Forwarding a thread from Dan to the list.
On Jul 6, 2006, at 2:09 PM, Dan Steinicke wrote:
Mimi,
I was reading the dashboard spec and had this thought.
Marking email as 'Needs reply'. This seems rather stuck in the old
paradigm of email use. Since Chandler will offer more actions to
the user than simply replying it seems like this could be better
named 'Needs action' or something so that it could cover the use
cases where the user needs to come back and turn it into a task or
event as well as replying to it.
Dan
Hi Dan,
Your thought is pretty much right on the money. If we back up a bit
though, I think you'll find that the design does exactly what you're
describing. (Whether that will be apparent to the user is a different
issue ;o)
You can think of 'Needs reply' as 1 flavor of follow-up action. There
are other flavors of follow-up action that are satisfied with
different UI elements / affordances.
You can also think of the various 'Needs action' affordances as going
from really general (Triage) to more and more specific (creating sub-
tasks):
1. Anything you Triage as NOW or LATER is by definition something
that requires follow-up action. What that action is, is unspecified.
It could be something to read, reply to, research. An errand to run,
a meeting to prepare for, an appointment to go to, a birthday to buy
a present for, etc.
2. You can use the communications status column to specify
'communications related' follow-up actions. 'Need to read' or 'Needs
reply'. We're assuming that these 2 things are mutually exclusive for
now.
3. An item might be so significant that you want it to appear on your
task list, at which point, you can stamp it as a task as well. In the
future, we would like to have flavors of tasks so that you can get
even more specific: This is a Research task, Write-up task, Review
task, Chore task, Errand task, Phone call task, etc...
4. You can also stamp an item as an event to put it on the calendar
and leave the date/time field blank...to indicate that you still need
to schedule it; OR
5. You can add a custom-date tickler to an item and leave the tickler
date/time field blank...to indicate that you still need to figure out
an alarm date.
6. Finally, if you really want to get specific, you can 'spawn a
cluster' of sub-items by creating 'related' items inside the Notes
field of a parent item. For example:
+ You receive an email from your real estate agent asking you when
she can stop by to show your house to potential buyers. Seems like a
simple enough request, but you know it will actually take quite a bit
of coordination to figure out a good time.
+ You create a string of items in the Notes field of the email:
-- /Mail Talk to spouse about travel schedule for next week
-- /Mail Ask kids about soccer practice
-- /Task Clean house
-- /Event Schedule painters
+ You also mark the original communication item as 'Needs reply',
stamp it to add it to your Task list and add a 'Tickler' to it for
'End of this week'.
These 'sub-items' are forever embedded in the parent email item. In
other words, their relationship to the original parent item is
preserved. However, the sub-items can also be triaged and dealt with
as independent first-class items in the table.
For a more detailed description of this workflow, see: http://
wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/QuickItemEntry
Mimi
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