Sometimes I mix it up on some odd topics. Here’s a little debate I’m in over whether the UI for Mail.app is broken.
What I find highly amusing about this discussion is the presumption by most of my adversaries that I have nothing critical to say about Apple, which is near-ludicrous. Highlights — or at least, my pearls of wisdom — follow. Hit the link to see the whole thing.
No, that’s not broken. The rule setting in Mail.app is a panel; panels are not windows and do not take scrollbars, according to standard Apple UI. The only part that can be called broken here is that presumably the + button should be grayed out when the height of the panel is greater than (height of monitor – height of additional rule entry – height of menu bar). Although arguably, even then you might want to leave it ungrayed unless you had a secondary test for a larger alternate monitor attached.
Might I suggest that the design of Mail.app strongly encourages you to have many rules with one entry per rule, rather than one master rule with many entries. Try it, and you’ll note many design touches which show that this is what the designers had in mind, with positive feedback for users who do so.
Posted by: Jeff Porten at March 26, 2005 03:06 AM
God help the people needing usability design who hire you, then. There is nothing sacrosanct about the use of the panel — however, there is something collectively sacrosanct about not changing the behavior of a UI element in one location to make it act differently than it does in 25 or 30 others. As I stated in my original post, the error here is NOT in reworking the panel to provide for an infinite scrolling list; the error is that the user should be limited to the number of rules that can fit in the panel. If you want to provide an infinitely long list, then you need to abandon the panel interface.
I’ll skip the ludicrous hyperbole and stick to the ludicrous first two sentences. What amazes me are clueless comments like this one, which seem to imply that humans have some genetic instinct for email rules, akin to the infant sucking reflex. The way a user works is defined by experience, which in turn is developed through repetition across many applications. Therefore, if every panel in every application has a defined and limited set of parameters, you don’t suddenly redefine how that element works because one edge case might decide to create a rule of infinite complexity.
As noted before, fans of infinite complexity can create infinite rules. Or they can choose Perform AppleScript and get infinitely complex there. Such design decisions allow for an application that remains usable by Ma and Pa Kent, who just want to read email from Clark without being sold Kryptonian Viagra.
What part of “the + button should be grayed out” don’t you understand? Perhaps I should repeat myself using smaller words: yes, it’s bad that you can lose access to widgets. The height of the panel is limited to the height of the monitor. Scroll bars can be added, but break what the user expects from a panel. Therefore, stop the user from adding more than N elements.
An exception is made here for the file dialog panel, which looks like the file dialog in any other part of the system — and has scroll bars. Why? Because you give the user what he expects, and the file dialog is standardized across applications. No such exception exists for the mail rule, which is located in only one application.
Both, actually. You don’t have to hire me. Just as I wouldn’t hire you for any work requiring any kind of cogency or ability to present an argument. Should I ever find a need for godlike pronouncements from anonymous people with no credentials, though, I’ll be sure to give you a call.