[Karunamon]

I think people are allowed to say they dislike the design of something without providing a academic thesis as to their reasoning.

Here is a big one for me though: the war on information density by UX designers

Have a look at the side by side comparison: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/115.0/whatsnew...

Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It looks like a professional application, a tool for getting work done. The one on the left looks like a toy website for newbies (or worse: Outlook).

I have a 32 inch 4K display and most of the designers seem to think most of that space should be filled by useless dead space and massive buttons like this is Windows 95 and the average user needs the "start" affordance (now tarted up with eye-catching bright colors!) to know what to click on. Apparently my head is expected to literally explode if I ever see two distinct lines of information separated by less than two line breaks.

This kind of infantalizing of the UI for can be defended in some contexts but here, it demonstrates that the designers do not know their target audience. This isn't the dial-up days, grandma doesn't read her mail on Outlook Express or any other local client, she uses a website like everybody else. The only people using actual local clients in 2023 are in enterprise (Outlook…) or are power users who want features they can't get on the web.

[housemusicfan]

> Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

This is such an apropos example because the left-right windshield wiper widget to switch between the two screenshots referenced, ostensibly to give me a "beautiful" "experience" because two static thumbnails is for squares, is unusable and borderline broken.

[pseudalopex]

No one asked for a thesis.

This was not part of the war on information density. The 3 column layout was requested often. It is optional. It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens. Professionals do not use 32 inch 4K displays only. Sender above subject is faster to skim in my experience. Not to you maybe. You can use the old layout.

I dislike the blue new message button. Probably CSS can fix it.

[Karunamon]

>It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens

This is trivially disproven. Look at the screenshots provided. The "new" view shows 14 messages using the entire height of the display. The "old" view shows 14 messages… in half the amount of vertical space. Toggling off the preview pane would double it to around 28.

Even throwaway computers have wide aspect ratio displays nowadays, vertical space is at more of a premium than horizontal.

This trade-off of giving more space to the preview pane at the cost of halving the amount of inbox that you can see is, again, evidence of designers not knowing their target audience. One click to bring up a message is an affordance (arguably, a limitation) copied from the limited web clients that the user likely installed a local client to move away from. It's bad for security, it's bad for cognitive load (keyboard navigation of the list results in distracting flashing, and now there are two distinct interfaces to see a message), and all of these trade-offs come at the supposedly benefit of not needing to double-click to open the message?