# Thunderbird Email Client - User Survey



## kjsweeney (Dec 30, 2021)

I am currently studying User Centered Design at RMIT university and apart of the course, I've got to do a user centered survey for a product. The product I have chosen for the survey is the Thunderbird email client.
Would anyone who uses Thunderbird email client and would not mind filling out a user survey, please follow this link. Any participation from the FreeBSD community would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you
Kevin Sweeney


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## digifuzzy (Jan 8, 2022)

Participant Information about the survey is a url to some document behind a login (url given at top of survey form) and is inaccessible.


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## Geezer (Jan 9, 2022)

Done the survey, hope it helps.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jan 9, 2022)

digifuzzy said:


> Participant Information about the survey



The phrase is _participant information_ (not about the survey). 

I assume that it's proper for the public to *not* have unrestricted access to information about participants.


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## digifuzzy (Jan 10, 2022)

However,...
"Take this survey blindly" does not sit well with me. What is the purpose of the study. Who's leading this charge? Why is information being collected? Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. I would feel more comfortable with some modicum of details rather than a newly created account showing up in the feeds saying "do this". <insert small hint of institutional paranoia here />


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## kjsweeney (Jan 11, 2022)

digifuzzy said:


> Participant Information about the survey is a url to some document behind a login (url given at top of survey form) and is inaccessible.


Sorry about the PIF document not being available. I have added secondary download link.

Thank you


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## kjsweeney (Jan 11, 2022)

digifuzzy said:


> However,...
> "Take this survey blindly" does not sit well with me. What is the purpose of the study. Who's leading this charge? Why is information being collected? Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. I would feel more comfortable with some modicum of details rather than a newly created account showing up in the feeds saying "do this". <insert small hint of institutional paranoia here />


It is a apart of my studies in user centered design. As part of the course, we had to choose a product and conduct a usage survey on it. It is to get us used to user surveys and create a report from said survey. Are discouraged to capture personal identifying information and it is not the purpose of this survey.
I hope it answers your questions.

Thank you


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## grahamperrin@ (Jan 13, 2022)

It's always great to have people actively expressing an interest in user-centred design. 

kjsweeney I had a couple of additional thoughts during, and immediately after, the survey. 

(I confess to rushing through the survey, which is not necessarily a bad thing; too long a survey will simply not get a response.)

Would you like those additional thoughts (a) here, (b) in private i.e. e-mail, or (c) not at all? 

(Given the context of your studies: I'll not take offence at (c).)


Thanks for clarifying and making available the PIF. The acronym was new to me.

Pleasing end users might feel _unreasonably_ difficult, sometimes (it's easier for users to criticise than be creative). Stick with it.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jan 15, 2022)

In my survey response, I was vague about a very frequent problem. Now I realise, there's an accessibility bug, which forms part of this topic in Mozilla Discourse:









						Accessibility: keyboard navigation to the list of messages
					

With Thunderbird in vertical view, and the message pane visible:   after I click (or select something) in the body of an e-mail, it’s unreasonably difficult to reach the list of messages with the keyboard alone.  I can either:   Tab Tab Tab Tab Tab Tab Tab  – or:   F8  Shift-Tab   – which is...




					discourse.mozilla.org
				




kjsweeney sorry for being nondescript in my survey response. If I had side-tracked to properly describe what's wrong, I might never have got back on track to complete the survey.

(I know, it's possible to pause then resume survey responses, but I always prefer to complete things in one go.)


Other readers: if you have thoughts on the problem, please join me in Mozilla Discourse (not here). Thanks.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jan 22, 2022)

One thing *really* annoys me with Thunderbird – and with *archaic use of plain text for FreeBSD lists*.

I take care to add *extra* lines, whilst drafting, to avoid *loss* of white space between paragraphs.

I use the _Options_ menu to specify plain text, before sending.

End result, today: loss of space between paragraphs; three paragraphs pretty much mashed into each other.

This is partly why I so *rarely bother to use the mailing lists*.

It's often an ugly reading experience; it's doubly frustrating when I take time to attempt to prevent ugliness and the time is wasted


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