Status On Feb 21, 2006, we had a Design Session on usage scenarios and and implementation options for what we've been calling "Sections" in the Summary Table View.

For Context, please see:

• Design Session announcement: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004166.html
• Preliminary brainstorm on Usage Scenarios for Sections: SectionsUsageScenarios
• Design-Engineering discussions on the design list:
  • http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004019.html (Please read this email in reverse, Alec's update is at the bottom).
  • http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-January/003994.html

GLOSSARY

Section An arbitrary grouping of items within a Sidebar Collection which allows for a single item to appear in multiple sections
Partition A division of items within a Sidebar Collection defined around a single attribute, which does not allow

USER MOTIVATIONS

Sections help users organize their data into meaningful groupings

Partitions

• Help users find items by chunking them down
• Help users attain a high-level view of their data by chunking them down

NUTS AND BOLTS

Sectioning versus Partitioning

Click on a column in the summary table view to:

• Section or Partition items by the attribute defined in a column OR
• Section or Partition items b some other meta-attribute of the items in that column (ie. Partition the Who column by Sphere: Home people, Work people, Book club people)

If we implement Sections, there is the possibility of defining custom sections from scratch, defined around any attribute:

• Project: Launch section
• @: Corinne section
• Timeframe: Today section

Open Issue Does anyone have any specific use cases for this kind of behavior?

For all the above options there is the possibility of providing for 2-3-4-to-n levels of "hierarchy" as well.

USE CASES

Ephemeral Groupings to View or Compare Two Lists Side-by-Side

Kahlila is in her weekly one-on-one meeting with June. K would like to pull up a list of issues she's collected over the last week that she needs to discuss with J. K would also like to review the status of 2 projects that she is working on with J. During the course of the meeting, she realizes that a few of the items she has on her "Issues to discuss with June" list are missing from her Project lists. She would like to do a "side-by-side" comparison of the lists to make sure they're all complete.

MimiYin: I would characterize this as more of a drive-by side-by-side comparison of two collections than a persistent organization of a Sidebar collection.

Persistent Groupings to Organize the way you work and help you maintain FOCUS

Partitioning by Triage Status

• Lawrence doesn't want to see all of his items, all the time in his Dashboard view. He just wants to be able to focus on the things he has to do Today with the option to review stuff that's coming up over the next few weeks. He likes to have easy access to things that are Done as well, in case he needs reference material or needs to check to make sure he did something.

Use cases for abritrarily defined sections: Custom organization based on any attribute

• Sphere: Home
• Sphere: Work
• Timeframe: Today

• Project: Launch
• Project: Documentation
• Timeframe: Today

Ephemeral Partitions to aid in Scanning and Search

Partitioning by Date to help users find things:

• Future
• Next month
• Next week
• Tomorrow
• Today
• Yesterday
• Past week
• Last week
• Last month
• Earlier

MimiYin Seems like we'd want to the center the view on Today, which would be in the middle of the Table. However, finding Today again would be hard to do. Maybe you could use the mini-calendar to do it.

Partitioning by Kind

• Notes
• Communications
• Tasks
• Scheduled Tasks
• Events

Sectioning by Context

• @Work
• @Home
• @Computer
• @Calls
• @Hardware store
• @Grocery store

Sectioning by Person

• @Jim
• @Bob
• @Genevieve

Ephemeral Groupings to Review status or see the Forest for the Trees

Sectioning by Project

• A section for each issue in the Apps Team Architecture Issues table:
• Bi-directionality
• HTML editing
• User-defined attributes

INTERACTION ISSUES

Possible Interactions

• Click header to group
• Pull-down or menu item
• Some way to turn on and off sections
• Some way to hide and show sections

How do we make it clear to the user when they're Adding to a Grouping versus Moving to a Grouping?

• Is cursor feedback enough?
• What about dividing up the section/partition area so that when the user drags and item over a section/partition, the left half is (ADD) and the right half is (MOVE). If it's hard to draw over the rows of the table, could we implement this in the section header itself?

Ephemeral views

• Overlaying sidebar collections

Building persistent views

• Show and hide sections/partitions
• Add and remove sections
• DnD to reorder sections
• DnD to put sections into sections

Specifying Semantics

• Defining sections around an attribute
• Defining labeling rules for a section

DnD a section/partition to the sidebar and vice versa