The usability of a garbage can
It's been a while. The last couple of weeks have been a mix of usability lab, and me being sick. Usability, as always, was exhausting but very productive. Scripted activities in a lab are only part of the interface picture. There are a lot of things that environment isn't, but one thing it is: a great way to shine a light on any basic stumbling blocks that the designers/developers have become immune to during the process.
We had surprisingly few of these; the worst one involved prompting users to try to go into "mobile"/small display mode. It was lumped in with "styles" in the preferences, which nobody expected (and not many found). It's been shifted to more a appropriate heading, and more importantly, a "fast switcher" is now available on the masthead. This has the advantage of being a common element across much of the web. Hopefully we'll catch most cases automatically with a little intelligence on style sheets and a tiny bit of a javascript probe. Google seems to rely exclusively on this--or a user knowing their mobile url--as neither google.com nor gmail seem to have a link or preference anywhere to jump to their mobile versions. I'm not sure if they don't subscribe to the mobile web design community's wariness of detection (as accuracy is always suspect), or they just think they're that much smarter than anyone else... interesting question!
Aside from that issue, the other thorny one was the idea of deleting messages. IMAP has a two-step deletion model; you mark a message deleted, and then you "expunge" to permanently remove all deleted messages from a mailbox. It's a model of both safety and efficiency. You aren't moving a message around to delete it, so you're saving on IO, possibly network bandwidth depending on the environment, and lessening the risk of message corruption.
The downside, as we've heard numerous times in both the usability labs and from users throughout the years, is that most people flat out don't like it. They obviously like not having messages permanently disappear as soon as you hit "Delete". They don't like the message sitting there, with its big red "X" and strikethrough and whatever other "hey, I am deleted! I'm different!" indicator might be used. This isn't surprising. From POP3 clients twenty years ago to the defaults of Yahoo! Mail and Thunderbird today, deleted messages go to a "Trash" can. People are used to it, people want it.
The problem is, that isn't what IMAP is designed for. So, we're left thinking about ways to accomplish this. Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and Outlook all take a common approach. By default, deleted messages are copied to a Trash folder. They are also left in place marked for deletion, in proper IMAP style. The client hides these marked-for-deletion originals from the user's view.
What happens when the Trash is emptied?
All the copied messages in the Trash folder are permanently removed, while the originals are left there for all eternity, or until the user executes some sort of "Compact folder..." command. Which, obviously, nobody ever does unless they specifically know they should, because the client is hiding the messages that the "Compact" will remove. How can you expect someone to be a responsible user of a shared resource when they don't know that their software is leaving a trash heap under their feet?
This approach, however, does have advantages in that it satisfies the user desire for a Trash folder, and it leaves deleted messages alone in the original mailbox until directed otherwise. While the latter is problematic for the reasons noted above, it's a good thing in that it's non-disruptive if a person uses more than just that client to access their mail. Imagine you've been using Gophermail, marking messages for deletion but you aren't ready to get rid of them permanently yet; then you use Thunderbird at your desk, and it unilaterally does an expunge for you after you delete one message there. You'd go back to Gophermail the next day to find all the messages you left there gone, and then you'd end up with an expensive paperweight after giving your laptop a Kruschev-style shoe-banging.
So, there is a method to their madness.
But it has a huge cost in wasted storage.
What's a person to do! We're discussing this in an ongoing fashion. In the end, it seems that this approach may be the best idea if coupled with a clear, well-communicated policy like most e-mail providers (from Google and Yahoo to other universities) of removing any deleted messages after thirty days. This is one that is going to take a lot of talking out, but it seems a reasonable compromise.
