Ok, I propose the following.
First, who is going to submit a search at the same time as they’re moving some individual items to arbitrary folders and a group of others to yet another place? Allowing that sort of multiple action just forces the user to consider every single control on the page (all belonging to several distinct actions) for every single action he takes. Awful. The whole thing needs to be broken out into several independent forms.
Folders need to be listed as clickable links on the left-hand side, with the count of messages in the respective folder included on the label. The currently selected folder should be highlighted and not linked.
The search stuff needs to be a completely separate from. Preferrably should go at the bottom, I think. Default the folder to “(all)”, since that’s what most people are probably likely to want when they do a search. Instead of the [From | To | From/To] dropdown, put two checkboxes. Comboboxes are the least usable UI control by far; avoid whenever possible.
Update: search in deleted messages only when the user explicitly asks for that.
When showing search results from all folders, no folder should be selected; or maybe show a virtual “Search Results” folder. In that view, put the search controls at the top so they’re easier to reach when the user inevitably goes to refine his/her search.
Untangle the message input box from the target selection. The current setup is
Send to: * User: [_____] Nobody Reply text: * [________________] Reply to: * Foo says Blah * Bar says Blah
Instead it should be
Message: [________________] Send to: * Nobody * User: [_____] Reply to: * Foo says Blah * Bar says Blah
A nice touch for those with JS enabled would be to auto-select the “User” checkbox when the attached entry gets changed to something non-empty. Actually now that I look at the new arrangement I wonder why there needs to be a “Nobody” option at all; sending to a blank username would accomplish the same.
Move/delete:
Put the controls on the right side in the replies table, lined up with the checkboxes.
Lose the Folder dropdown box for individual messages, since it adds a huge amount of visual clutter and only benefits the people who have a significant number of folders and frequently file many different messages into many different of these folders at once. I can’t imagine that being such a large fraction of the userbase that it’s worth degrading the page’s skimmability for everyone else.
Update: the only other case where these dropdowns matter is when doing a search that picks up results from multiple folders. So group search results by folder.
To preserve the “apply actions to the results of a search” functionality, you can add the search parameters as hidden fields to the reply form.
Update: lose the “(deleted)” vs. “(trash-bag)” distinction. Just show how much time messages have left till irreversible deletion.
Makeshifts last the longest.
In reply to Re^3: Searchable Inbox
by Aristotle
in thread Searchable Inbox
by demerphq
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