| In-line... :o) On May 26, 2006, at 11:35 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Yes, good point.
Thanks for delving into this, there were some built-in assumptions behind this reasoning that should be articulated and discusses, but I'm not at all sure they're right. The assumption is that the first time you send/receive an Item, it's the 'official' communication. e.g. Bob & June invited me to their BBQ, nevermind that it was their daughter Carol that updated the event by adding me to the invite list. However, once you've sent/received the 1st time, subsequent updates are all about 'who updated what'. + Junior added 3 more of his friends + Larry is bringing the slip 'n slide + Florence isn't coming, but she's sending over a mint jelly pineapple It's all about which piece of meta-data is important to the user in which context. + The first-time you send/receive, the official FROM: and TO: values are important. + For subsequent eidts updates, who EDITED and UPDATED the Item are what's are important. ===== However, there is also the case (partially illustrated in the Stamping Storyboards) where a small group of people collaborate on an Item before sending it out to a larger group, and so in the beginning the Froms and Tos aren't actually the FINAL Froms and Tos, they're the small group of collaborators instead. The ideal workflow for this is: + User can enter in the FINAL FROMs and TOs right away (From: The Management, To: The Staff) BUT + User can mark the Item as a Draft and 'Send' it to a different set of people for Review, without sending it to the FINAL FROMs and TOs. The UI might look something like... Send to checked: [ ] From: The Management [ ] To: The Staff [x] Reviewers: Co-worker 1, Co-worker 2 So if Laura were drafting a communication on behalf of Tracy to the Board, Tracy would receive an Item in her Dashboard that looked something like this: Draft | TO: The Board The "important" piece of information for Tracy in this situation is that it's a Draft of a communication TO: The Board, not that it's a communication Sent by: Laura. Chances are, Tracey has lots of stuff in his Inbox that were Sent by: Laura and displaying that an Item is a Draft of a communication TO: The Board, helps Tracy distinguish between the dozens of Items Laura sends her every day. People do this today by typing in the FROM/TO information in the Body of the email, but the metadata is lost to the clients sending/receiving the email AND the user can't see the FROM/TO metadata in the summary table view as they scan their Inbox to triage mail. ===== However, this seems extra-complicated to do in a 1st class way within the Beta timeframe. For now, if users want to 'emulate' this workflow, they can do that by: 1. Enter plain text (not email addresses) in the FROM: and TO: fields as a way of "recording" who they are without sending the Draft to them. 2. Enter valid email addresses in any of the fields: FROM, TO, CC OR BCC for whoever needs to Review the Draft. In the Laura and Tracy example above, Laura might do the following: ===== FROM: Tracy's valid email address TO: The Board (not as an email address, just as text) ===== NICE TO HAVE: We could add the ability to right-click on an Item that allows users to "Send Items as Drafts". That way, when Tracy receives the Item, she can see that it's a Draft and not freak out that Laura send the communication to The Board without giving her a change to review it. So Tracy would receive something like this: Draft | TO: The Board This workflow wouldn't be very discoverable, but early adopters who do things like read read-mes, could try it on for size, we could learn from it and tweak the design based on feedback. Mimi :o) |
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
