• Contacts_Mockups.ppt: Contacts_Mockups.ppt
• Contacts_Mockups.pdf: Contacts_Mockups.pdf

Use Cases

• Search for Everyone Looking for information related to a particular person. Jordan sent me an invitation to his party and in it, there were directions to his house.
• Heavyweight Contacts Management for Bart the Busy Body/Coordinator and Eli the Executive Assistant Bart addresses and sends out holiday cards. Eli mails out the quarterly report to all board members.
• Heavyweight Contacts Management for Helen the Hub, Angie the Apex and Bart the Busy Body/Coordinator Bart and Angie keeps close track of information about people she meets in the industry. Helen and Angie maintain logs of conversations with key people they work with regularly. Helen and Angie maintain lists of agenda items for key people they work with regularly.
• Communicating for Helen the Hub and Bart the Busy Body/Coordinator Helen and Bart like to have easy access to communicating with a handful people they work with regularly. This includes being able to see when certain people are around and being able to initiate quick conversations with them to ask questions.

Not supporting

• Mobile contacts management.
• Open Issue Support for Groups? Probably not top priority for small workgroups.

Information Architecture: What is a Contact item

• Users should be able to have contact items for:
  • Individuals
  • Couples
  • Families
  • Groups: Clubs, Societies, Work teams
  • Businesses, Organizations and Institutions
  • Places
• In the future, Contacts could expand to be a more generic Directory Kind, including
  • Product catalogs
  • Restaurant guide
  • Hotel directory
  • Airline directory

• In the future, it will probably fairly important for users to be able to specify their own sub-kinds for Contacts with custom schema for each sub-kind (e.g. Models versus Agents versus Photographers)

• Contact items can be stamped
• Contact items can be triaged and tickled
• Contact items can be shared (both as primary and secondary items)

Content model for Contacts

• Name = Title when Stamped as Message, Task or Event
• Fields for 4 emails addresses
• Notes field
• Links to related items * All items related to this Contact
  • Messages TO, CC, BCC this Contact
  • Messages FROM this Contact
  • Items ABOUT this Contact (Title), etc...
• Appears in

Information Architecture and Virtuality: Place in the Faceted Sidebar

• A segregated Contacts App Area that is separate in 1 of 2 ways
  • Contact items are not automatically included in the All App area. Instead, contact items need to be explicitly added to the other App areas via Stamping (e.g. Add to Tasklist, Add to Calendar); OR
  • For each Collection: there is a separate Contacts pane between the Summary Pane and the Detail View Pane
    • Contacts are explicitly added to or removed from the Contacts pane; AND
    • Contacts are automatically added to the Contacts pane if they are referred to by items in the Collection

Linking to Contacts

• Users can link items to Contacts by typing in a Contact name into the following fields:
  • Addressing fields (From, To, CC, BCC);
  • Title field;
  • Location field;
  • Notes field;
  • Label field; and any
  • User-defined attributes
• It would be nice if there was visual feedback as to whether the Contact name had been parsed correctly (e.g. lozenges in Apple Mail or underline in Outlook Express)
• Links to Contacts are bi-directional
• Contacts point back to Items that link to them (Messages TO: this Contact, Invitations FROM: this Contact)

Navigating to Contact Items from Linked Items

• It would be nice if you could right-click on a Contact name to "View Contact details"
• It would be even nicer if the Contact details could pop-up in-place in a separate window; if not
• We can just switch App areas to go to Contacts App area and automatically select the right Contact item in the Summary pane
• Really, really nice to have: OSX Lifesize Breadcrumb Trail style navigation: Click on a Contact to view the Contact Details in a Detail view pane to the right of the Item Detail View you were just looking at

Navigating from Contacts to Related Items

• Select Contact in Summary Pane or separate Contacts pane
• View Contact in Detail view pane
• In the detail view of the Contact, select from the following options
  • All items related to this Contact
  • Messages TO, CC, BCC this Contact
  • Messages FROM this Contact
  • Items ABOUT this Contact (Title), etc...
• Related items can appear in:
  • The summary pane; OR
  • A new summary pane to the right of the detail view (see OSX Lifesize Breadcrumb Trail design)

Easy Access to Communicate with Favorite Contacts

• Click on an icon on the Contact item to:
  • Email that person
  • IM that person (assuming support for IM)
  • View items related to that person
• It would be nice to have the ability to customize the interaction options, e.g.
  • All tasks assigned to this person
  • All emails this person sent to me...

-- MimiYin - 16 May 2006