Goals and Objectives

• The sidebar spec feature changes have 2 primary objectives:
  • Responding to some of the feedback from our 0.6 users based on what we learned from them.
  • Revisiting changes to the sidebar virtuality now that users won't be spending all their time in one app area.

Summary of Changes

• User Problems Addressed by Changes:
  • There are special behaviors associated with the OOTB collections that aren't reflected in the visual design, as a result, users are getting confused about how they work.
    • They are library collections, meaning they contain the superset of all MINE items
    • They can't be deleted, renamed, or moved.
  • Users need a way to quarantine new event invitations and task requests from their main calendar views.

• What's Changing:
  • All Collection
    • Make this behave more like a library collection - ie: iTunes.
    • Rename the My collections to Dashboard.
    • Disallow overlays between the All collection and user-defined collections.
    • Have the Dashboard collection appear as a table in the Calendar.
    • Give the Dashboard collection a unique icon for each app area.
  • Other sidebar changes:
    • Bring back the special icons for the out of the other out of the box collections in the sidebar (In, Out, Trash).
    • Add a divider line between the out of the box collections and user-defined collections.
    • Disallow overlays between In/Out/Trash and user-defined collections.
    • A single click in the sidebar does not switch the focus from the summary table view to the sidebar.

Risks and Dependencies

• After discussions with engineering, most of this work is minimal.
• Some of this is simply artwork (Mimi) rather than code.
• We have the infrastructure to change icons very easily.
• Changing the name of the All collection to dashboard is dependent on getting some of the dashboard work done.
• We still may need to iterate further on this to get it right for the Beta and 1.0. For this reason getting most of these changes in for Alpha4 would be an advantage.

-- SheilaMooney - 21 Jun 2006 * Alpha4_Sidebar.png: