Framing the Exercise

• OneDotZeroTargetUserExercise.pdf: OneDotZeroTargetUserExercise.pdf
• OneDotZeroTargetUsers.xls: OneDotZeroTargetUsers.xls

Questions the Target User exercise will answer:

1. Who should we target in the Target User group?
2. How do we target the Target User in the Target User group?

By understanding the dynamics of the small group collaboration scenarios we are trying to solve, we can answer the following questions:

1. What is the volume of information we need to support. # of items. # of people in the working group.
2. How heavy will the use be? Large repository of stuff, most of which you never see? or Small repository of stuff you're always interacting with?
3. How heavy will the collaboration be? Read-only, Read-write. Shared ownership of a collection? Primary owner versus Drive-by users?
4. What is the frequency of edits.
5. What's the nature of the edits? Same collection? Same item? Same attribute? Which attributes? Labeling? Stamps? Intrinsic attributes? Body? Date/Time? Addressing?
6. How robust do sharing notifications need to be?
   • To what degree of granularity do the edits need to be logged? Per item? Per attribute?
   • Do we need to keep track of who made the edit? and when?
   • Do we need to allow users to make annotations on edits? Can we
7. Is the information entered manually? In what way? In Chandler, via Drag and Drop from some other App or the Desktop.
8. What Kinds of information do we need to support? Communications? What modes of Communications? Is just Email good enough? (Probably) What about documents (Resources) and Contacts.
9. Are our users mobile? Do they all have devices? (This one is the hardest to answer)
10. What are the usage scenarios for the Desktop client versus Web client?
11. What are the most important attributes for these users? What kinds of buckets do they sort their information into?
    • To read
    • To reply to
    • To follow up on
    • Save for later
      • When?
    • Done
    • Focus on now?
12. How amorphous are the tasks? How much support do we need for clusters and creating sub-tasks? (e.g. Bugzilla is only good for very concrete tasks. Breaking down amorphous tasks in Bugzilla is a pain.
13. How crowded will the calendar be? Do we need to solve the problem of displaying lots of information on the calendar? e.g. with callouts? fish-eye views?
14. How complex are the scheduling workflows? Do we need sophisticated negotiation workflows? How much back and forth is there when scheduling meetings?

User Research and User Interviews

Katie's really early calendar inverviews

• https://wiki.kkie.us/bin/view/OSAF/CalendarInterviews

Chao's interviews from Feb 2005

• Questions for LPFI: LevelPlayingFieldInterview
• LPFI Interview Notes: http://wiki.kkie.us/bin/view/OSAF/InterviewsWithLPFI

• Questions for Creative Commons: CreativeCommonsInterview

• Analysis of Interviews with LPFI: https://wiki.kkie.us/bin/view/OSAF/AnalysisAndRecommendationsLPFI

Priscilla's interviews

• NotesInterviewBusyBodyCoordinator
• InterviewMuseumDocentCoordinator
• InterviewBookClubNoTwo
• InterviewBookClub

Mimi's interviews

• FrancescaInterviewNotes
• LoriInterviewNotes
• TargetUserInterviewMiniHub

• OutlookExchangeInbox

Target User Group Profile

• Names for the personas:
  • Helen the Hub
  • Bart the Busy Body / Coordinator
  • Angie the Apex
  • Eli the Executive Assistant
  • Ivan the Individual Contributor
  • Violet the Visiting Collaborator

• The Personas fall into roughly 2 types of collaboration relationships:
  • Casual Collaboration happens between Ivan the Individual Contributor, Violet the Visiting Collaborator AND Helen the Hub, Bart the Busy Body / Coordinator and Eli the Executive Assistant.
  • Regular Collaboration happens between Helen the Hub and Bart the Busy Body / Coordinator; and between Angie the Apex and Eli the Executive Assistant as well.

• TargetWorkingGroup
• HighLevelPersonaStructure
• HubPersona
• ApexPersona
• AssistantPersona
• BusyBodyPersona

Other undocumented or poorly undocumented stuff

• DotSevenTargetCalendarUser
• Surveys on the list about:
  • Email usage
  • IMAP folder hierarchies
  • Task management usage patterns

Other characteristics

• Random meetings versus Regular meetings versus No meetings

The results

Why we think our Target Users will use the Chandler System (applies to both Calendar and Tasks)

1. Integrated support for Communications workflows
2. Multi-author collaboration (both calendar and tasks)
   • Getting the Notifications workflow right
     • Ability to send active PINGS to certain recipients
     • Ability to see who edited what, when in each share
     • Ability to see all changes across all shares in a centralized view
3. Integrating information-sharing workflows within and without a pre-defined sharing group
   • Allowing spoke-users to participate in item-sharing workflows via Scooby and Email
   • Allowing spoke-users to participate in multi-author calendar sharing via Scooby and Email
4. Lightweight interoperability with existing clients (e.g. Dragging and Dropping emails)
5. Standards-based interoperability (more long-term) (e.g. CalDAV, WebDAV, IMAP, etc)

Why we think our Target Users will use the Calendar

1. Allowing meeting organizers to treat scheduling meetings and processing invitations like tasks via Triage and Iterative Information Processing workflows
   • Built-in event sharing and invitations
   • Multi-author edit/updates
   • Allow organizers to send invitations without specific date/time information
2. Making it easier for people to schedule meetings and project milestones by glancing at their calendar by expressing more meta-data.
3. Getting timezones right
   • Allowing users to manage timezones in their heads (i.e. floating timezone)
   • Displaying events in other timezones with the local start time.

Why we think our Target Users will use Chandler for Task management

1. Iterative information processing workflows: Deferring tasks with Ticklers
2. Connecting the dots / Creating a feedback loop between the Runway view (currently your Inbox) and your Project views (your Task lists and Project plans)
3. Ability to de-construct complex tasks with in-place sub-task creation and clusters, while maintaining the ability to manage your tasks by FOCUS (aka Triage status)
4. Solve the retrofit/reconciliation hump that makes it hard for people to stick to a single system for long. Instead, they redo it all from scratch or abandon their task system for ad-hoc lists.
5. Collaborative Task management reduces the burden of task management on the team. Instead of everyone keeping track of the same tasks individually, they all manage them together.

-- MimiYin - 20 Apr 2006