One of the cool things I like about the upcoming Thunderbird 3.0 is that it’s now really easy to find the phone number to that dude your friend e-mailed you a month ago, or to track down who it was that arranged the Christmas concert your choir attended three years ago. This is thanks to the new search function, called Gloda. I got the opportunity to help out with the design of the UI stuff for this, so I wanted to highlight some parts of the design process.
The filters
The early versions of Gloda put a lot of emphasis on the filters that further let you drill down your results. Actually, it had so much emphasis on them that the poor search results got put away at the bottom of the screen. It was a bit tricky finding them there, witch is unfortunate for a search interface.
The solution was a sidebar that clearly put apart filters and results and we were able to cut down the amount of text used by turning some of the true/false switches into the more human-readable (and space saving) check-boxes. We also merged all the to:s and from:s to just People among other things.
The style for the button widgets in the sidebar was a hard decision to make. While they are clearly different in style from the other buttons used in Thunderbird (and on the rest of the desktop), they also have less of a tendency to take attention away from the more important search results, and in this case, that’s a good thing.
The search box
To begin with, the gloda search box was a separate box from the old filtering box. We thought about dealing with this putting the filter box just above the message header pane, but because this would result in showing fewer headers we settled on a approach where we merged the two search fields into one and in the end. Thinking about it some more, it really makes sense, since it’s just about finding things, regardless how things work under the hood.
Timeline
The timeline allows you to see where in time your messages live and hovering a filter in the sidebar highlight where in time that filter applies. We initially discussed showing this in the sidebar, but due to the horizontal space constrains there, we decided to put it in the search results pane. The timeline is hidden by default so it won’t get in the way of the search results.
Looking ahead
There is still lots of improvements that can be made and it would be great to hear how the new search works for you, your friends and relatives.
Get Beta4 or grab the upcoming RC1 when it comes out and try it out!
what terribly annoys me about that otherwise great interface is that, at least in beta4 and unless i’m missing something, the interface returns the list of matching messages but
1. shows the beginning of the messages and not necessarily the part of the messages where the match was. it should rather show the relevant part.
2. doesn’t highlight the match in the brief contents of matching messages. What matched in the messages should be bolded, or highlighted with a yellow background, right now it’s hard to spot the matching parts
But in any case it’s a huge progress from thunderbird2 where when you searched message contents it would also match message headers and it would not convert message contents from base64.
so i’ll be very happy to upgrade to tb3 also at work, the moment rc1 is out.
also tb3 can finally copy-paste pictures also in linux, a great improvement.
@emmanuel: yes, both of those are natural improvements that we want to do but didn’t manage to squeeze in the 3.0 release. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=518597 if you want to track it.