacki             glowack2@msu.edu

"A wise craftsman never blames his tools."