Mail Quota interface for Notes 8.0+
Margo guest blogging for Mary Beth has some questions about mail quota displays in some version of Notes post 8.0. My response is a bit too complicated for a simple comment, so it's trackback time!
Here's the original:
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Normal outline
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when you hover on the
graph
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Why tuck away the details into a mouse over? Because they're irrelevant to the purpose of the graphic, which is a warning to the user about their quota status. Showing a graphic AND the details at the same time is redundant and unnecessary.
Why move the server to there, too? Well, perhaps you could show "on server" on there, but naming the particular server is just going to be confusing to the user. Particularly in light of cluster usage where they might be load-balanced to a particular machine.
Margo asks "how often should we update the graph?" Before I answer that, let me ask "what should the graph reflect?" I'm pretty confident the current strategy is to have it show the percentage of quota use of whatever NSF instance is currently open. If I remember correctly, this is how OpenNTF Mail does it. It's not the right way to do it.
It should reflect the quota usage of the user's home server. That's the only quota that's actually relevant. That's the one that will prevent the user from sending & receiving further emails, which is why they would care about it in the first place.
Hard to do? Somewhat. Not ridiculously so. If I were suitably motivated, a "when mail is added" agent could update a profile document which could drive the graph. It would obviously be much better if this were driven by the mail router instead.
It's less important that the graph be updated real-time, and way more important that it show the quota usage that actually affects the user's mail access. As for policy control -- well, yeah, anything to increase control over interface is a positive.
Yes, I realize that there might be an accessibility issue here. How screen readers treat popup text is unknown to me, but I certainly think it's IBM's responsibility to figure out how to resolve that in 8 anyway, given the use of it in actions & view columns.
Yes, I also realize that I took out the graphics for most of the items in the outline. Be honest, doesn't it look a lot cleaner that way? Note that I left them on the spots that are relevant draft targets. (Yeah, you could drag something into your inbox. Please tell me if you think there's a use-case for this. And I don't know whether dragging to the Follow Up folder activates the dialog box, but if it does, then there should be a graphic there.)
If anyone thinks this is overkill, I'd remind them that if a user is working on a local replica that reflects 50% usage, and then they suddenly stop getting mail on the server and everything bounces back, do you want to know who they're going to blame? Do you think they're going to think "oh, it was MY FAULT, because I didn't look at what was on the server version?" Of course not. They're going to say "Notes sucks because it tells me what my usage is on my local replica where I deliberately set it to only replication the first 40K of a message, and it tells me I'm find on my quota, but I'm about to have my mail cut off. STUPID STUPID NOTES!!!!"
The difference is whether you're going to show information to the user about something involving underlying code, or you're going to show them information that actually affects their user experience. It's an open and shut case.
Comments
I don't like the stark look of no icons in the outline. It's not clear to me why the trash has one but the rest do not. Will an R8 outline collapse the whitespace if there is no icon shown, or is that just image manipulation? It would be nice if it's real.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 10:00:41 PM On 02/28/2007 |
Posted by Mike Lazar At 10:13:07 PM On 02/28/2007 |
My problem with the graphics is that they serve no purpose. Normally, a graphic would a) indicate special behavior such as a drag target or clickable action; b) act as a mneumonic so you could have a stripped interface where the graphic fully REPLACES the text label; or c) act as a reminder mneumonic for certain kinds of entities (eg: a background icon on a "patient" form that symbolizes the age and sex of the patient.)
The graphics in the standard outline are PURELY DECORATIVE. They convey no information that isn't already there, particularly since you can't, say, turn off the text-labels in an advanced mode. I'm not a fan of purely decorative graphics. Not so much because I mind decoration, but because it reduces the meaning of graphics in all situations where there's something to express to the user.
By the way, nice to hear that you've already done the code I'm describing. Send me the template and I'll post it in the Notes 8 Design Partner forum.
@2 - I don't think the goal is to obsolete any 3rd party products.
If I remember correct, you can tell the router to ignore quotas, right? That would mean that the user could continue to RECEIVE, but, not being able to create new documents in their mail NSF, they wouldn't be able to SAVE sent mail. I really don't know whether that would prevent the actual compose action as well. I'd have to try it and I don't have a good environment for that right now.
Interesting thought to check ALL replicas. Perhaps the best alternative would be stronger controls for the administrator? Something where X% of quota means the mail admin starts getting notified and can warn the user? I don't want to create more work for the administrator, though. The problem is, the admin is the only one who should need to understand what a "mail replica" is.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 07:43:39 AM On 03/01/2007 |
In the scenario where the router obeys quotas, it simply prevents the user from saving a copy of the message if they're working on a server replica. From local replicas it gets a little weird.
Since quotas are not enforced on local replicas, users can save copies of e-mails and not know they are over their quotas. The bizarre part is the Send Outgoing replication action will fail if they are over their quota. I think this is weird because I would have expected it to fail replicating their mail, not sending an outgoing message. I don't remember the exact message, but it doesn't say anything that makes sense to the user, and it took me a while to figure out what it was doing.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 04:20:33 PM On 03/01/2007 |
Posted by David Price At 01:01:45 PM On 03/05/2007 |
Posted by manu At 08:47:00 AM On 02/27/2008 |
Posted by Jonatas At 11:18:30 AM On 02/23/2010 |