"Ask again" is a broken UI

[Reuben Thomas]

Two big problems:

1. By default it should be unticked (most users only want to set their webmail service once) but:

2. Once it has been unticked, there is no GUI for changing one's webmail service again.

There is a simple and obvious solution to this, which is for desktop-webmail to add multiple entries to the "Preferred Applications" list of mail clients. Then there is no two-stage user interface, and the user can do something much more obvious, which is to select their mailer directly in the Preferred Applications list.

This need not remove the possibility of the user's creating their own customised URLs: you can have a "Custom webmail..." option which itself leads to a simple dialog in which you fill in the Inbox, compose and (optional) favicon URLs.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

I agree that something around preferred applications would be nice ... but i made it so that users can configure mailer even if they didnt check "ask again" by clicking on preferences -> desktop-webmail.

Problem with preferred applicaitons is that its not that simple to maintain available mailers dynamically etc. if you have a mockup of what you want to do I would love to see it.

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

On 9 January 2011 17:08, Alexander Sack <email address hidden> wrote:
> I agree that something around preferred applications would be nice ...
> but i made it so that users can configure mailer even if they didnt
> check "ask again" by clicking on  preferences -> desktop-webmail.

In that case, you can improve things immediately by removing the "ask
again" checkbox (and never "asking again").

> Problem with preferred applicaitons is that its not that simple to
> maintain available mailers dynamically etc. if you have a mockup of what
> you want to do I would love to see it.

I'm not sure what you mean by maintaining available mailers
dynamically. Why would you want to do that? What's needed is a list of
preconfigured ones, and a "custom" option which leads to the
configuration dialog.

As for a mockup, a simple re-explanation should suffice: under "Mail
Reader" in "Preferred Applications", I expect in the combo box to see
"Yahoo! Web mail", "Gmail", "Hotmail" &c. as options that I can just
select, along with "Custom webmail" (which would lead to the
configuration dialog).

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