Marking up workflow

Motivation To provide affordances to the user to easily mark up content items for lightweight processing and organization.

Terminology

Warning: Can't find topic Glossary.Markup

Warning: Can't find topic Glossary.Stamp

Warning: Can't find topic Glossary.Label

Warning: Can't find topic Glossary.Process

Warning: Can't find topic Glossary.Organize

Use cases

• Processing: Marking up content items
• Mark an email "To reply to"
• Put a Task on the calendar
• Mark "Show me on" reminder time for when the content item will appear in the Processing area of the users Dashboard view
• Mark an event as recurring
• Mark context (ie. @home, @work, @hardware store)

• Organizing
• Assign to a thrask
• Assign to a mailing list mailbox
• Assign to a calendar
• Assign to a contact group
• Assign to a project
• Assign to a Sphere of Life
• Assign to any collection

Structure

Processing: Marking emails as "To reply to" v. Stamping emails as Tasks
There is a difference between stamping an email as a task or a calendar event and marking an email as an email that needs to be replied. In the former use case, the original email really IS the task or the calendar event. In the latter use case, the email spawns a second task which is really just a related task. If we were to be strict, we would simply require users to create a second "Reply to this email" task and relate the two by putting them into an ad-hoc collection (ie. Thrask). However, marking emails that need to be replied to is such a common use case, it might be smart for us to special case this particular type of email-task relaationship and provide users with an even lighterweight way to relate a "Reply to this email" task to an email.

Processing: Timed tasks v. Calendar events
There are similar "looks alike, but isn't quite the same thing" issues regarding putting tasks on the calendar and their close cousins, calendar events. Certainly in the user's mind, the two are very similar and often confused. For example, I have a "Buy a house" project. One of the tasks on my "Buy a house" project list is to talk to a real estate agent. I find a real estate agent to set up a meeting: Meet with Joe Realtor at 3PM on Friday. This item started out as a Task, but now it's displaying some distinctly calendar event like aspects. Should we force the user to turn the item from a Task to a Calendar event? Should we simply allow the user to add time attributes to the Task? How are Tasks and Calendar events different anyway?

1. Can Tasks be recurring like Calendar events? Yes.
2. Can Tasks have start times and end times and durations? Yes.
3. Can Tasks have participants? Yes.
4. Do Tasks have headlines? No, not according to the content model right now. But this isn't necessarily an intrinsic quality of Tasks, though one might argue that creating Headlines for tasks is overkill.
5. Tasks can have a due by: attribute which doesn't apply to calendar events.

It seems like there is actually very little difference between Tasks and Calendar events other than the Headline attribute (just for events) and due date (just for tasks). However there is potentially a huge cognitive difference between tasks and calendar events for the user. A user who simply wants to put a task on the calendar (ie. pick up dry cleaning at 2PM) will feel that a calendar event interface is overkill and unwieldy. In truth, tasks, even "Time Tasks" that have been put on the calendar are conceptually very different from events and appointments.

1. Tasks don't often involve other participants (ie. chores)
2. Time tasks are flexibly, people usually fit tasks in wherever they can
3. Timed tasks are "optional" appointments

Treating timed tasks and calendar events as the same kind of content item would not only over-burden simple Tasks with affordances designed for Calendar events, it also confuses the user's schedule, making the calendar look more crowded with "must attend" events than it actually is. This is especially true if we allow users assign due dates to "Emails I have to respond by a certain time".

Below is a proposal to provide different workflows for 1) entering calendar events and 2) putting tasks on the calendar as well as an easy way to convert tasks to calendar events (as in the example with Joe Realtor).

The organizing use cases are less controversial. They should probably just be done by setting attribute values in the "See also" section of the content item's detail view.

• processing_workflows.gif:
  

Workflows

Proposal Each of the use cases listed above has a corresponding "activation" button in the Content item status bar. Clicking on the activation button invokes the appropriate UI affordances to appear. For example, clicking on a "Calendar" icon invokes time attributes.

• Workflows that need to be done
• Marking emails as a calendar event
• Marking emails as a task
• Labeling blocked tasks. Modeling dependent tasks in ad-hoc collections
• Putting tasks on the calendar, marking calendar items as recurring
• Turning tasks into calendar events
• Marking "Show me on" reminders and context
• Marking up in the "See also" section

[OI^?]

-- MimiYin - 09 Apr 2004