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?

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Published:
05.13.08 / 8pm
Category:
mozilla