So, tables have headers, and those headers are often clickable; click on the "Subject" column header in Thunderbird, and suddenly your mail is sorted by subject... Same for date, sender, etc. This is a common UI element.
Anyone else find themselves going to click on their most recently received message, missing just a little, and staring at all the mail you ever got that had no Subject: header?
Anyone else find themselves going to click on their most recently received message, missing just a little, and staring at all the mail you ever got that had no Subject: header?
Comments
It does annoy me that it's so easy to resort mail. I hardly ever want to sort mail by anything other than date, and when I do I don't ever want it to persist.
But it's easy in Eudora to see what I'm sorted by and resort. So it doesn't actually bother me.
However, I do find that particular UI "feature" rather annoying.
Actually, I don't much like that UI element, which I do see in various places. I would much rather have the header labels affect the processing in some way.
The real problem is that these tables don't have the same UI elements as spreadsheets, despite being the same thing.
Worse, I usually react by clicking the header again, as if it were a toggle-switch... which causes it to resort-descending. Which is equally bewildering.
If there is a use-case for the feature as it is, then... it's time to get more creative. Like you said, clicking the header again sometimes feels as if it should be a toggle switch, go back to where I just came from. But that's not going to cut it either. Maybe the scrolling shouldn't be the whole header, but a region at the far right of the header. I'm imagining a little darker grey up/down triangle (diamond-shaped pattern) where you would click. Clicks on the rest of the header would be ignored.
On the other hand, this is unexpected behavior for the people who have used these anywhere else in the universe.
Hmm.
But if I really had to design it I would put a contextual menu on the column header, with all the things I could think of that you'd want to do to a column (sort, filter, export-unique-list, collapse/expand tree, etc) as well as a "Set default..." option that let me choose which of those actions happened when I clicked the column (including nothing at all).
And then I re-sort by subject, scroll until I see a highlight, and then add any replies of mine with a control-click. Then I move the whole wad into the client-specific folder.
(Using Thunderbird, BTW)