Re: [Tools-implementation] A usability anecdote on the mailarchive tool

[Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-09-01 18:33, Robert Sparks wrote:
> I was catching up on the gendispatch list today using thunderbird to 
> read the list through the IETF imap service.
> 
> I encountered a couple of days of messages that were not being served 
> correctly through that service (Ryan is looking at fixing that). They 
> were served through the http-based mailarchive service just fine, 
> however, so I shifted to those to complete my goal of catching up.
> 
> And I found that I was significantly more than twice as slow reading the 
> view via mailarchive than I was reading it through thunderbird. I 
> started poking at why, and a lot of it has to do with how the css at 
> mailarchive renders whitespace around quotations. Some has to do with 
> contrast, and some has to do with the need to scroll more.
> 
> I also lost time to learning to discard things that were in my face but 
> I didn't have to read. Those would eventually be trained into me, but 
> before accepting them I think perhaps I should push back about them. 
> (Like the thread index at the bottom of the message - that should 
> perhaps be collapsed or otherwise made very visually distinct).

+1

Collapse and greyed-out when collapsed, and not visually part of the
message pane.

> So I wonder if we should look for outside help in assessing how the view 
> can be made more ergonomic (and also assess how the community is really 
> using the tool)?

Ack.