Mailing Lists Usability
Hello listers, I thought I was the only one but today I met someone who also suffers from the User Interface of mailing lists. The content on KICTANet is rich and it helps build ICT perspectives on a day to day basis. However, the readability of messages is usually a pain especially when the thread gets busy. This is not limited to KICTANet though. Most mailing lists lack intuitive usability. Seeing there are a good number of us here in design, web development and usability, it would be interesting to know if there are better options out there that this community can benefit from. If not, what about organizing (not necessarily through KICTANet) of a design hackathon to improve this. Moses. --- Moses Karanja | @Mose_Karanja <https://twitter.com/Mose_Karanja> | PGP: 0x1529552F <https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=index&fingerprint=on&search=0x1529552F>
Moses, Mailing lists are not loved for their UI, I doubt there is much innovation left there. UI and UX is left for apps, websites and forums where developers work every day to get things looking more swanky and ease of use going up. We at Techweez sometime back started a forum <http://forums.techweez.com/> that nears the function of a mailing list in that outside of you getting informed of new topics and replies by visiting the forum, you can also choose notification frequency, follow specific topics (and get notified only when there is contribution in those topics), reply via email and start topics via email (we are yet to enable these two). Work in progress is a very light app that will enable one follow all these via push notifications, so you will be alerted that there is posts you need to follow and go to the browser to respond. Beauty of this is you have all these options, choose your pick, we also have desktop notifications, so you just leave one tab open and conversation never leaves you. Regards, Martin Gicheru Editor at Techweez On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:38 PM, Mose Karanja via kictanet < kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:
Hello listers,
I thought I was the only one but today I met someone who also suffers from the User Interface of mailing lists. The content on KICTANet is rich and it helps build ICT perspectives on a day to day basis. However, the readability of messages is usually a pain especially when the thread gets busy. This is not limited to KICTANet though. Most mailing lists lack intuitive usability.
Seeing there are a good number of us here in design, web development and usability, it would be interesting to know if there are better options out there that this community can benefit from. If not, what about organizing (not necessarily through KICTANet) of a design hackathon to improve this.
Moses. --- Moses Karanja | @Mose_Karanja <https://twitter.com/Mose_Karanja> | PGP: 0x1529552F <https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=index&fingerprint=on&search=0x1529552F>
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Seeing there are a good number of us here in design, web development and usability, it would be interesting to know if there are better options out there that this community can benefit from. If not, what about organizing (not necessarily through KICTANet) of a design hackathon to improve this.
Some of us still prefer the traditional way that many lists which use Mailman operate but if you are looking at UI improvements, there is version 3.0 which addresses some of your concerns; one which I find useful was that you can directly reply threads from the web interface. http://wiki.list.org/Mailman3 Regards, David.
Thank you all for the responses on this. The incredible options available like Techweez’s forum and Odhiambo’s ‘scripts' and now Mailman3 offer hope. This is not a classical ICT policy debate but I hope it can help make our policy discussions better. If you feel you have something that you would not rather have on the main list, feel free to reach me directly and I will collate the options and later share with people who may need a better way of handling MailingLists. Back to ICT Policy. Moses.
On Mar 2, 2016, at 9:44 AM, David Njuki <njukey@gmail.com> wrote:
Seeing there are a good number of us here in design, web development and usability, it would be interesting to know if there are better options out there that this community can benefit from. If not, what about organizing (not necessarily through KICTANet) of a design hackathon to improve this.
Some of us still prefer the traditional way that many lists which use Mailman operate but if you are looking at UI improvements, there is version 3.0 which addresses some of your concerns; one which I find useful was that you can directly reply threads from the web interface.
http://wiki.list.org/Mailman3 <http://wiki.list.org/Mailman3>
Regards, David.
--- Moses Karanja | @Mose_Karanja <https://twitter.com/Mose_Karanja> | PGP: 0x1529552F <https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=index&fingerprint=on&search=0x1529552F>
participants (3)
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David Njuki -
Martin Gicheru -
Mose Karanja