Dashboard view spec

For background please see PPF

Status Proposal for Dashboard view. Needs to be reviewed.

Structure

In Chandler there will be two orthogonal notions:

1. Processing or Triage status (Stored, Processing, Deferred [note: in 0.7alpha4 these are labled Now, Later, Done]) and
2. Date / Time.

Traditionally, there has only been one, the latter. However, we have all experienced flagging an email containing important actionable tasks and having it disappear (OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND) as our Inbox fills up with new mail. Most PIM applications make the assumption that the most recent items in a view are also the most important, the ones we want to stare at all the time. This mistaken notion that MOST RECENT = NEED TO KEEP IN FRONT OF MY FACE is what drives many people to set up elaborate email filing systems, spending half their lives manually dragging emails from their Inbox into anywhere between 10 and 50 folders! We asked ourselves, what are we actually trying to accomplish?

One theory is that most users don't really care about having all of their email filed neatly into folders and sub-folders. They're simply trying to get email out of their face so that they can keep their Inbox free of all email except for the the few emails they actually need to deal with. In other words, they're using heavy-handed organizing affordances (ie filing by project, subject matter) in an attempt to accomplish relatively lightweight processing. In Canoga, we would like to take a first stab at providing users a separate, orthogonal, easy to access workflow for processing items. In other words, GETTING items out of my face will be different from FILING and ORGANIZING items into a reference library.

We've identified 4 main processing or triage states:

1. Stored (reference)
2. Processing (keep in front of my face)
3. Deferred (put this back in front of my face at a later date...)
4. Delete or Put in Trash

Some other use cases for how people might want to process are (see ProcessingItems for more details):

• Mark an email as To reply to
• Put item on the calendar
• Set recurrence on an item that has been put on the calendar
• Set a "Tickle me" reminder date on an item and Specify a particular reminder actions (ie. Pop up a dialog, Put item back into Processing Bin)
• Mark an item as important or FYI
• Mark an item @Context
• Mark an item as private

Nitty-gritty details

• Items are sorted by "Put / Re-put / Arrive in Processing Bin" order (in other words, items are not sorted by Date)
• Items that have been tickled to be "Re-put" in the Processing Bin appear with their "Do on" or "Due by" dates. Items with no such dates (ie. Untimed Tasks, Notes) do not appear with a timestamp.
• Emails appear attached to their Date Received or Date Sent unless they have been assigned Calendar dates, in which case, the Calendar dates supercede the original dates.

Workflows

Many of the widgets and UI components depicted in the wireframe below are taken from the Summary Table View design. Consult Summary Table view spec for more details.

Items are collected into user's Processing Bin, both items the user receives (emails, notifications) and items the user enters. Users can get items out of their face in one of two ways.

1. Store it (via DnD)
2. Defer it (via DnD and optionally setting a Defer until...date)

Assigning items to mailboxes, calendars, projects, spheres of life, contact groups or any other user-generated collections is a separate, orthogonal workflow.

• Triage_Workflow.gif:
  

• Current_Workflow.gif:
  

Wireframes

The wireframe below shows the Processing Bin for today, Friday May 7, 2004. Items appear in the Processing Bin for any of the following reasons

1. Newly collected items that have yet to be processed
2. Tickled items that the user designated to reappear in the Processing Bin on Friday May 7, 2004
3. Items that were in the Processing Bin on the previous day that were never processed (rollover effect)

The Processing Bin also integrates a traditional Summary Table view with a Day view calendar. All Calendar items that occur in the future (basically after the present time) on Friday May 7, 2004 are presented as calendar events along a proportionally blocked out timestamp scale.

• InfD Information design
• Indented = outgoing item
• Bold = unread item (this includes old items that have been tickled to reappear in the Processing Bin on a certain date)
• Clock = Calendar Event
• Task = Task
• Paper with lines = Note
• Pencil = Draft of an outgoing email
• No icon = Email (because it occurs so frequently)

• Dashboard_view_Fisheye.gif:
  

• Dashboard_view.gif:
  

[OI^?]

• Icon to represent outgoing items

-- MimiYin - 28 Apr 2004