551164 - Indexing and other new features turned on by default during installation

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 545563

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[rbhall52]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8
Build Identifier: 3.03

When installing the newest version of Thunderbird, the new mail indexing feature, as well as the new toolbar, are turned on by default. It is not obvious where to turn them off or keep the original way of doing things if you do not want to use these features. You should make new features like these optional upon installation, and tell the user where to turn the feature on if they want to use it. You should also have a message that makes it more obvious as to what the new feature means and does so that the user knows the change they are about to make to the program when they choose to use the new feature.

I am pretty familiar with installing updates to firefox and thunderbird, and I missed the option about using the new toolbar or not using it when I installed the thunderbird update on the first computer at home. Then I realized what I really wanted and did the second installation correctly. If I can miss it, probably quite a few other people missed it, too.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install the program upgrade
2.Don't pay a lot of attention to the new options/features available
3.Get new features that you did not count on and are not sure how to change back to the original way of doing things
Actual Results:  
I got two new features that I did not want with the upgraded program

Expected Results:  
Explained in detailed description above

Comment 1

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

I think by "installation", you mean "upgrade" -- is this correct?

Bug 545221 may be interesting for you (and this would appear to be a partial dup of it).

(In reply to comment #0)
> You should also have a message that makes it more obvious
> as to what the new feature means and does so that the user knows the change
> they are about to make to the program when they choose to use the new feature.

Any ideas on how to make this better? In particular, how do you ensure that people are informed of changes without being annoyed by them -- and how do you ensure that they have a fair chance to consider whether to use them or not? A wizard might work, conceivably, but would be quite annoying for an experienced user -- although hopefully there aren't too many people upgrading multiple times from 2.x to 3.x. Also, it seems like a wizard might be a bit offputting and worrisome.

I would recommend you discuss this on the newsgroup (mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird on news.mozilla.org) to explore the design before coming back to this; Bugzilla is not really the place for design-tradeoff discussions, especially ones that involve hard usability issues.

Comment 2

[rbhall52]

Yes, when I said "installation", I meant "upgrade".

Yes, the bug report you mention does say pretty much what I was thinking about the "smart folders".

I guess I need to shift this discussion to the newsgroup you mention. I am just not familiar with that newsgroup. I will tell you my thoughts here, and then copy them to the newsgroup.

I guess my major point was not really that I had to understand that much about the new indexing, toolbar, and smart folder features. The point I was making was that the new features were turned on by default, which signficantly changes both the main interface and the way it works when dealing with messages.

I really did not like have to wait while messages were being indexed. I was not really sure what was happening until I read up on it. I turned off that feature and do not plan to use it any time soon(I don't do a lot a searches).

I did not want to mention this, because I consider it an insult to you to say it, and I am not trying to insult you, but this is very similar to how Microsoft does it with their products like Office when they do a new version. They think they always know what is best and everyone suddenly has to change the way they do things when they were already familiar with the previous version of the program that has now been released as a new version.

If you intend to add a new feature that changes the interface or the way the program works in a significant way, you should have it as an option for the user when the upgrade to the new version is done. That way, the user will still have the familiar interface and things still work the way they did before, which is familiar to the user. If the user wants to try the new feature, they can be told how to "turn it on" and they can read up on the differences between the new feature and the way things used to work.

When I upgraded Thunderbird, I don't remember being shown how to "turn off" the new features. I had to search the knowledge base to find out how to do it. The user should be able to find the information fairly easily, which means letting them know up front how to do it.

Thus, when you do the upgrade, the new features are mentioned, with either an explanation or a link to a webpage showing that explanation. Meanwhile, the new features are ready to be "turned on" when the user is ready to try them after reading about them.

Comment 4

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Cleanup *dupeme* whiteboard flag from bugs that are marked as Resolved
Duplicate!