635881 - Setting up a signature is hard to discover

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

One thing we discovered during the Thunderbird UI testing in London [1] was that discovering how to set up a signature was hard.
Because of this, most of the participants did not succeed in setting up a signature.

1. http://design.canonical.com/2011/02/thunderbird-in-the-usability-lab/

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

> "The majority of participants expected to be able to create a signature under
> ‘composition’. When that failed, they looked under tools, add-ons, preferences,
> insert and write."

So, Tools > Account Settings isn't intuitive enough, right above "Options"?
Once they are there, the textbox for the signature is right in the main tab per account. It's getting tricky if you want to set up a more complex signature, that's covered by bug 488469.

Comment 2

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

I am guessing that most people think of "account settings" as handling your access to email, not handling composition. An underlying result from that study seems to be that the powerful features of identities are poorly understood by new users.

In that case, it would probably make sense to have the composition tab of preferences at least link to the default identity settings, if not actually allowing you to edit them there.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Ok, guess I'm too much aware what account settings imply to see the issue. ;-)

The "Manage Identities" sub-dialog is fairly self-contained and covers other composition-related items like composition mode and reply-quote position for identities. To expand on Joshua's suggestion, I could imagine having a button
in the Composition preferences, opening a "Manage Identities" like window to
pick the identity for which the settings are to be modified without having to
go through the actual account manager pages.