In <20041018161519(_dot_)146775d3(_dot_)moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
Especially these days, in the browse environment the user is often in
"whack-a-mole" mode - he's got various kinds of stuff in his inbox,
including maybe important personal messages, trivial personal messages,
important "work" messages, trivial "work" messages, list traffic, spam,
and viruses -all jumbled together. His main goal is to keep the list of
things that haven't been looked at from getting too long. Some things
get deleted unseen, some get looked at and then deleted, some get
forwarded, some may get refliled if the user is sophisticated enough.
Basically the user is performing triage.
Even though a lot of messages do get terse replies, the "compose" screen
at least gives the user a chance to shift gears and focus on the message
he's composing. That's why I think that the selection of reply
recipients needs to be part of the compose environment. To be
effective the compose environment needs to make it easy to reference,
quote, and or incorporate portions of the subject message - and this
includes making it easy to reference, quote, and/or incorporate portions
of the recipient list from the subject message into the recipient list
of the reply.
OK, that's a fair point. The user just hits the one and only reply button,
which brings up a compose window and hides all the hurly burly of the
remaining 99 messages in his Inbox. Now the Compose window says:
"would you like to reply just to the original author,
or to the list,
or to what the original author/list-maintainer suggested,
or to everybodt mentioned,
or fill it all in by hand".
Well that looks like 5 buttons, but we can probably manage with less (or
you can configure it with extra buttons to your choice). But, in any case,
we have removed the clutter of the Inbox, so there is less problem with
having several options in view (and they don't have to be buttons - other
interesting ways have been mentioned in these threads).
Note that a similar problem exists for reply body text. We find it
quite useful for an MUA to be able to include the subject message text
in a reply, but quite tedious to edit out the irrelevant portions.
Sure, so then the Compose window might say:
"Would you like the original message included as a quotation,
and with what delimiter (e.g. '>'),
and would you like it reformatted".
and so on.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl(_at_)clerew(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave,
CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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