Not to further complicate things, but what about this option for a SENT PM…
I only show a Thumbnail for Recipients in the “To:” list, and deem Recipients in the “Bcc:” list as secondary and thus not important enough to display their Thumbnail.
FROM: DoubleDee
TO: User1 (+pic), User2 (+pic), User3 (+pic)
BCC: User4, User5
DATE: 1/16/2014
SUBJECT: Re: Sent Message
Mockup…
I came up with this idea while I was waiting for some responses earlier today, and in case the CSS was too hard to do for the design shown in Post #12.
In some ways I like this design better since it is simpler and feels less “cluttered”.
It also offers more flexibility if I decide to increase my “# of Recipients Allowed” value from “5” to say “10”.
It will also make my coding easier.
And since every username is a hyperlink to the Member’s Profile, you can always see who someone is with a “click”.
Then again, it might look “unbalanced” to have Thumbnails for the “To:” list and not the “Bcc:” list?! :-/
Frankly, I don’t like it, because it’s inconsistent. If you’re showing thumbnails everywhere else, then omitting them here for the BCC field makes it too easy to overlook those recipients entirely. Also, you can’t assume that everybody will regard their BCC recipients as “secondary and thus not important enough”. They may be just as important as the other recipients.
Why would I want my own picture on the From field? I know what I look like and I know I’m sending the PM!
Is there a specific reason you have ‘large’ thumbnails showing all the time?
Can’t say that I am a fan of it as it seems a little pointless, if you send a mass mail then your page is going to be entirely filled with thumbnails of recipients!
It’s a nice idea but folly and decoration more than a functional requirement.
You could make them smaller without sacrificing quality so much to make them unrecognisable, though granted it would take more server space.
For example, the timeline and friends here are 60x60 instead of 75x75
For me (of course I know what ny own looks like) even the reduced size of the attached image is still large enough to be recognisable.
25x25 ??
I’m coming to this thread a little late, and haven’t read every post in detail, so my apologies if the following points have already been covered.
My comments are as follows:
Is the plan to show the thumbnails to the recipients of the message, or to the sender, or both? If the recipients see them, you don’t want to show BCCs. If you show any thumbnails at all, it should be for the FROM:, the TO: and the CC:, but never the BCCs.
You say you will only show five recipients. Is that because your system only allows five recipients per message. Or, is it because you don’t want to take too much space for the thumbnails? If the latter, I suggest you show the five thumbnails, but add a note saying " … and x more". If the user then clicks on that note, perhaps show the names (not the thumbnails) for all the recipients.
As far as positioning is concerned, I would favour showing them all in one row (including the FROM:). I would then either: (i) Add the designation (FROM:, TO: or CC:) as a small piece of text, say, in the bottom right-corner of each image; or (ii) Put that same text above the images, but only for the first image for each of the three designations.
I would add that, if I was the recipient of one of these messages, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in seeing the images of the other recipients (or of myself, of course). I might possibly like to see the picture of the sender, but even that wouldn’t be a priority for me.
Recipients will see a “From:” and a “To:” line with no distinction between “To:” and “Bcc:” (My php determines the appropriate Username/Images to show each Recipient…)
This thread is about what the Sender sees, and of course the Sender does need to be able to see the “To:” and “Bcc:” clearly deliniated!
Arbitrary # that seems reasonable. This is a PM feature and not intended for “mass mailings”, so if you need to contact more than 5 people, then you either have too many friends or are a spammer!
(I may have painted myself into a corner with how an Admin would send out “broadcast” messages, but that will have to wait until v3.0 or whatever?! For end-users, I think adding the features of sending a PM to more than one person and blind copying is more than generous!)
If you look at the mockup screenshot in Post #12, that is the end effect I wanted…
(I might consider dropping the Thumbnail in the “From:” space for the Sender, since he/she knows what they look like!!)
Your mockup in Post #12 is more or less what I had in mind (including dropping the From: image).
Regarding the arbitrary limit of five recipients. That’s fine. But you should avoid hard-coding the actual number. Somewhere in your processing logic, you will have a test for the number of recipients, and will reject any that exceed five. That would be easy to change if you later decide to increase the limit. Equally, the design of the thumbnails should be easy to change. You don’t want to be in a position where changing the limit from five to, say, ten will mean a substantial redesign. (Sorry if I’m stating the obvious.)
