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Does anyone at Thunderbird want to hear suggestions or complaints?

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by Wayne Mery

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I've been using the newly redesigned Thunderbird and have a number of problems with it. Chief among them is the lack of apparent involvement by human factors experts when it comes to the design of the windows seen by the user of the tool and to the communication to customers about changes. Your programmers seem to have made the mistake that my programmers used to make back when I had a lot of them reporting to me - they do things that seem fine to young people but are not fine for older people. For example, when I am sending a new email it is very hard to read some of the commands and options because the text appear to be light grey instead of DARK BLACK against a white background (perhaps it is just that it is not bold when it ought to be), and the fonts are often quite small. This may seem fine to the 20-year-olds who are developing this software, but it is a real problem for the 76-year-olds like myself who try to use it. It took me several days of hard work to finally see how to add a "cc" to an email under your new system.

To complicate matters, the changes were introduced with no notice and no information about how to do relatively simple things (such as including a cc in an email!). And when I searched your web site for help I could find no place to make suggestions for improvement or to point out problems, only places where I could ask questions and hope the automated help system would come up with something that matched my problem.

So, to repeat, is there any way to communicate suggestions for improvement to those responsible for Thunderbird?

I've been using the newly redesigned Thunderbird and have a number of problems with it. Chief among them is the lack of apparent involvement by human factors experts when it comes to the design of the windows seen by the user of the tool and to the communication to customers about changes. Your programmers seem to have made the mistake that my programmers used to make back when I had a lot of them reporting to me - they do things that seem fine to young people but are not fine for older people. For example, when I am sending a new email it is very hard to read some of the commands and options because the text appear to be light grey instead of DARK BLACK against a white background (perhaps it is just that it is not bold when it ought to be), and the fonts are often quite small. This may seem fine to the 20-year-olds who are developing this software, but it is a real problem for the 76-year-olds like myself who try to use it. It took me several days of hard work to finally see how to add a "cc" to an email under your new system. To complicate matters, the changes were introduced with no notice and no information about how to do relatively simple things (such as including a cc in an email!). And when I searched your web site for help I could find no place to make suggestions for improvement or to point out problems, only places where I could ask questions and hope the automated help system would come up with something that matched my problem. So, to repeat, is there any way to communicate suggestions for improvement to those responsible for Thunderbird?

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Regarding CC and addressing see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/new-thunderbird-78#w_new-addressing-area

The contrast / theme area you mention is a very big change and improvement in Thunderbird, but it is still evolving (programmers aren't trying to make things worse). Every update has theme fixes, including 78.4.0.

If you post a screen shot we could better understand your issue.