Jeffrey, Travis and I chatted briefly yesterday about a fast and
dirty pass at a quick entry web widget that users can plug into their
iGoogle homepages, OSX Dashboard, Vista Dashboard, etc.
We decided to optimize for the case where the user wants to quickly
enter a whole series of items one after another. So we provided a
single-line text field where you can enter the title and then simply
hit Enter to submit the item without having to click on a Submit button.
After thinking more about this, I think one of reasons why someone
might hesitate to dump stuff directly into Chandler and instead pull
up a text file or pull out their paper notebook first is that when
entering information into Chandler, you still have to 'decide' what
constitutes the item-unit and many times, when you just want to
quickly dump something out of your head and get back to what it was
you were doing, just that simple decision is a significant barrier to
'quick entry'.
So I think it's actually more important to more closely simulate the
'pull up a text file and start typing' workflow in our quick entry
web widget.
We give users a large-ish text field where they can jot down some
ideas, we declare the Title to be whatever blob of text comes before
the 1st line break and dump everything else into the Notes field of
the item.
The downside of this is that users need to manually hit Enter in
order to submit the item to the service. But I think this is an ok
trade-off given that it's unlikely users are looking to optimize for
the rate (speed) at which they can enter multiple items.
Does this resonate with anyone else?
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