This first session will be devoted to: Outlining 3 families of Usage Scenarios for Email {and} their attendant implementation issues/options/approaches.

Request for Preparation

Please bring 5 emails you received in the last week that you had to keep track of for some reason, e.g.:

• invitation to an event
• something you had to read in more detail
• a link to check out
• a request for task
• something you needed to reply to

The 4 families of Usage Scenarios are:

1. To support Personal {or} Small-Group Collaboration on Getting Stuff Done These scenarios should be familiar to us all by now:

• Mitch and Esther managing Mitch's calendar and Tasks Mitch assigns to Esther
• Ted and Julie managing Household tasks/events/information
• PPD team managing PPD tasks/events/information

• Personal usage

2. Small-Group Collaboration for the benefit of a Larger Group Audience

• PPD team collaboratively managing the Design list
• What are some other examples?

3. Desktop GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail

• What do you use Webmail for?

4. Replace T-bird, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Eudora

• What do you use your Desktop email client for?

Questions we will address (at a high-level) include:

1. (30 min) What are Use Cases and Workflows do we need to support in order to provide a usable experience for each of these scenarios? e.g.

• PPD needs to coordinate the weekly Design Sessions
• Mitch wants an update on planning for the next OSAF board meeting
• Ted and Julie coordinate travel plans for attending conferences next weekend and getting the girls to their various week-end activities
• Bear wants to know what he needs to get done this week in preparation for the Scooby 0.1 release
• Scanning through 150 new messages to pick out the ones you need to read and deal with first

We're not trying to be exhaustive in this session. We just want to get a high-level idea of what's involved for each group of Scenarios.

2. (15 min) What does that translate into in terms of features?

• Reply, Reply all, Forward?
• Threads? More sophisticated affordances for creating organizational structures?
• Reading HTML email?
• Viewing HTML email? Spellcheck?
• Mail filters? SPAM filters? Whitelists?
• Auto-Out-of-Office reply, Timed sends, Flagging
• Drag and Drop emails from existing Email clients?
• POP mail?
• Sync with IMAP folders? 1-way subscribe to select IMAP folders?
• How many flavors of servers do we need to work with?
• Really good Search

3. (40) What are our implementation options for each family of Usage Scenarios?

• OSAF hosted email accounts?
• Select a few flavors of mail servers to work with?
• Support DnD from existing email clients?
• Tag email messages with special Chandler headers so that Chandler only downloads emails that have this special Tag

(5 min) Next Actions

-- MimiYin - 11 Apr 2006