[Chandler-dev] Next Usability Hurdle: Answering the question: What should an item be?

[Mimi Yin]

Now that Grant is happily ;) plugging away at paring down the UI:  
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2008-February/ 
009558.html

I'd like to introduce the next set of bugs to tackle on the Desktop  
Work Queue: Helping new users understand how to think of the 'item- 
unit' in Chandler. We've gotten a lot of feedback that it takes quite  
a bit of hard thinking for people to wrap their head around what  
might constitute an item. We'd like to lower the cognitive barrier to  
getting started with dumping ideas into Chandler.

1. Item is an awfully abstract concept. Let's center the user's  
thinking around more concrete ideas like Notes, Messages and Events.  
This mostly means changing the hint text in the Quick Entry field  
from 'Create a new item.' to 'Create a new note.'

I think we should also remove the hint text about /Find. I think it  
unnecessarily clutters the Quick Entry field and makes it so that you  
don't even necessarily realize that, that's how you can create new  
items. I'm also not sure how important it is that users understand  
how to search, especially new users who don't have any data yet! The  
hint text also misled Phillip to believe that you had to type out / 
Find in order to search, whereas you can actually just hit the  
standard Cmd/Ctrl-F keyboard shortcut to invoke search as well.

2. A user suggested that our OOTB items could be more useful. Instead  
of Chandler-related tasks and events, we should instead provide a  
list of 'fill-in-the-blank' items that better demonstrate how  
Chandler is most useful. I've done a first pass at an OOTB set. Many  
of the items are based on use cases current users have sent to the  
mailing lists.

You can check out the items I've created by downloading the .chex  
file from this bug and loading it into Chandler. Be careful not to  
overwrite your own data! https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/ 
show_bug.cgi?id=10557

Feedback on this set of items would be great.

Mimi