Hi, A lot of good issues and ideas have been weaving in and out of
the Contacts Design thread on the list so I thought I'd take a moment
and attempt to extract some highlights, if not pull together a blow-
by-blow summary. (I will follow-up with a short-term proposal for Ed
to think about.)
Please respond with anything I've missed / misrepresented. Thx! Mimi
Contacts Usage Scenarios
+ Ed voiced his belief that the 'Digital Rolodex' usage scenario is
crucial to overall Chandler usability.
+ There was concern that the term CRM is too sale-sy. We should use
'relationship manager' going forward.
+ I spun off a separate thread about GTD Waiting for workflows:
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2007-July/007511.html
Stamping Contacts
+ I think we're in agreement that Stamping Contacts to add them to
the Task list / Calendar and vice versa is not particularly
compelling, although Ted said he would use that feature. (I still
feel we should leave this functionality in place for now and figure
out how to deal with these modeling issues through some usage.)
+ I believe we're also in agreement that jotting down a Note and
saving an Email as a Contact *are* compelling use cases.
Navigating between Contacts and Items pointing to/from Contacts
+ I think we all agree that being able to easily navigate to/from
Items that point to Contacts is a useful feature.
+ It's not clear if this functionality is necessarily in direct
conflict with Stamping Contacts.
+ There's the idea of being able to see all items that reference a
particular Contact and vice versa, but what about organizing those
references by attribute? To: Contact, From: Contact, Author: Contact,
@Contact, etc...
There remains some significant challenges to figuring out where
Contacts fit in, in the UI
+ Davor: Treat Contacts like Collections in the Sidebar. (There's no
reason why this couldn't be extended to apply to any kind of item.)
I don't think we'd want all contacts / items to live in the sidebar
as collections, but users could identify a few contacts to put in the
sidebar. This is not dissimilar to the idea of being to define rule-
based collections in the sidebar: All items referencing Davor.
However the idea of simply dragging a contact / item to the sidebar
to accomplish this workflow is very appealing. Jeffrey had a similar
idea to this a while back where he had contacts showing up in the
mini-cal pane as an alternative view to the preview/mini-cal UI.
(Essentially, we can think of the Sidebar as a place to store access
points to 'Favorites' or most-viewed data.
+ (11th hour addition) OS X Finder - Breadcrumb Trail UI - Clicking
on a Contact in the Detail View opens up another Summary Pane to the
right of it and so-on-and-so-forth. This idea would be in addition to
the Contacts and Items as Collections in the Sidebar idea. IOW, the 2
are not mutually exclusive. (I will send out a more serious proposal
explaining this idea. In the meantime, here are some old mockups:
http://chandlerproject.org/pub/Journal/ContactsFeaturesForBeta/
Contacts_Mockups.pdf)
+ Some more issues to address
- What about Contacts that reference other Contacts? Do those Contact
show up in the same view as Tasks, Messages, Events as well?
Contacts and Groups
+ Define groups around any attribute on a Contact (eyes=blue)
+ Define groups around a complex rule
+ Ability to manually define groups, essentially inclusions and
exclusions
+ Q. Should Groups be Contact Items as well? I think there are
compelling use cases for being able to reference a group. For
example: Agenda items to discuss with the PPDTeam.
+ Q. What about companies and organizations? Are they Group-Contacts
that reference all their members?
+ Having a notion of a 'default' email address (for using groups as
email aliases)
+ Supporting different 'default' email addresses in different
contexts (default 'Home' address versus default 'Work' address)
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