Re: [evolution-patches] Much improved search bar patch

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 10:16 -0400, JP Rosevear wrote:
> 
> Sure looks like Ray responded to your criticism to me.  He talked about
> why bottom is not a bad thing from his perspective and you talked about
> why it was bad.  What exactly was it he didn't understand Jeff?

claiming that my reasoning suggests it is better placed at the bottom to
distract the user less has NOTHING to do with what I was talking about
at all.

my whole argument was about being able to FIND the search widgets.

If you recall from Anna's user testing videos, only 1 person (ONE
PERSON!!!) ever thought to look at the bottom of the Nautilus window to
find disk space availability.

It is my belief that it's because things at the bottom are overlooked
because no one expects stuff to be there. Also, people tend to look
straight ahead rather than down for stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if a
google search confirmed what I'm saying if combined with "Usability
Testing" or "User Interface Guidelines" or some such.

Thouis is arguing something completely off-topic from my arguments.

And *then* he also argues I shouldn't reject the patch based solely on
my arguments because they aren't that big of a user change anyway. 

Huh!?!?


Now, obviously putting this search bar at the top is also a bad idea in
Evolution's case because we already have a search bar widget there which
performs different kinds of searches from the one we're adding.

I took the opporunity to look to see what other mailers do.

Outlook: find dialog window
Mail.App: Same.
Thunderbird: Same.

I also looked at other apps on the desktop: Same (except for acroread
which expands a pane on the right-hand side dedicated for searching the
document which also has some good ideas but has the down side of taking
up a lot of space).

(btw, wouldn't you agree that consistency across apps on the desktop
makes Good Usability Sense (tm)?)

See, acroread addresses my issue with my point that putting something at
the bottom is "out of sight, out of mind" by putting the widgets along
the side (at the top). I'm not so much liking that within Evolution
either mind you, but I think it's better.

If we forget about the message-window for a minute, and try to solve it
for the main window - one solution I see is opening a search box above
the folder list widget.

that may also have usability issues tho, since that might impy that the
search is for folders rather than the current document. I don't know.
But it does solve all the problems anyone had with the old dialog window
approach and it certainly solves my earlier complaint about it being too
hard to notice.

Or... what if we placed it between the message-list pane and the view
pane? That would seem to pretty clearly dictate that the search belongs
to the email document (rather than the list) and all around solve world
hunger. And!!! Best of all!!! it would work in both the message-window
and in the main window. One implementation to rule them all.

Jeff