Version 7 Scroll Bar

Hi Filip, and thanks for this information.

If the main reason for changing to a thin scroll bar was to clean up the UI on mobile screens, why did you not just retain the traditional style of scoll bar for desktop users and let it be enabled as a setting?

There seem to be quite a few more uses for a scroll bar than were taken into account. I just discovered another of these this evening. Usually my email is visible all the time, so i can see new emails as they arrive in the inbox. I must have scrolled down, so the top of the list was not showing, and i did not know this was the case because there was no scroll bar to alert me that it was scrolled down. So i missed incoming emails.

I say “there was no scroll bar” because that is effectively the case, even though technically there is one - it’s just so thin and faint that it’s not noticeable.

This change seems to be disconcerting to quite a few users (myself included) - enough so that some are reverting to v6 and others are looking for an alternative to eM Client (though i think there is no good alternative). Yet the solution seems so obvious … give people the best of both worlds and allow them to choose the style of scroll bar they prefer. For desktop users there is no reason to hide the scroll bar (and good reasons not to hide it), and having it there all the time for users who choose that option would eliminate your problem of keeping the position/width of the content fixed.

There was once a Linux distro that i really liked, but they had scroll bars a lot like this, and that one thing alone put me off so much that in the end i reluctantly did not use the product.

On the positive side, eM Client is in a class of its own with no significant competition. It is very good, and i don’t intend to abandon what’s so good about it because of one problem, even if it is a fairly major problem. It just means that i will have to go without certain core functionality until the problem gets resolved, because in the end there is still no better alternative. But i suspect i’m more patient than most, and if not fixed this problem could lose you more than a few desktop users.

Thanks for looking into this.

Hi,

I may have not expressed myself clearly. This specific change wasn’t related to mobile, although it definitely helped a lot on small tablets where any pixel matters. We predominantly use eM Client on 11" laptops/hybrids to 27" desktop/all-in-one computers.

Showing scrollbars all the time is not practical either, many times there’s nothing to scroll and it just wastes usable space and only visually distracts from the actual content. In version 6 they were shown only when there was something to scroll, which I assume is what you are asking for. That however again leads to the content being moved. Typical scenario where we observed it is the folder tree on the left with the counts of unread messages aligned to the right. When some part of the folder tree was expanded/collapsed it may have required to scrollbar to be shown/hidden. I know it’s just a small thing, but I wanted to come up with some example that we regularly hit.

There was a lot of thought and discussion when we were making the new user interface. Many of the decisions were influenced by telemetry data gathered from the users.

I just want to explain that we are not ignoring you, or the feedback from users, or that we made the change arbitrarily. Quite the opposite, we are trying to listen to feedback and the way people use eM Client affect our decisions.

Thanks for all the positive words. It helps us keep motivated to improve eM Client further.

  • Filip

You are right Shanna. Ma opinion is that the best solution is to make one version for desktop and, if they want to spread to touch devices, one version for touch devices. Thats because there are for me big differences in control and usage. After reading your comment it looks to me that V6 is for desktops a V7 is for touch devices. For me this is the same thing that Microsoft did with their Win8 - many people on desktops was dissapointed and therefore Microsoft quickly made Win8.1 as service pack for Win8. Crossplatform applications are not the future - developers wake up finally!!! - diferences between platforms are too big to make one software for all platforms. That is impossible.

Larry B I did the same yesterday.

Why you simply don ́t make more than one UI and don ́t let users to choose which one they want, instead of just choosing colors, through your themes (skins) feature? What about make the themes (or skins) feature useable (with more settings for UI) instead of moving it slowly out of software? I think this is the simpliest way you can satisfy almost all users. Many developers are doing this, why not you?

I really don ́t understand why so small issue like moving content is so important for you.  I have never noticed it before reading yor comment. If you want to make an app for touchscreen devices simply make a different version for them and dont mess with UI for desktops. I must say that the new UI is awful for me. It looks to me scattered (not only menu, but the whole UI). This version was simply not good step for you. I hope that through updates you will make this version at least as good as version 6 is.

While a narrow scrollbar is a major annoyance, if you are going to stick your mouse users with this PLEASE package high-contrast ratio versions of your color schemes with the updates.  With the exception Bordeaux and Dark, I have some difficulty seeing this “scroll thread” to hit it with a mouse.

Cut your older users some slack.

Just to chime in (I’m hoping the more people you hear from the better the chance we’ll get through to you), the thin scrollbar is really lousy for many users. Period. And the missing arrows at the top and bottom of the scrollbar is a terribly annoying loss, as well. Why do we have to lose function going from Version 6 to Version 7? I understand your explanations but they don’t add up to anything useful for us, the customers. I tried reverting to Version 6, but I must be doing something wrong and my many old emails weren’t visible to the program. (I had previously moved the storage folder.) Once I figure out what I’m doing wrong, I will go back to Version 6 if you don’t “fix” the newer one. V.6 is better for my (laptop) purposes.

Please listen to what we’re all saying here and try not to assume you necessarily know what’s best for us. Thanks.

This is the whole point I believe and a spot on comment. You cannot assume your demographic is young whizz kids, nimble fingered and on phones and tablets. We have several licenses here, all paid for versions (because we liked V6). I would imagine the user age range here is 40 and upwards, all desktop.

The real problem is that these people are bought up on Windows standards. Scroll bars, scroll buttons etc are all ‘natural’ to them. Take them away and they flounder. I watch one gentleman for example (who I have mentioned before in my posts) who really struggles with EMClient now. Yes, he has a wheel mouse. But he is not dexterous enough to use it. He likes the mouse, the scroll bar and the scroll buttons just being there in a format he knows. As mentioned before, the scroll bars hiding is an issue too. He thought, in a panic, he had lost his e-mails because there was no scroll bar indicating just how long the list of emails was. I had to show him he needed to move the mouse over the message list window to show the scroll bar and get to his messages.

Can I ask, what was the real reason behind hiding the scroll bar? was it just for aesthtic reasons? If it is, I don’t see that this is an improvement to the look and feel if the software. Most people are so used to seeing scroll bars, when they are not there it just throws confusion into the mix. I would find it hard to name many programmes that hide scroll bars (Outlook does I know, and I guess maybe other programs) but I can’t think of many others. If hiding it is just a screen ‘real estate’ issue, I don’t think that really has much credence.

I know there are one or two others on here who have commented who, like myself, are software developers. So you have to give a good reason for this scrollbar change (other than aesthetic) to convince me that this was a necessary step to take. I know we all need to earn a living and when you are going up a major version in a software life cycle you need to show that some changes justify the +1 on the major. But sometimes functionality is a far better plus point than major aesthetic changes which people don’t often favour.

Just my thoughts!

MikeFlame : Maintaining support for UI skins is difficult. We are small team and can’t really afford to support that level of customization because it makes it immensely hard to test the application for each release in all possible configurations. Such features also make the application slower (anybody remembers the Winamp 3 fiasco?) and harder to maintain. We implemented customizable toolbars and dark theme (which is not perfect yet), which were among the most requested user interface customizations for the past few years.

S Mittelstaedt : I can’t promise anything yet, but we may offer some high contrast theme. Certainly accessibility features are under discussion right now.

marbles99 : I never said anything about young demographic. We are well aware of the demographic of our users and it includes substantial number of middle-aged and older people.

I’m not a designer, I am a software engineer. The discussions about the look of eM Client 7 started around the same time version 6 was released to public, in the beginning of year 2014 and went through many iterations. As stated previously the goals were to cleanup the interface and make it up to the standards of modern apps and modern technologies without hindering usability. We may have succeeded in some aspects and failed in others, but generally the changes were received quite well. It brought some accessibility issues along the way, which we expected, but we are committed to resolving them one way or another.

The Windows standards have evolved over the years. I was raised in the era of Windows 95 where most applications followed the UI look and feel of the operating system. Then later Windows XP came and changed the look substantially, introduced themes and started redesigning the UI along the concepts of tasks you want to accomplish. And suddenly every application vendors thought themes are good idea and started to make the system look like a big incoherent mess. In the era of Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 the emphasis is on showing more content and getting the user interface out of the way. We believe that Microsoft went way too far with this in Windows 8/8.1 to the point of being unusable and made some functions downright undiscoverable. However the basic idea is sound. Why distract the user controls relating to something you are not dealing with right now?! We have to evolve to stay relevant and sometimes that may break a thing or two.

Anyway, just to summarize it, we are discussing ways to resolve this issue, possibly by introducing some accessibility options or by improving the default behavior to be acceptable for wide audience.

MikeFlame: The new UI in version 7 was generally well received, but it’s not without its issues. We welcome constructive criticism.

On touch devices the user interface is actually a bit different, the margins are adjusted to make it easier to select different UI parts by touch (on non-touch devices this mode can be enabled by pressing Ctrl-F11 in the main window).

Apologies, I didn’t mean it to sound like I doubted your own analytics. Just my experience as a developer is that younger people like touch UI stuff whilst us older crowd (with exceptions of course) like a PC, a screen, mouse and keyboard. Just a generation thing I guess.

Anyway, thank you for the explanation. And I totally appreciate what you are saying. And it is good to know that you are looking into what can be done. Thank you for that.

Thanks for at least commenting. The Ctrl-F11 does nothing useful on non-touch laptops such as mine. (The rows and fonts can all be adjusted in settings already.)
More important, what happened to the indicator that showed whether you had replied to or forwarded a message. I don’t see that anymore–and I have “conversations” disabled in settings. Why is that gone. It was very useful. Thanks.

I very much appreciate your belated response because it answers the question as to whether we can expect a meaningful change. Speaking for myself, and I am neither a teenager or an old “fart”, the continual annoyance of the dysfunctional scroll bar on a Windows 7 computer far out-ways the V7 improvements so I am reverting back to V6 and suggest that all my fellow complainants do the same. I would therefore suggest that you retain the ability to download V6 and indicate it remains a viable option for others who that dislike the new UI.

Version 6 is still available for download and it will be maintained for a while. The links are available on the download page. We would however prefer to get as many people as possible to upgrade to version 7 so they can enjoy new features and other benefits.

Could you please also answer my question about the missing “already replied” indicator? I don’t see that anymore and it was very helpful to easily see which emails I’d replied to or forwarded.
Also, is it possible to go back to Version 6 and still maintain the database folder I was using in Version 7? I can’t seem to see any old emails, only getting new ones, and so I was forced to reinstall Version 7. Is there some incompatibility issue or am I just not copying over the database properly? (I have it pointing in Storage to D:/eM Client.
Thank you.

The indicator is still there, but not when the “Show conversations in all views” is enabled. Either disable conversations completely or check"Show conversations in message detail only". With the “Show conversations in all views” enabled, the indicator is meaningless as it groups the messages on one line.

Thanks, I appreciate your response, Jay, but I already have it set to “disable conversations” completely so I don’t know why that’s still missing. It worked in Version 6.

What I really wish is that I could get Filip Navara, or any developer for that matter, to answer even one of my questions in this thread. I see that after someone else replies, they reply to them, but never to me. Don’t know what I did wrong, but I’m feeling a bit like the red-headed stepchild.

Doug-- that is very strange, since I see them clearly on mine…
Note the arrows at left side of messages.

Fascinating. I even tried changing mine to message panels on, the way you have it, to see if that made a difference. Those little arrows don’t show up for me the way they always did in Version 6. I thought maybe they are column choices now and looked everywhere to see if I just needed to add them in, but I don’t see that. I know this thread is about the scroll bar, but that issue seems dead enough. They acknowledge it and don’t appear to care to address the “problem” as many of us non-touchscreen users see it. So I was hoping the developers could address this other issue or the one I have about my database when reverting to Version 6. I have the free version of eM Client. Maybe that’s why they don’t respond to me. Still…