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46 lines
5.1 KiB
46 lines
5.1 KiB
---
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layout: post
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title: Thunderbird Style Guide and Usability Study
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author: Anxhelo Lushka
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link: https://lushka.al
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date: 2018-07-03 12:00:00 +0200
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categories:
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images:
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- images/blog/thumb_thunderbird.png
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tags:
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- Style Guides
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- Usability Study
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- Open Source Design
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- Thunderbird
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excerpt:
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One of the reasons we love helping communities that create and support open source projects is the direct and explicit communication we have with those folks.[…]
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---
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Since early on, we had a special connection with Thunderbird. While many users moved to web-based mail clients, we always preferred using a single mail client to manage our mail and calendar. In fact, in the early days our founder Elio helped [redesign the Thunderbird Conversations add-on](https://github.com/protz/thunderbird-conversations/issues/967) and even now our email infrastructure is powered by [ProtonMail and ProtonMail Bridge](https://protonmail.com/bridge/) via Thunderbird.
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Unfortunately, Mozilla moving away from Thunderbird created technical and design debt throughout the past years, resulting in a wider gap between Firefox and Thunderbird. As a comparison, Firefox latest logo makeovers happened in 2010, 2013 and 2017. Respectively, the last update to the Thunderbird logo and branding was 2010.
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The good news however is that efforts to revitalize Thunderbird have gained momentum again. Monterail have visualized their vision of a new Thunderbird UI, Thunderbird itself has now a Community Manager and a new Project Council was recently appointed. [We didn't hesitate to jump on board](https://twitter.com/elioqoshi/status/972067552846319616).
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This marked the start of a wonderful collaboration. In Open Source we often times encounter resistance and hesitation to change. It's something we acknowledge and can understand, considering there are contributors who have been involved for years and suddenly someone out of the blue suggests doing a number of changes. We respect that. However the Thunderbird project has been welcoming to suggestions and help, allowing us to enjoy the process thoroughly beyond simply handing off the deliverables.
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To be inline with the new Firefox Photon Design system, we worked on a fork specifically tailored for Thunderbird, including a revamped logo and word mark. We also set the stage for an upcoming UI redesign in the future by conducting a small Usability Study specifically tailored on security features out-of-the-box within Thunderbird. We would like to thank Open Technology Fund for supporting this work towards the Thunderbird project as part of its Usability Lab.
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## New Logo
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Quite a few months ago designers involed on the Thunderbird project filed a new [issue on Bugzilla](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404648) and started discussing for a possibly redesigned logo for the e-mail client software. Elio Qoshi, Ura's creative leader and founder, as part of the greater Mozilla community got into the discussion and together with the community they came up with a revamped logo. The continious consultation among the community members and Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird's Community Manager, resauleted on a remodeled logo which was included on the Thunderbird 60 release.
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## Usability research
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For quite some time now we offer Usability Research services as we are collaborating with Renata Gegaj, our Usability Research expert. Thunderbird was the first project Renata was involed in as part of the Ura team as she conducted a full usability study on real users. During [Open Source Conferense Albania (OSCAL)](https://osc.al) 2018, Renata selected 6 people of different ages and occupations and assigned them 9 tasks to complete while using the software. While users would do so, she observed wheather they encountered any blockers and noted them down in order to prepare a full report for the Thunderbird Legal Council which will help the project's developers and designers to improve their users' experience with the software in the future.
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## Styleguide
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We strongly support the idea that organizations and communities should have their brand mediums in one corner placed carefully, that's why we came up with the initial idea of [Identihub](https://identihub.co) ,our first software. Although, styleguides are a different type of having your brands' visual details in one place. As we've done in the past for the [Tor Project](https://styleguide.torproject.org) and [Reproducible Builds](https://reproducible-builds.org/style), for Thunderbird we developed a full [styleguide](https://ura.design/projects/thunderbird) for them based on [Firefox's structure](https://design.firefox.com), keeping the Mozilla vibe. There you can find all the details regarding Thunderbird's logo like colors, typography, icons and license.
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## New website
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Furthermore, we [decided to help](https://github.com/thundernest/thunderbird-website/issues/31) Thunderbird by redesigning their website following clear guidelines. This is still underway and you can check our progress on the issue linked above.
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