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Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#21
post #10

> A few weeks ago, we conducted hour-long conversations with 10 of our users to dig deep into how you manage your preferences and configurations in Thunderbird desktop Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

> Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

For very narrow studies it is possible to get representative data with fewer than a dozen interviews, but in this case it is explicitly not representative. In the video they mention that most of the participants have used Thunderbird for over a decade and follow release notes, development, and various forums closely, which to me suggests that they were recruited opportunistically rather than a random statistical sampling.

They do mention that they have plans to engage a larger audience in the future but that can be incredibly expensive. Even large organizations typically have to augment a small number of representative interviews with a large number of surveys and a very large set of user telemetry to properly weight interview feedback.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, even just going through your software with one user can give quite a few insights about what's not obvious about it. That's not at all to say you never need more, but very few open source projects do user research in the first place, being passion projects that just scratch the developer's/s' itch. More samples is always better, definitely at n=10, but I'd also not dismiss the results and benefits of doing it!

If the crowd is diverse enough. Was it? The article doesn't reveal.

The video goes into slightly more depth, and at about 1:30 into the video they acknowledge that the participants were not representative and that they would like to conduct further research.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#24

From user feedback, I wonder if they've learned how to prevent Thunderbird from creating an empty "thunderbird" folder in my home directory yet.

Is this is the snap version of tb? If so it has restricted file access.

Maybe try the .deb version? (maybe need to back up your data in ~/snap/thunderbird/

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#25
post #10

> A few weeks ago, we conducted hour-long conversations with 10 of our users to dig deep into how you manage your preferences and configurations in Thunderbird desktop Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

It's a standard research technique. You can have 2,000 people answer an automated survey but you can't have hour-long conversations with them. Researchers in many fields would like a better solution for in-depth interviews.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#26
please make the oauth flow catchy and easy to debug, like straight up suggesting that an unreachable imap server is because the port is blocked or catching the the custom domainis just outlook and updating the flow accordingly. Make it nice for enterprises, so users can push for enterprise use, too :)

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#27
related - recently I learned Microsoft doesn't provide any way to download all your emails from outlook.com in one way to back them up, so Thunderbird was the tool I used to create backup

still can't comprehend how is this legal in EU, Google at least provide takeout

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#28

TB has big UX problems not mentioned: Search works poorly (Misses too many results to be useful), messages you typed have weird paragraph spacings, and reading multi-message threads is a mess.

Which UX problems? When I read

> Thunderbird’s robust functionality is its superpower, but a dated interface shouldn’t be a barrier to entry for newer users.

I started preparing for the worst.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#29

From user feedback, I wonder if they've learned how to prevent Thunderbird from creating an empty "thunderbird" folder in my home directory yet.

If only there was a way to edit the source code, and recompile it yourself.

Oh well, no software is perfect.

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