May 13
A bit of a Communication Problem
I’ve been doing some testing recently with Thunderbird and its offline support; trying to get a handle on what the state of the onion is. One problem that has bothered me is the silent state of online to offline, not to mention the dialogs that happen after that.
Communication
How do you convey that Thunderbird is offline or online? I’m not too sure of the implementation yet but I think we can get some excellent ideas when examining IM clients and how they handle online vs. offline; for email it’s just a little less extreme.
Online
Should have some indication that is available, but not too prominent because this is the state where everything is good. When you’re online, emails will be sent right away and new messages will arrive, we don’t need a large piece of real estate to inform you that the situation is normal.
Simple and obvious green signal that you’re online
Offline
Requires a clear indication that is prominent and obvious. Auto-reconnection should be the default and timeouts created that indicate when the next reconnect will take place; allow people to interrupt and reconnect immediately.
You’re grey and offline, do you want to try going online now? I’ll try in a little bit anyway…
Because for email we can also expect that some people will want to be offline intentionally we need to allow for people to remove the indication and include ways for people to tell Thunderbird to stop trying to auto-reconnect.
Getting Back Online
When you’ve finally reconnected it’s a moment for celebration… Yay! Get back to work!! This kind of notification allows people to understand that you’ve reconnected and things will be back to normal.
Getting back online from an offline state can also incur some syncing and likely heavy network traffic so for those reasons alone it’s good to let people know that Thunderbird has realized the new online state and is going to start doing it’s business again. Hold on to your butts…
Woo Hoo! We’re back online!
Some Caveats
We examined an IM client with a single account. There are some extra things about Thunderbird and email that need to be considered, here’s just one: You could have multiple email accounts and only a few are not connecting. What does it look like to have the account you’re focused on online and another account offline? What does the opposite look like?
The silent state of offline? Have you not noticed the little icon on the left of the status bar?
Maybe that’s just proving the point.
Note, that TB’s version is a lot less clear than the SM one which is on the bottom right and is probably in more people’s field of vision because that’s where the scroll bars meet.
Depending on how eye catching the notification is, this could be a problem. If it ever gets in a state of bouncing between online and offline, you’ll forever be irritating the user with notifications “we’re back”, “no we’re not”, “yes we are”.
Perhaps the simplest solution is to indicate the state of an account when the core components of the account are in view. For email this would probably be the folder structure, and you could lighten/darken/colour the text depending on the state of the connection. The colour could change when the user has intentionally asked the account not to connect.
This idea is already used in the message pane for labelling messages, and would still allow for some form of (small) image to represent the general health of the connection, perhaps up on the toolbar or the header of the sidebar?
Couldn’t you use the OS API to get and notify the connection state? GNOME (and KDE too I think) already have NetworkManager which will pop-up a tooltip when the network is up. Windows users have something similar in the tray. Also, using NetworkManager you would avoid in some cases trying to reconnect with timeouts.
Don’t forget about color blind users (about 1 in 12 users have some sort of color sensing deficiency in their vision).
Standard8: Oh, right!! But that’s the status of offline/online mode, not really what’s happening on my system. I’m gonna check out SM to see what they do.
Mike: Good points. Motion and distraction has to be kept to a minimum and the controls need to keep the user in complete control of bouncing notifications.
Cosimo: It’s possible. Firefox currently listens for NetworkManager to gather online / offline status but this isn’t in Thunderbird yet.
Aaron: Right, I think regular plain text changes to title bars and other areas will be helpful indications for all users.
apple mail shows a little icon beside the folder name when it is offline and let user click it to go online.
the good thing about clicking something to go online is that if you’re on a slow connection downloading mails will not clog your line when you reconnect.