I think all things considered, the DONE section in the Dashboard will
feel pretty out of the way.
Philippe, would the Mark-up-the-Purge workflow satisfy your need to
keep Done stuff around for a while? (e.g. you can change the triage
status of an item in the NOW section, but it won't 'disappear' from
the NOW section until you explicitly hit a button to file items
accordingly.)
There are a couple of reasons to keep the DONE section in the Dashboard:
1. You don't have to switch context in order to search. Oftentimes,
search is 1 step in a multi-step workflow. If we want people to
pretty much live in the Dashboard, it would be a bummer to break up
Triage workflows by forcing people to switch context every time they
wanted to find a piece of information. (e.g. I'm putting a Tickler on
a Task, I know the due date for the Project related to theTask is
somewhere in a message in my DONE. I'd like to find that message
without having to switch out of the Dashboard context.)
2. Unlike Gmail, the Dashboard is not the equivalent of the INBOX in
email clients. It's defined around Focus, which menas it contains
Drafts of message you're about to send, Sent messages you still need
to follow-up on, and items that aren't communications at all. As a
result, if we were to divorce the 'All' collection from the
Dashboard, we would end up with:
+ All items
+ Dashboard
+ In
+ Out
+ Trash
...with newly created/received items flowing into both All and NOW/
LATER and newly received items flowing into IN.
I feel it adds a layer of complexity that will be hard to explain to
users unfamiliar with our Triage concepts.
However, we used to have a notion of an Archive collection that was
in addition to the DONE section. It was a way of excluding 'obsolete'
items from searches and other user-defined collections, a way to keep
things up-to-date without having to delete them.
The Archive collection works a lot like Trash. If you Archive an
item, that item is removed from all other collections (out of the box
or user-defined). However, unlike the Trash, users probably won't
Empty their Archives very often.
Does that address some of your concerns? It seems pretty close to
what Philippe is describing.
Mimi
PS A separate thought, I wonder if we can get people to stop using
the 'My calendar' collection as a personal calendar by renaming the
'All' collection Dashboard, keeping it Dashboard across all App areas
and presenting the Calendar-Dashboard as a Table, rather than as a
Calendar Canvas.
I think all of these issues + some others that have been floating
around on the list (e.g. maintaining selection across app areas) need
to be addressed in a coherent proposal about the Sidebar Virtuality.
On May 15, 2006, at 2:01 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Hi,
Alec Flett wrote:
However, when I'm done with an item, I don't want to see it
anymore unless I explicitly search for it. Sure it could be in the
"Done" portion of some inbox "all" display, but I've personally
found that in gmail, as long as I know they're in the "All Mail"
collection, then I actually would rather NOT see "done" things on
the screen at all... I just looked in my "All Mail" collection (a
rare thing for me to do) and there are 4385 "conversations" - I
wouldn't want to see any of them in my Inbox - not even the first
10 - it would just be clutter on my screen.
So I guess my question is - if we expect users do spend most of
their time in "All" then what are we going to do with the 4385
'done' items that they accumulate in the course of a year of
intense information management? If they're not in "All" then where
are they?
I'm not using gmail or other fancy tools to handle my task list but
I feel the same way about the "Done" thing. I oscillate between
deleting them entirely or archiving them in some deep folder
hierarchy... but I'm not doing this immediately. In other words, my
"done" things still linger in front of my eyes for a while so that:
- I can fill up my daily log at the end of the day
- can keep an eye on them in case some pop back to life (happens
with emails for instance when waiting for an "ok" for the
recipient...)
- have the psychological satisfaction of seeing my temp pile of
"done" grow...
I guess this means that my done list is time limited and I would be
perfectly happy seeing only the done of the current day. The rest
should be archived and accessible in some hidden place as Alec
mentioned.
Cheers,
- Philippe
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
