Re: [Evolution] Advice

[Yanko Kaneti <yaneti indigo declera com>]

    On 18 Jan 2001 21:10:20 -0800, troy hakala wrote: 


            2. Outlook Bar is good for novice users, Folder List is good for power 
            users. But neither is good for most users. Do something good there.

        Oh? What's not good about the folder tree?


    the folder tree is VERY confusing to most users -- they see WAY too
    many folders and get confused and can't find the folder they want
    quickly. and the hierarchy thing does not make sense to people,
    believe it or not. i know it is hard to understand, but you'd be
    surprised the things you see people trying to do when you watch them
    actually use the product. basically, people think of email as ONE
    place: their inbox. they certainly don't think of their calendar or
    their contact list as a folder (when's the last time you put a
    real-life calendar in a folder?). and NO ONE manages their folders
    in a proper hierarchy -- most users make one flat list of folders.
    at most, people go 2 levels deep ("here's my personal stuff and
    here's my work stuff"). after all, when have you ever put a
    real-life folder inside another folder?  the worst thing about the
    folder tree visually, in my opinion, is that a nested folder doesn't
    look like it's *inside* the folder, it looks like it's below and to
    the right of the parent folder. :)

    99.9999% of Outlook novice users don't even know the folder list
    exists. and even 80% of Outlook power users use *both* the Outlook
    Bar and the Folder Tree because each is good for some things. there
    was work to merge the outlook bar & the folder list into a single
    navigation model, so you'd have big icons for your inbox, calendar,
    etc and smaller and possibly tree-like navigation for your mail
    archive folders. and it'd hide Sent Items, Outbox, etc since they're
    used less often. but it never made it into a released version.


wow! i found the above paragraph VERY informative (i am not na UI designer)
thanks troy :)  (no sarcasm here)

mayby one way to address this now is to allow the shortcut bar to be
docked above or bellow the folder list, this would of course require 
a little more configurabilty on its side, like:
  -small/big/custom icons
  -icon text on/off/custom
  -some sort of free icon placement

just my 2c,
yanko