1771761 - `New Contact` and `New List` disappeared from address book context menu on Contacts Side Bar

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect, P1)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot 1: New Contact and New List missing from AB context menu in TB 102

New Contact and New List disappeared from address book context menu on Contacts Side Bar

... which is a pretty bad usability regression. Essentially, it means you can no longer create a full contact (or list) on the fly whilst in composition, but you'll be forced to fire up your entire Address Book for that purpose. Which is very inconvenient, because otherwise Contacts Side Bar makes for a perfect miniature version of the AB.

Thanks to Richard (:paenglab) for alerting us to this issue.
I'm not sure if the old strings are still around, so this may require new strings.

Implementation caveat

Fixing this regression requires showing the new Edit contact form somehow in the composition window. Imo, just having a big popup which would be populated with the edit form would make for a good UX, similar to the TB 91 UX. The advantage is that we won't completely hide the composition context in the background, which would be a bit confusing.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

There isn't really such a thing as the new contact dialog anymore, so you'd still go through the address book tab.

Comment 3

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

How we decide to handle this mostly comes down to a UX decision.

As Magnus pointed out, we don't use dialogs anymore for the new address book but everything is handled with inline subdialogs (better for a million reasons), so "simply" triggering a creation dialog is not possible.

We could, obviously, find a way to call those subdialogs and allow creating lists and such during composition, but the real question here is:
"Do we want to do that?"

IMHO, we have a fundamental workflow problem in Thunderbird, which is will of allowing entry points to features everywhere, regardless of convenience or real necessity.

• Does it make sense managing lists and contacts while composing?
  The composition experience should be about composition, not about managing address books. Moreover, offering a "miniaturized version of the address book in the compose window" it's very much over engineering and over complicating things.
  If users need to handle contacts, they should do it from the Address book.

Enabling all the features of the address book across various areas of the application gives the expectation that you can do everything from everywhere, and I really doubt this is a good idea.

Now, before we start a neverending discussion on this bug with feedback like "but it's convenient, it's ux-efficency, I use it all the time, it's powerful for enterprise, etc", let's take a step back and properly think about what kind of workflow and UX we want to offer moving forward and keep it consistent.
I'm gonna organize some thoughts and evaluate pros and cons, and write something on tb-planning so we can discuss it in the mailing list.

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I'd also lean towards wontfix.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #4)

I'd also lean towards wontfix.

Maybe. But then, that's really not a great neutral starting point for a discussion.

Comment 6

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I'm gonna follow the decision made on bug 1771795comment6 and close this as WONTFIX.