Oren Sreenby from UW sent me an interesting link to a presentation that Mary Czerwinski gave recently at their Computer Science Colloquium. Mary and her team at MSR have been working on innovative new UIs to improve task management and task flow on the Desktop. Some of you will remember her from the NY Times article Brendan posted to the list a few months ago entitled: Meet the Life Hackers and how they deal with Constant Interruptions in their work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5090&en=c8985a80d74cefc1&ex=1287115200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The first half of the presentation, focuses on ways to reduce "context-switching" on the desktop, which essentially boils down to better "window" management. A couple of interesting things to call out are:

1. Clipping the "important" part of windows, so that you can have many windows open at the same time without needing to overlap them because each window occupies most of your screen.

(Clipping is tangentially related to OS X's Expose functionality, which allows you to tile your open windows in various configurations to help you find "lost" windows. However there are some significant differences:

• Expose in OS X is modal, meaning you're either in a tiled view of your windows or in "regular" mode and you can't actually interact with the windows when you're in one of the Expose tiled modes.
• Windows in Expose are simply shrunken, not clipped, so oftentimes, the shrunken windows are too small to be intelligible or provide any valuable information.)

2. Fish-eye display of window-clips where certain window-clips are "minimized" off to the side

3. Users can arrange their window-clips into clusters and project-based groupings

4. Subtle visual cues alert users to when window-clips are active (ie. downloading files or syncing) versus dormant

All of this amounts to a much more fluid approach to "getting things done". It reduces the cognitive load of constant context shifting: looking for lost windows, re-remembering what you were working on, checking upon on the status of things.

This then made me rethink our "summary-table" based approach to task-management in the Dashboard, so I started sketching out some more "tile-based" displays of open items in the "NOW" section of the Dashboard.

We have an interactive graphical display for calendar (because it's simply easier for people to grok calendar data laid out on a calendar grid.) It would be interesting to explore a graphical display for the Dashboard and see if it improves our ability to "keep track of what we're doing."

What if you could arrange your NOW items as re-sizable tiles, clipped to show the most important information, arrangable in any configuration, thereby

• Allowing you to cluster groups of related items together,
• Allowing you to control the relative prominence of items, and
• Taking advantage of your ability to remember things based on where they are.

I also experimented with adding a second dimension to the Dashboard view. In addition to sectioning the Dashboard horizontally by Triage status, I've also sectioned it vertically by "Relevance to Me". (ie. In the realm of email, that would roughly translate into "things To: Me", "things CC: Me" and "things sent to some list that I'm on"...but it should be something that users can fine-tune with explicit Drag and Drop.) The resulting effect is that you get these "spheres" of relevance, where items in the top-left-hand corner are the most relevant and relevance decreases as you move to the right and down.

• fisheye_dashboard.png:
  

• fisheye_spheres.png:
  

-- MarcGibeault - 13 Jan 2006 -I'm not sure if here is the best place to put that- feel free to delete or put at a better place. It's just that it's here I saw the most relevant info on this much-talked about feature of a Fish-eye view... I just wanted you to take a look at Apple's new app. http://www.apple.com/aperture/ that seems to offer very versatile navigation based on something similar. I can't test it because I don't have access to a mac. Hope it helps.