Philippe Bossut wrote:
So the solution (for UI) is to break out of the location metaphor
altogether as you said. May be that's precisely the real breakthrough
that "tags" and "folksonomy" have achieved recently and a reason of
their success. Not something really new (from a computer science
standpoint, we've been using links and queries since years) but at
last an efficient metaphor for complex semantic linking that consumer
level users can use without being confused.
I personally wish that I could just have a delicious-like interface for
all my mail - I mean ultimately, I don't need to see all my mail folders
in my sidebar - I need some subset of collections that give me quick
access to important messages.
Part of that dream is that someone has gone and already tagged my
thousands of e-mail messages with relevant tags, and so forth. But I
always wondered - say we fast forward some number of months/years to
when chandler is usable as a mail client and we have this world of tags
and collections, how does my mail get from hierarchical mail folders to
this neat folksonomy?
One thought I had is that there is actually a lot of meta-information
stored in mail that we could sort of auto-create collections from...
essentially, what if chandler sort of auto-tagged your e-mail and then
also made some special collections based on data collected during the
auto-tagging?
For instance:
1) Folder name. I have some folders in hierarchies (I'm using the
delimiter '.' as we do on the OSAF server), "MailingLists.dev" "bugs",
"Sent", "Sent.2005" and so forth. I think we could more or less tag each
message with all the components of the path. For instance a message in
"MailingLists.dev" would get tagged with "MailingLists" and "dev"
automatically. Messages in "bugs" would get tagged as "bugs". We may be
able to develop heuristics for making a good guess at which tags to
create collections for in the sidebar. For instance, if all messages in
the "bugs" folder are also from "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" then
maybe that tells us something else about what the "bugs" tag means.
2) Sender/Recipients. We wouldn't need to tag anything based on this,
but we could auto-create collections for the "top people" - i.e. I have
a few specific friends who I probably exchange at least 30% of my
personal e-mail with. We could create collections for these "top people"
- I think we could probably come up with some pretty decent heuristics
for determining who those people are.
3) Mailing lists - there are multiple ways to identify mailing lists,
from well-known RFC822 headers, to looking for [xxxxx] in subject lines,
to noticing that MY e-mail address doesn't appear in the To or CC
headers. We could again develop some heuristics to filter out the noise
so that if I have 1000 messages with [....] in the subject line, but
only 2 of them have [ACLFW] then I'm probably not on a mailing list
called ACLFW and might just have some messages from them, or a friend
used [ACLFW] in a subject line when sending a message.
4) Date - we could easily auto-create some collections for "more than 1
year old" or "last month" - because honestly, I don't care where my
really old messages are, as long as I can find them by searching.
Anyway, you get the idea. I really like the idea of at least giving the
user a "best guess" when transitioning from another mail system into
chandler. The same principle could apply for importing calendars from
iCal, RSS feeds from BlogLines, or whatever.
Alec
Radical idea for Chandler's UI: move away from the "storing places"
metaphor (folders) and move into a "tags" (categories) metaphor. This
will mean a different way of presenting the sidebar and may be a
change in vocabulary in the UI.
The good news is that Chandler's collections are actually closer to
"tags" than to "hierachical folders". It's also consistent with what
you propose.
Cheers,
- Philippe
Mimi Yin wrote:
Thanks for the links to the articles Philippe:
===
From: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3181
"The team at University College London found that the master
memorisers have neither higher IQs nor special brain structures to
explain their talent. Instead, when debriefed after the memory tests,
many admitted they always use an ancient Greek mnemonic technique
known as "method of loci".
This involves visualising yourself walking along a well-known route,
depositing images of to-be-remembered items at specific points, then
retracing your steps during recall."
So clearly, by having collections in the sidebar that can accommodate
a single item appearing in multiple collections, we're undermining
the brain's "location-based" mechanisms for 1) remembering where
things are and 2) general orientation.
*WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS IN THE SHORT-TERM:*
I'm wondering if one way to understand why users get disoriented by
having 1-item appear in 2-places is the cognitive dissonance that
arises from trying to jam virtual concepts into physical metaphors.
(ie. search folders, where folders connotes
Because OTOH, people can be incredibly flexible and agile when
navigating concepts and ideas. I think very few people would be
confused by the idea that:
Joan would show up in both of the following lists:
+ Gender: Female
+ Hair color: Brown
Instead, the model that is put forth with search folders is Joan can
be found in both:
+ Folder: Female AND
+ Folder: Brown
"Folder" is not a very helpful description of the semantics
underlying "Female" and "Brown". But the ability to define "Female"
and "Brown" as more than just generic Folders, the ability to define
them in terms of an attribute (Gender: and Hair color:) helps the
user to understand that they are simply different characteristics or
facets of items.
Another reason why the ability to "attri'bute at'tributes" to
collections helps to orient users is simply the "chunking" benefits
it affords. Instead of a long list of "Folders" you can now segment
the list into "categories of categories: categories based on Gender,
categories based on Hair color."
In Chandler, we're proposing to take this "chunking down" of the
sidebar one step further, which is to group the "attributes" into
attribute types: Who v. When v. Where v. What, etc.
The final step (in the short-term) is to provide graphical-visual
indicators (aka icons) that expose these various "characteristics" of
collections (ie. This is a Who-based collection).
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/LookingToThePhysicalWorld
*WHAT'S THE REAL SOLUTION?*
These are short-term "compensatory" measures for helping people
navigate a virtual landscape organized in terms of conceptual
grouping as opposed to physical-location-based groupings. I say
short-term because I am assuming that we aren't going to reinvent
basic UI structures (ie. the triumvirate of sidebar-summary pane and
detail view).
In the long-term however, it may make much more sense to allow people
to navigate this conceptual landscape in a way that doesn't
"duplicate or triplicate" items into multiple "locations" simply
because the "locations" are defined along conceptual axes.
Instead...
+ items are arrayed on a canvas that itself has semantic meaning (ie.
like a map or a calendar)
+ items are displayed with visual cues exposing key metadata (ie. an
avatar for "who" an email is from, color for "hair color", size for
"file size" or "task size")
In this model, items would never "appear in" multiple locations,
thereby violating the "method of loci" described in Philippe's
articles. Instead, items remain singular and various ways to "slice
and dice" or "group" items emerge from visual groupings.
+ All green stuff
+ All big stuff
+ All stuff in the upper-right-hand quadrant
We already have this kind of view for calendar. It would be
interesting to explore a similar UI framework for more generic and
heterogeneous displays of data.
For more detailed descriptions of what I'm proposing, see:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/LookingToThePhysicalWorld
Mimi
On Jan 25, 2006, at 8:56 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Grant Baillie wrote:
A "+" button next to the "Appears In..." item in the detail view as
a clue?
Or making the whole "Appears In..." field editable.
Anyway, I remember that we played with a similar idea in Entourage
and implemented "search folders" so that, indeed, emails appeared in
different places (instead of being filtered and moved). This feature
tested terribly. It's somewhat disorienting for people to have one
thing appearing in 2 places at the same time...
Cheers,
- Philippe
PS: on the subject of locations (places) and items, it seems that
some of it is so hard wired in our brains that using it is the best
memory strategy known. See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3152502.stm
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3181
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