Show tooltips when the mouse is over column headers to indicate that they can be sorted (and the current sorting order)
The fact that column headers are sortable (or sorted in a particular direction) is not obvious to non-technical users, from what I've repeatedly observed over the years with them changing the sort order without realizing (or not realizing they can change the sort order) and being confused that they "can't find their new emails". This morning for example, my dad called me for exactly this, and it turns out he had clicked the status (unread mail icon) column header and it was showing all the "forwarded" mails at the top instead of the latest mails. They never notice the downwards (or upwards) chevron/arrow sort indicator in columns, even less so when it's overlaid on top of a mail status icon in the 1st column.
I then spent a solid 5 minutes trying to explain to him this whole thing, he could not imagine that those column headers are clickable and sortable.
My suggested improvement/solution for this would be for the UI to be more explicit and self-documenting about this feature, by using GTK tooltips when the mouse is over those headers. This would not harm power users at all, and may help non-technical users. The tooltips could contain instructions that this column can be sorted (or reordered with drag & drop, or additional options with right-click) and indicate which column is currently sorting, in which order.
So for example, in an ideal world, it would say:
Click to sort by <b>{{column name}}</b>, in/by {{order}}.
Your mail is <b>currently sorted by <i>{{current sort name, even if another column}}</i></b>.
Click & drag to the left or right to change the order of columns.
Right-click for additional options.
...where "in/by {{order}}" could ideally be nicely written as, depending on the context:
- "from oldest to newest"
- "from smallest to biggest"
- "in ascending order" / "in descending order"
- etc.
This improvement could apply first to the mail lists, but ideally also all the other lists (contact lists, tasks, memos, calendar events in listview...)
Observed with Evolution 40 on a spare Fedora 35 machine.