Make a completely minimal "focus" interface theme about mailpile HOT 7 CLOSED

Like this?

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@aaronpk haha, yah- that most certainly fits the bill for "much like the google home page" nicely done ;)
Curious how usable / realistic of an interface this is? Do you think there is a large audience of people who would use something like this- would you?

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I think even that is too many buttons (what happens when you've typed stuff in the box and then click New Email?) but I think it could be pretty interesting. The simplicity of Google's interface resulted in basically every browser gaining some kind of single text input that let them immediately search the web. It would be kind of great if I could switch my Firefox search box over to my Mailpile instance easily and start searching.

It would probably need to support some range of in-band search options like gmail does, from:, to: etc but I could definitely use this if it was also set up to integrate into other programs.

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@public @aaron interesting... so there IS a desire for a drastic simplification of our inbox, cool! I'm definitely going to explore designing a theme like this- it probably won't be the default theme (at first), but do find the idea very exciting!

There are lots of directions this can go. I'm not sure I want to go on anti-button crusade, but it would no doubt yield something interesting! Also, I wonder about making various aspects (from: to: date:) into more concrete graphical elements- as while I'd like to think we can easily implement Google quality NLP on the search input that might be a bit of challenge, otherwise we're left with req. techie syntax that doesn't work for everyone!

Thanks guys for the input :)

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Certainly, the existing wireframes on the mailpile.is site contain some things that - not to put too fine a point on it - aren't "core" to the use of email. What problem, for example, is solved by showing how many emails you have, or how many you've unread, for that matter? Why have pagination? Why run the user's name in a large banner across the top? I would think it would be a very good idea to strip things back to the point where everything has at least a few good reasons for being there.

In terms of the "anatomy" of the UI, it would be interesting to run some research into how people use webmail systems like this. There are a number of quite significant assumptions being made in Gmail's UI for example, and I often wonder where they came from (eg tags, a separate address book, etc.)

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@gilgongo the UI has evolved and changed a bit from the comps on the homepage- not too drastic, but definitely some improvements as per things you highlight! If you're command line savvy, you'll have to check our alpha end of this week ;)

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@brennannovak OK I'll have a look when that comes out (I've got a Debian VM I can try installing it on).

I think that if you're to re-imagine (or just plain redesign) something as important as a webmail UI, then you will need to take a step back and formulate some high-level UX design principles for it first. I can't immediately see these anywhere on the site beyond some general statements about privacy and stuff. Without them (and particularly as this is a FOSS project) you'll be swamped with "good ideas" that you have no real way of evaluating. At least, this is what might be happening now on these forums. I'd say that Features are neutral until you execute them. By all means consider them, but you can have bad features well executed, as well as vice versa.

So here's an example of what I mean by a UX design principle by which lower-level features can be judged (BTW this is JUST AN EXAMPLE - I'm not trying to say it's right or anything):

"Email is about contacting, and being contacted by, people (or things). Prioritise the status of communication over what you can do with individual messages themselves."

So, when you think about the ability to tag outgoing mail, or having "context aware" notifications, etc. you can also think about whether those things help or hinder the above high-level design goal. Perhaps it would be better to spend time on refining the UI that helps you understand whether you have had a reply from somebody instead?

Again, the above is just an example for illustration, not intended to imply what should be done.

In general, I think it would be a shame to see Mailpile's UI become like LibreOffice, which tries to mimic everything that other suites do without attempting to think about why any of those features are there, or without trying first to imagine usage scenarios that actually need to be addressed. The Gmail team went in with some reasonably solid UX principles first (you only need a handful really) which they seem to have mostly stuck to, and it's done did them pretty well I think. They could have just created a web-based version of Outlook and got a lot of (cheap) take-up from that approach, but they didn't.

Forgive me if you have indeed thought about such principles, of course! But if you haven't, what would you say you were aiming at? You need to be very wary of listing "features" as a proxy for user experience because they are two completely different things.

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