Re: [Evolution] Evolution 2.0 UI proposal

[Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>]

Greetings Brett,

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 12:46, Brett Johnson wrote:

> True.  Tabs along the top of bottom of the view do waste some vertical
> space.  Of course currently (in the mockups you sent out), that space is
> already being completely wasted with the redundant toolbar-sized "tell
> me again which folder I've selected?" bar.  

UI redundancy is absolutely not the same thing as a complete waste of
space. :) That information in the toolbar reinforces for the user which
folder has been selected. This is important information to provide,
because it make the interface more forgiving. People make mistakes.
Building more than one place into your UI to give people information so
that maybe they make fewer mistakes acknowledges the existence of human
error.

> The only useful thing there is the search widget, which could easily be integrated into the toolbar
> instead (especially if evolution would honor the gnome toolbar_style
> preference, and not waste valuable toolbar space on redundant text).

Integrating the search bar would force the app to be prohibitively wide.
(For example, if I want to make the Evolution window the minimum width
such that all toolbar buttons in the Mail component are showing, then
the window needs to be about ~750 pixels wide, assuming that I use a
10pt font) If we want the app to be semi-usable on smaller screens, then
we do not have the space to add the searchbar to the toolbar.

> In fact, it'd be *really* sweet to take a page out of Galeon's UI
> design, and allow tabs to be promoted to full fledged windows (and then
> demoted back to tabs) as desired.  Seems like this would be a great
> solution for those folks that want to separate the tabs into disparate
> applications. 

So, I am not necessarily totally against the tab idea, even though it
might sound that way. My concerns and a proposal are as follows: 

Concerns: 
* Given that the toolbar items change as you change component, we would
need to enclose the toolbar within the tab as well if we wanted to
confine component-related changes to the area within the tab. This
strikes me as a fairly odd UI. 

Note that the fact that the toolbar changes from component to component
is a significant difference between Evolution and Galeon. In Galeon, the
same set of toolbar items apply to any given webpage; in Evolution, it
doesn't make much sense to show the Reply/Forward (etc) buttons in the
Calendar. 

* We are hoping to make Evolution easily pluggable, so that people can
install an arbitrary number of components. (There is already work being
done to develop a News reader component, an IM component, etc.) As such,
it has hard to tell how many components any user might have within her
Evolution. If we use tabs to allow you to switch between them, then as
the number of components grows, the distance that you have to move your
mouse to activate a given component also grows. If we lay out the
buttons in a matrix,then the distance that your mouse has to travel
between the folder tree and any given button (or between nav buttons) is
much smaller. Less mousing == good. :)

That said, the mockups that have started this thread aren't meant to be
a final product by any stretch of the imagination. We will conduct
usability tests of the mockups, and if people have difficulty
understanding them, then we'll try something else, like using tabs.

cheers, Anna 

-- 
Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>