Stamping workflow

Status New additional use cases have been added to this page that have not been reviewed by the design team. Proposal to reorganize this page along with MarkingUpWorkflows into two documents that discuss:

1. Lightweight processing affordances (ie. stamping, marking up items) and
2. More intensive organizing affordances (ie. ad-hoc collections, mailing list mailboxes, calendars, contact groups, projects, spheres of life, collections).

Motivations

• Stamping is a way to provide users with a quick and easy way to mark up their items. It is similar to Flagging in today's PIMs, but we're hoping to improve on current designs in both 1) ease of use and accessibility and 2) depth of functionality.

Use case

• Email to Calendar event
• Bob gets an email from Ted: Want to go with me to Jen's party Saturday night? Attached is the invitation with all the info.
• Bob would like to have Ted's invitation to go to Jen's party on his calendar.
• Bob is too lazy to create a new calendar item and enter in all the info.
• Bob "stamps" the email as a calendar event and throws it on the calendar for Saturday night.
• Now, whenever Bob looks at Ted's email, he can see the calendar event as well and vice versa.
• stamping.gif:
  

• Email to Task
• Bob gets an email from his wife June: Please get the oil changed on the way home tonight
• Bob wants to add this request to his "On the way home" task list he's about to print out
• Bob "stamps" the email as a task and puts it in his 'On the way home" task list

• Task to Calendar event
• Rosie is trying to buy a house
• She creates a 'Buy a house" task list
• One of the items on the task list is to talk to a realtor
• Rosie gets a recommendation from a friend to talk to Dan the realtor
• Rosie calls up Dan and sets up an appoint. While she's on the phone she records all of the information for a meeting with Dan in the notes field of the Task: Talk to realtor.
• Now Rosie would like turn the Task: Talk to realtor into an event on her calendar
• Rose "stamps" the Task as a Calendar item and destructively turns the Task into a Calendar event

• Calendar event to Task
• This is less common and mostly to help users deal with "oopies" I meant to enter that as a Task
• Jason enters a "Pick up dry-cleaning Today at 2PM" on his calendar
• He realizes it's really a task, he "stamps" it destructively as a task

• Putting tasks on the Calendar aka Creating Timed Tasks
• This is different from "stamping" a Task as a Calendar event. Proposal There should be simpler affordances for putting Tasks onto calendars than forcing users to thing of "Timed Tasks" as full-fledged calendar events.
• Marisa enters a task to go shopping for a birthday gift for her Mom
• Later on, she decides the best time to do that would be Saturday morning
• She returns to her task item and "puts it on her calendar" for Saturday morning
• She also adds a "Due by" date to remind her that no matter what she has to have bought a present for her Mom by the following Tuesday, the day before she leaves to go visit her Mom in Florida

• Marking an email "To Reply to by" (Not technically stamping)
• This is different from "stamping" an email as a Task or a Calendar event. The email is not itself a description of a task, but instead generates the task "Reply to email". This is probably one of the most common use cases that users will encounter in their efforts to process and organize content items.
• The proposal is to provide an easy way for users to mark emails as "To Reply to by" without having to create a separate "Timed Task" related to the original email through an ad-hoc collection. See MarkingUpWorkflow for more

• Notes to Tasks and Calendar events
• Jot down a note, destructively "stamp" into either a task or a calendar event

• Recording verbally communicated Tasks, Resources and Calendar events
• Larry's wife Rhea leaves a message on his cell phone to remember to pick up their dog Gracie from the vet on the way home
• Larry enters the task in Chandler and wants to record that the task was from Rhea, however, he doesn't want to Send the item to anyone.

Rules of interaction

• Users can stamp an item in the Stamping column of the Summary table or in the Status bar of the Detail view.
• Email as a Calendar event
• Email as a Task
• Note to Email, Calendar, Task, Contact (destructive)
• Unfiled (?) to Email, Calendar, Task, Contact (destructive)
• Task icons override Email and Calendar icons [OI]

Workflow (Summary table)

• Mouseover (MO) stamping column. A light grey stamp icon appears with a pull-down arrow.
• Mousedown (MD) and pull-down menu displays a list of appropriate stamping options with icons.
• Select appropriate icon.
• Mouseup (MU)

• To change triage status
• Click and hold to open pop-up menu
• Select status

• To remove stamp:
• Click activated stamp on mark-up bar
• Right-click stamp in summary table view

• stamping_workflows.gif:
  

• To move stamp:
• Drag stamp from one content item to another in the summary view
• moving_stamp.gif:
  

Open Issues

• How many different Task states do we want?
  • Green = Unblocked
  • Yellow = Waiting on
  • Red = Blocked
  • Slashed = Canceled
  • Checked = Done

• [Structure] Stamping and the Content model
• How should we model stamped items?
• If you stamp a mail message as a task, the current content model is designed to represent that as two items related by an item reference.
• If you treat a task as a calendar event, the current content model is designed to represent that as one item which is an instance of a kind that has available all the attributes of both a task and a calendar event.
• John suggests that in the python code, the best way to handle these stamped items would be to represent them using python multiple inheritance.
• We need to review the content model and the python mapping, identify what different need to be taken into account, and pick a design.

#Trash.ContentModel

Anatomy of an Item: Content model

[OI^?]

• How do documents and other resource items fit into this content model
• Are notes that have been emailed still considered notes? How do we differentiate between notes and messages.
• Is there a notion of a content item before it's been stamped: Email, Task, Calendar or Resource?

Sentences about stamped items

• E: Messages that have been emailed or Notes that have been emailed
• E+T: Tasks that have been emailed. NOT an Email that is also a Task
• E+C: Events that have been emailed. NOT an Email that is also an Event.
• E+Ct: Contacts that have been emailed. NOT an Email that is also a Contact.
• E+R: A resource that has been emailed. NOT an Email that is also a Resource.
• T+C: Tasks that have been put on the calendar. NOT An Event that is also a Task.
• R+T: A resource that is a task (ie. A powerpoint presentation I have to finish)

• Content item
• Headline
• Notes
• Date created
• Last modified on
• Created by
• Last modified by

• Processing item
• Triage status: Processing, Deferred, Done, Archive, Junk, Trash
• Mark as Needs reply
• Mark as Needs to be filed
• Mark as Important, Normal, FYI
• Mark as Private

• Task
• Task type: Call, Write-up, R&D, Errand, Chore
• Task on the calendar
  • Due by
  • Due by recurrence
  • Due by alarm
  • Do on start time
  • Do on end time
  • Do on duraction
  • Do on recurrence
  • Do on alarm
  • All day task / Anytime task
  • Timezone

• Event
• Event status: Attending, Tentative, Declined
• Headline
• Start-time
• End-time
• Duration
• All day event / Anytime event
• Timezone
• Recurrence
• Alarm
• Location
• Resources - not OOTB

• Resource
• Resource type: Note, Word document, JPG, MP3

• Communications
• From
• To
• CC
• BCC

• Emails (implictly added to communications items that have been received or sent as emails)
• Email history
• From (displayed)
• To
• CC
• BCC
• Reply to
• Date sent (incoming and outgoing mai) (displayed)
• Date received (incoming mail)
• Size
• Server status
• Mail status: draft / queued / replied to / forwarded / resent
• Attachments?
• Comments
• Other message header attributes

• IM
• ??

Comments

MimiYin 20 Jul, 2004 Can we deprecate email even more? Can we think of the "Email" stamp more generally as a "Communications stamp", essentially a way for users to record the "From" and "To" of an item. This would include items that are being recorded because they were originally "communicated" verbally and don't need to be actually communicated via email or IM. Email attributes are never explicitly added by the user. Instead, they are implicitly added when the user actually "transports" an item via Email. (This would be true of items transported via WebDAV and IM as well.) This prevents users from being able to "unstamp" items as emails. They can remove the "Comunications stamp" but they can remove the Email attributes. This should be reflected in the Kind filter as well.

-- MimiYin - 21 Feb 2004