Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> writes:
> On 8/17/02 12:30 AM, "Russ Allbery" <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> If Google were actually responsive, it would be usable. It's probably
>> the best available one.
> You just don't like blondes. (more correctly, you're already looking
> forward to when web services turn them into redheads...)
Maybe you could crank the arrogance down a few notches here? You're not
the only technical person who has some experience working with
non-technical users and some glimmerings of what they might like or not
like, you know.
I know web interfaces are all the fad now, mostly because for many
problems they're the 50% solution and worse is better (for fairly
undstandable and sound reasons). That doesn't mean they're a panacea,
even for unexperienced users.
They're another interface choice. Some people prefer webmail clients;
many people don't. Some people who prefer them do so primarily because of
the convenience of access and just put up with the interface and the
slowness of access. Some of the people who prefer them prefer them for
reasons that have nothing to do with the user interface and everything to
do with their confusion about the idea of launching multiple applications
to "access the Internet." And some of the people who prefer them do so
because they want to keep all their mail on a remote server for various
reasons, such as privacy concerns, and IMAP isn't an option for them.
Those people who really do prefer the interface will, again, want web
archives that have the same interface as their preferred mail client. So
if their preferred mail client is Hotmail, then those people will be
well-served by a traditional web-based mailing list archive. If it isn't,
they won't be.
I think you can get there with read-only IMAP folders, down the road. If
that becomes a popular protocol for providing mailing list archives, some
of the web mail systems will start offering support for it.
> But they're also comfortable with the browser interface
That depends on how they read their mail. If they read their mail with a
webmail reader, then yes, they are. If they read their mail with
something else, then no, they're not, *not for reading mail*.
They're not used to a browser interface exactly; they're used to a *web
page* interface, which comes with a bunch of assumptions of how you
navigate and what sort of information you're looking at. If your mailing
list is a mailing list to send out web pages, then a web page archive
works pretty well. HTML announcement lists and that sort of a thing fit
into that paradigm quite well. If your mailing list is a list for mail
messages, then you're doing a transformation of a mail message into a web
page, and users are used to dealing with mail in their mail client are
having to learn a new *mail* interface to deal with the mailing list
archives.
There's one thing I know extremely well. The vast majority of users
*hate* learning a new mail interface. This is why we still have (very
non-technical) users who use mm, despite the fact that it's a horrible
mail reader by modern standards and can't even understand MIME. They've
been using mm since TOPS-20, and that's what they understand.
Just because it's in their web browser doesn't mean it's a familiar user
interface. Any complicated web application (and a halfway decent mailing
list archive with good search capability and support for threading *is* a
complicated web application) is essentially a brand-new user interface.
It's built on top of standard building blocks, which makes it easier to
learn just like interfaces built on the standard look and feel of a
desktop platform are easier to learn, but there's still a learning curve
compared to giving them their archives inside their mail client.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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