Re: [Usability] Mail clients put the Subject field in the wrong place

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

2005/9/19, Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>:
> I'd also put the recipient fields underneath the message body, on the
> grounds that sometimes you're not sure exactly who a message is
> appropriate for until you've finished it.

Even with the valid example, an argument stating that "sometimes it's
like this" does not sound that encouraging.

Sometimes I decide to go to bathroom, but that doesn't mean I should
always sit there with my laptop just in case...

What I think are the three most important factors when placing UI
components are:

- What is most used
- What is the logical order of things
- What are the relations of said components

All of these are not enough to decide here though:

- All of the fields (to:, subject, body) should be filled in all messages
- There is little or no logical difference between "this message from
him about that", "from him and about that the message is this"[1]
- They all relate about the same way to each other 

So, what should decide the ordering? For the first two (to:[2] and
subject) I see no big reasons for one way or another, but for keeping
the message body last there is the notion that it's the one expanding
rather lot vertically (in reality it doesn't as it's scrolled of
course, but the user most likely wants to resize the window sometimes)
and this would mean that the elements in the bottom will always be
located depending on the window size. If the fields are on the top of
the window, there less movement as they won't go anywhere when the
window is resized.

This is probably more than 0,2c, but you can keep the change.

[1] I like when I can create a sentence from an UI, it means that it
has at least some level of logic in it.

[2] Ok, so it could be three or four if you count cc and bcc but I
consider them grouped with to: which is only logical way to handle
them in my opinion

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi
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