Ground rules and motivation

Ground rules for brainstorming

• We are not evaluating ideas.
• We are not swagging or discussing how hard something is to implement or how complicated it might make the UI.

The value of brainstorming use cases is to understand the realm of possibilities. Some possibilities will be less "common" than others, but it is important to get the lay of the land so to speak before plunging into more specific designs that target the "middle" of the bell curve.

Where we are and what we hoped to accomplish

We then proceeded to discuss where we are in the design process. We think we have a basic framework for basic information management.

• We know that people need to have a big, centralized Inbox, where they collect anything and everything.
• We know people need some quick way to Triage this .
• We know that people almost never "complete a task" in a single pass.
• As a result, we know that people need a way to "keep track" of their information as they make iterative progress on their tasks over the life-cycle of their information.
• We know that people need easy affordances for "marking-up" their information in ways that are meaningful to them.

What we don't know are the specifics of HOW people will Triage. WHAT semantics are most useful to people. HOW these semantics should be organized and presented in the UI.

We mostly focused on brainstorming that brought everyone up to speed on how we arrived at the framework we have today. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to push forward into brainstorming scenarios and usage patterns that will help us come up with more specific design proposals for the Dashboard, design proposals that help us answer the HOW and WHAT questions outlined above. Nevertheless, even though we were revisiting familiar territory, the exercise concretized many of the key framework concepts in a way that I think will be helpful to future conversations about the Dashboard. See more below.

Below is a brief synopsis of what we did and possible next steps.

Brainstorm exercise 1: What's on your mind?

Group exercise: Write down 10 things you have on your mind + take a look at the last 5 emails you received before coming to this meeting.

For a blow-by-blow of the scenarios we came up with in the brainstorming session, see: DashboardCollabDesign20051215

• Is there anything that requires no action on your part?
• Is there anything that requires a simple action you can do in under 2 minutes
• Is there anything that requires looking into
• Is there anything that requires someone else doing something first
• Is there anything you can't do right now because it's time sensitive?
• Is there anything that you can't do right now because you don't have the time to do it right now? (Now as in today.)
• Is there anything that's just a black box to you? You know you have to do something about them, but you have no idea what.

Analysis: 2 axes of metadata

The most interesting that emerged from this brainstorm exercise was that even in just trying to describe "where I'm at" with particular tasks, two axes of meta-information emerged:

The first deals with the stage or phase of the task.

• This task is done OR required no action on my part.
• This task is well-defined and can be done in less than 2 minutes.
• This task has been handed off to someone or something else and I'm waiting on their reply.
• This task requires some more research
• This task is a complete black box to me

The second deals with "When do I want to be aware of this task?"

• This task really urgent, I need to deal with it ASAP
• I can't do this until tonight.
• I have an opportunity to work on this tomorrow morning at 9AM.
• If so-and-so hasn't gotten back to me by the end of the week, I have to get involved more directly.
• I have to have dealt with this by New Years, but I should really start dealing with it a week before New Years.
• This will probably happen over the next three months.
• I don't ever want to think about this.

It would be really useful for people to see where they're at with any given task (in addition to meta-data that is traditionally provided: ie. Who it's related to, A description of the task, Size of the task, What project it pertains to, etc.)

And then be able to assign a time or timeframe for when they should have that item automatically "transferred from storage into RAM" so they can be aware of it and start to deal with it. (This essentially translates into something resembling a Tickler, but a Tickler that handles exact dates and times, as well as fuzzy time ranges and dependencies on other events and/or tasks being completed.)

Each person will have their own personal scale for how "finely" they want to break down that second axis. (Today, Tonight, This week, Next week, By the next pay period, The next quarter, Next year, Someday Maybe, etc.) Some will just differentiate between big bucket categories like DONE, NOW and LATER or NOT NOW.

Slight digression Currently, people can only bucket things into 2 categories: DONE and NOT DONE or FLAGGED and NOT FLAGGED or FILED and NOT FILED. So, just the addition of a 3rd category to differentiate between NOW-NOT DONES and LATER-NOT DONES might be a huge improvement. It might also encourage people to think in terms of prioritization through triage as opposed to "do whatever comes in, in the order it comes in", which is what "sorted-by-date" views of email encourage us to do.

Regardless of personal preferences in the granularity of triage, there are 3 high level categories that are probably universal to everyone. They are

• DONE: things I don't need to think about anymore.
• NOW: things I need to be thinking about; and
• LATER: things I don't want to be thinking about right now, but I will need to think about at some point in the future.

The line between NOW and LATER is especially fuzzy and as mentioned before, people will have varying degrees of granularity for how they will want to sub-divide these categories.

But the question still remains, what is the threshhold between NOW and LATER? Can it be determined by simply asking the question: Is this something you want to keep in your head right now? If it is, then it belongs in NOW or some sub-division of NOW (Tonight or This week perhaps). If it isn't, then it belongs in LATER.

So, what we've been referring to as Triage status" is perhaps better described as *Focus status.

But wait, is there perhaps a 3rd axis emerging?

While there is a close relationship between Tickers/Timeframes and Triage or Focus status, is Triage/Focus really just a hierararchical parent of Ticklers/Timeframes? OR to put it conversely, Are Ticklers/Timeframes really just sub-divisions of Triage/Focus status? Or do they sometimes work independently of each other? I would still maintain that the two are still different axes of metadata. Sometimes, you may assign a Timeframe that is technically in the Future for an item, but still decide that you want to focus on it NOW.

What are some unexpected examples of this?

• A project that is due far into the future, but you need to figure out NOW, some timetable for how long it's going to take and when you'll start on it or else you feel like you're going to forget about it until it's too late. In other words, the project is LATER, but the next action: Figure out a plan, is NOW. We could force the user to state this explicitly in the PIM, create a separate next action: Figure out a plan with an assigned timeframe of Today, but that would be onerous and so much more complicated than simply triaging the item as NOW.
• Fancy dinner Tonight. It's technically not happening until Later, but you want to keep track of it so that you don't forget to leave yourself plenty of time to get dressed and primped. Again, we could force the user to create a separate task for: Remember to leave time to get dressed with an assigned timeframe of Today, but that would be onerous and so much more complicated than simply triaging the item as NOW.
• Lunar eclipse Tonight. It's technically not happening until Later, but whether you regard it as NOW or LATER is going to depend on many different circumstances. For example, if you know you're going to be home for the eclipse, you probably don't need to worry about it until the reminder pops up, reminding you to go outside and look at the eclipse. However, if you plan on driving out to the middle of nowhere to get a better view because you live in a smog-infested city center OR you know you're not going to be near your computer when it happens, you might want to leave it in NOW so it stays fresh in your head all day. You get the picture

The biggest "lesson" learned from these examples is that NOW and LATER are extremely personal assignations and extremely unpredictable because they depend on many different circumstances, most of which are not captured in the PIM system, many of which the user isn't even conscious of.

• Mitch provided a personal use case in support of a 3rd independent axis for focus
  • I have a "today" section in my dashboard which shows events which occur today (is that because they are stamped as tasks?). Do all events which occur today show up here or just the ones I want? If the latter, is that because they are stamped as tasks? One way to interpret this is to say that, Mitch's Today section isn't really a literal Today section, it is a section of Today I items I want to maintain focus on. So you could say that one way to implement sub-divisions of the NOW triage/focus status would be to allow users to sub-divide NOW by other attributes: Section by Triage/Focus status. Sub-Section by Timeframe.
  • NOW might have: Today, Tonight, This week, Other
  • LATER might have: This month, This Quarter, et cetera.

As a result, the best the software can do is display clearly the metadata that IS captured in the system and let the user make personal decisions about what they want in their focus versus what they want out of their focus.

So the three axes of meta-data that have come out of this brainstorm are:

• Phase in life-cycle No action, under 2 minutes, waiting for, look into, black box
• Timeframe Today, Tonight, This week, After so-and-so gets back to me, After some event, Before some milestone, Next year, Someday maybe
• Focus or Triage status Now, Later, Done

FutureBrainstormIdeas