Scott Putterman wrote:
>...
> I'm curious about this. If you go to the Account Settings and choose
> the server you care about, you can set up mail notifications.
Is it on by default? It should be.
> When
> they go off, the icon of the server that has new mail changes and a
> green arrow appears in the mail icon in the taskbar.
That isn't obvious enough, for five reasons:
(1) 4.x users are trained to look in the bottom right corner of the
window for the component bar, and it has been moved to the left (for
no obvious reason);
(2) 4.x users had more obvious platform-specific notifications than the
component bar for new e-mail (see below), so the new e-mail
notification provided by the component bar may be unfamiliar;
(3) the component bar appears under the sidebar, which helps to hide it;
(4) in the Netscape 6 distribution, at least, the number of items in the
component bar has increased, which makes it more difficult to find
the icon for mail;
(5) the component bar exists in its own horizontal bar which contains
nothing else useful, encouraging users to turn it off completely.
I'd like to see a `Mail' button in Navigator's toolbar, with an icon
which is overlaid with a box with the number of unread messages. (A
similar method could be used with a `Chat' button for indicating the
number of online buddies for Jabberzilla.)
> What I'm curious about is that we have received a number of feedback
> responses saying there are no mail notifications. Do you have this
> set up and it's not working, or is it just a matter of not knowing you
> could set it up? We either have a bug or a usability problem.
>...
Usability problem caused by unimplemented features: notifications aren't
appearing in the manner which the users expect. On Mac OS, that means
following the Internet control panel's settings for e-mail notification
-- playing the user-specified sound, and/or flashing the application's
icon, and/or showing an alert
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18730>. On Windows, that
means playing the sound specified in the Sounds control panel for `New
mail', and putting an icon in the system tray
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18729>. And similar for
GNOME <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18732> and KDE
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18731>.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA
