GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 740745
add labels to buttons
Last modified: 2017-10-17 04:51:53 UTC
Currently, geary has labels for "Archive" and "Trash" in the main window. But it does not have any label for "new message", "Reply", "Reply to all", "Forward". For computer illiterates (I am thinking at my parents), this is an issue because they will not easily find this functionnality.
I just checked that the mailer on OSX *has* labels for all buttons which gives a better usuability.
Posting my thoughts after someone mentioned this bug in #geary: To be honest, I'd even argue we should remove the label altogether, as it's inconsistent with the other buttons. I think adding labels just gives us more clutter (and a huge headerbar).
Generally, the advice is: * Use an icon if the icon is commonly recognised * If the icon isn't commonly recognised, use a label * Don't use an icon and a label at the same time That is just a general rule of course! Whether you use tooltips is a factor. Likewise, it can be hard to create good layouts that mix icon buttons and buttons with labels. Reply, reply all and forward are exposed as labels as well as the icons, in the message menus. Likewise, lots of labeled buttons aren't going to be particularly helpful, since it gives your less experienced/confident users a lot of competing visual noise to sort through. Generally, reply is the action you want to emphasise rather than making reply all/forward more prominent. A better way to make the UI obvious to less experienced/confident users would be to add an inline compose box at the bottom of each thread, like Gmail does.
Resolving this as a duplicate of Bug 789078 it is part of that broader design work. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 789078 ***