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@devmount Any specific questions or considerations you either have in mind or you think are worth asking in this Discussion would be great itemized here, as primers in terms of how you'd like us to go about helping you narrow down the plan, build confidence and decide |
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Thank you for this suggestion @koobs! I added some questions to the Your Feedback section as starting point. Basically I need a plan to be able to add as many charts / filters as I want without making the UI confusing or revamping everything. Any constructive feedback on this helps. |
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SummaryI think this feature/discussion is a good opportunity (and time) to review the fundamentals, really think, and distill some concepts, to lay "intentional" and "designed" ground work for the future of third-stats. It's challenging at the best of times to 'add features and possible complexity' without making things harder for users, or losing value for some significant subset of users. And I think this is a big one of those. Note: If on the other hand, you'd like to, for whatever or no reason, approach this in the reverse, as in: whats the best or simplest way to add 'extendability' to third-stats as soon as possible given only what currently exists, then let us all know so we can orient ourselves and our responses in that way. With that in mind, and per some of the questions, thoughts and feelings below (in answer to your questions), and given we'd like this (I assume) to be a collaborative process, I think the most important thing is that we frame or sketch a 'process' for this. This is important to:
I don't necessarily know or want to dictate what that process might look like, either in terms of how you like or want this to work or what will work for others, but I'll try to elucidate some of my thoughts here, on that 'process':
How satisfied are you with the current UI? What bothers you the most?
Lack of 'common' or 'standard' data visualization mechanics, dimensions and language shared among visualizations. Mechanics are specific to and designed for each visualization.At the moment there's three implicit primary dimensions exposed, time, counts and 'people'. We see the use of "time" labels (weeks, quarters, years, and mail: sent and from (people) As more metrics and/or dimensions are exposed, providing common mechanics will become increasingly important as it forms the foundation of, and "grounds" the affordances / controls that will or can be exposed to users.
There's only so many ways to slice and dice particular data sets. Knowing/understanding one, should enable familiarity using others.
For example: We want to add a 3D visualization. This would/could only apply to data sets with 3 (relevent) dimensions. What about if there's 4? which dimensions are best or selected? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_and_information_visualization Terminology selection and consistency.I'm a third-stats user from the start. I still don't always feel entirely comfortable when I'm looking at stats.
Many examples:
Whats the minimal set of terms possible? A common and consistent language/dictionary of terms will improve usability and understanding, and complement visualization mechanics and dimension-specific functionality mentioned above. "Relatively" low value insights / utility overall.Eg: No ability to 'drill down' into 'first-level' stats, or 'do' anything else other than view top-level stats. See Also: #279 Would a tab navigation of different stats categories be an improvement or more of a hindrance for you when browsing the stats?This assumes categories and a specific implementation (tabs) without specifying a problem. waves orange/red flag :)
Thoughts
This leads to:
Thoughts/feelings:
How often do you use the filter (folder, date range, contact)? Would you prefer having it always visible or only showing it when needed?Hardly ever. The benefit is low and use is finicky.
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@koobs Thank you so much for taking the time for such a detailed and helpful answer! And also for supporting this project right from the start! Give me some time to process your reply, for some of your points I would like to create separate issues / discussion threads. |
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My pleasure take your time :) |
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Thanks again @koobs for your thoughts. I've written on this reply over the last months when I had some time in between, so sorry in advance if some things don't stick together 😇 Process and FrameYes, I would love this to be a collaborative process which is why I started this thread in the first place. On the other hand I'm literally the only maintainer / code contributor / designer in this project atm and my time is limited. So implementing greater features or revamping the UI either takes a huge amount of time (months, years?) or we just take what currently exists and develop an extendability concept that wouldn't take too much effort (e.g. my proposals above). What do we want from a future ThirdStats?For me: ThirdStats is a dashboard that gives insights about the messages I'm holding in my mail accounts and therefore insights about my behavior with messages. I'm interested in how many messages I send/receive, when I send/receive messages, from whom I receive or send messages to, how my messages are organized (folders, tags, starred), how big messages are (memory, char/word/sentence count?) and how many messages aren't useful (junk, trash). I'd like to discover information I wasn't aware of and change my behaviour about it e.g. to save time. A future ThirdStats should visualize those information organized in sections with corresponding numbers and charts. I should be able to customize this dashboard (as you already suggested in #279) to hide sections I don't need and highlight/feature section I need most. Roadmap: What are ideas/features/things we want ThirdStats to do/support/have going forward?
What are the primary data types and dimensions?Dimensions:
Entities:
Entities can be given any dimension. Did I forget anything? Missed opportunity to use more common/familiar/canonical mail terms
I always tried to adapt to the terms Thunderbird itself is using, but it's very likely I failed that a lot, also ince I'm no native speaker. In other words: I need support on this and created #390 for anyone to contribute. Whats the problem, tab navigation tries to solve?The problem is keeping ThirdStats simple an clear while adding charts. Users should be able to know at first glance, what charts/numbers they're looking at. Having all charts of all dimensions for all entities on one page (as it currently is) can be a mess.
This is almost always opinionated. So if users can define the order and visibility of all charts (#279), this should be fine.
That is the interesting question indeed. The most obvious categorization would be by dimension or by entity. Both works, but categorizing by entity would make more sense, since it's already established in Thunderbird itself (see spaces toolbar).
The problem is structuring the content in a way that is easy to understand and navigate for the user. The only alternative I can think of is keeping it single page and define sections e.g. with anchors to jump to.
Provide beautifully visualized statistics about emails in Thunderbird.
Lack of insights about the users email behaviour.
FilterThank you for your honest response to this. I think it's good to have the filter for people that want to specify the stats, but I know it needs some reworking to be a lot more usable. |
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Maybe display a few charts on the main-page and a link in the corner of every chart to see other charts related to this chart. |
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Thank you for this suggestions. Which charts would you show on the main page? Where should the links lead to? Other dedicated pages? Which pages would that be? I like the idea of having a kind of dashboard for all kinds of charts and dedicated pages / tabs for chart categories. |
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Storage size missing is quite a surprise when getting stats. Thanks for everything else, just missing total size of mailbox, at the minimum. |
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Agreed. In general it's a matter of existence of a corresponding web extension API. At the time of the creation of this add-on, it was not possible to gather storage size data (without using experimental or legacy features). Now we have a |
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@devmount Any update on this by chance? I too agree with @MagicFab 's comment. The UI looks great as is 👍 and debating between these 3 mockups seems like splitting hairs (FWIW, my vote is for mockup 1 but maybe compressed vertically to remove some of the dead space between various filters and the new proposed tabs). The key thing missing are statistics on sizes of (groups of) messages- this was one of my original motivations for installing this Add-On 🙂 I'd love to see this Add-On become an analogue of tools like "Grand Perspective" which had some wonderful treemap visualizations to quickly identify large space consumers on the file system. PS: A more "modern" visualization is offered by MacOS App Store "Disk Space Analyzer" which uses a circular donut-like chart but I feel the original treemap visualization is easier to navigate although a donut chart intuitively can be used to also convey % usage (either visualization would be welcome additions to ThirdStats 🙂): My 2¢ & thanks for creating this! |
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ThirdStats started as a simple one-pager containing 6 charts. Since then, ThirdStats evolved to a much more complex analysis tool taking many different metrics into account and providing account comparison, filtering and more. To prevent the current ThirdStats UI of the stats page to become more and more confusing, there needs to be a UI concept that allows the addition of more chart, chart sections and filter fields while maintaining clarity and intuitive handling.
In the following are some proposals to address the above mentioned issues.
1. Stats Categories
The stats page can be divided into different groups. This way, the page won't get overloaded and the different charts are better organized. Here is a draft of a possible tab menu:
The tabs indicate the currently active subpage, adapting the concept and style of the Thunderbird tabs and colors. Also this tab menu should be sticky when scrolling down.
2. Filter menu
There is currently the account selection with refresh button, 3 filter fields (folder, date range, contact) and 2 icon buttons (export, options). Filter fields and icon buttons can be moved into a drawer, which slides in e.g. from the right when clicking a menu icon in the upper right. Here is a draft of a possible drawer:
There should be an option to pin the drawer for filter power users. Also there should be an indication if one or more filters are active and the drawer is closed.
3. Compress Page Header
Applying the changes described above gives the possibility to compress the page header to a smaller height, giving more space for the actual content. Here is a draft for a possible change:
Your Feedback
These changes would allow to be much more flexible in adding charts, filter fields or other elements.
I would love to hear your thoughts about ThirdStats UI in general as well as about the above mentioned proposals. Let's discuss, how we can make ThirdStats look and feel even better together. Feel free to use the following questions as starting point:
Context
We already have some great discussions about UI elements, which I want to mention in this context as well to keep them in mind:
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