I wanted to address a point that came up during yesterday's Design Session 3 on Stamping and Communications.

Q: Won't it be confusing for the user to see From: and To: appear when they use the 'Communications' stamp if the From: and To: don't necessarily correspond to the From: and To: fields of the Email that is used to wrap and send the Information Item?

We talk about how From: and To: were closely associated with Email in most people's minds and that if we wanted them to mean Organizer and Invitees instead for invitations, we should call them Organizer and Invitees.

I explain that we wanted to keep From: and To: because we wanted the Communications fields to remain fairly generic, so that people would feel comfortable using them in a variety of situations, without having to think too hard about who the Organizer was and who the Invitees are. However, I didn't have a good example on hand.

The example I used was: Sometimes, when you're setting up a meeting, you first confer with other people 1st to get their input on the Proposed Agenda, the Time and who to invite before actually sending out the official invite. For example:

Esther needs to send out the invitation to a Fundraiser for Mitch on Mitch's behalf. She pulls together a draft and sends it to Mitch to review. Mitch receives the Fundraiser Invitation to review from Esther. Esther is not the official Organizer and Mitch is not an Invitee. Part of the ensuing Chatter or discussion about this Invitation is who to actually invite and who it should officially be from. After a few iterations of reviews, Esther and Mitch decide to put Kapor Foundation in the From: field. However at the beginning of the process, neither she nor Mitch knew what would be appropriate to put in the From: field.

Calling it an Organizer: field would make it even more of a blocker because it has an even more specific semantics than From:. Calling it From: on the other hand allows the field to mean all things to all people at all times. In the beginning, the Invitation draft is From: Esther for Mitch to review. Over time, the From: field comes to mean Organizer as Esther gets ready to send it out to the real Invitees of this event.

However, this is not an especially common use case. A few use cases that are maybe more common are:

In the Design Session, we discussed how, not all things on the calendar are necessarily traditional Events (meetings, appointments, parties). Things like Birthdays, Holidays, PTO, Flights. If we changed From: and To: to Organizer: and Invitiees:, it would make sending your brother your Dad's birthday and sending your spouse your Flight information semantically confusing. What does it mean to be the Organizer of someone's Birthdate? or of a Flight or a Holiday? Keeping the Addressing fields generic allows people to use it in whatever way they find appropriate.

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We touched on this in the meeting yesterday, but I wanted to reiterate that this de-coupling of From: and To: fields in the Information Item from the From: and To: fields of the underlying Email is ONLY SOMETHING A USER WILL ENCOUNTER IF THEY START EDITING EMAILS AND EDITING THE FROM: FIELD.

In fact, one could argue that the very reason we're using From: and To: instead of Organizer: and Invitees: is that it will feel more like normal email for new Chandler users.

User A, who is truly wedded to the Email mental model will never end up Sending an Information Item that is not From: User A.

The only way User A may get a shock is if another Chandler user (B) Edits and Updates an Information Item sent by User A and User A receives an Update that is Updated by: User B, yet still From: User A.

However, the hope is that the separate Updated by: field will clue User A into what has happened.

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It's important that we are aware of these potential pitfalls in the design. However, at this point, I think the best way to understand how we might change things for better is to actually implement some piece of the proposal and Dogfood it and test it. In the mean time, we can also try testing the workflow with different attribute names for From: and To: with users. However, what we choose to call the From: and To: fields for each Stamp (Calendar v. Tasklist), doesn't really affect the implementation design? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

-- MimiYin - 05 Apr 2006