[chandler-users] Notes from demo of Chandler

[Jeffrey Harris]

Hi Folks,

Here are my notes from demoing Chandler to a CS professor and CS program
admissions director, technically savvy but not typically an early
adopter, whose use of email and collaboration scenarios I think are
reasonably close to those of a Hub, call him D.

The first thing D did was follow the directions in the new "delete
sample items" item, which had the unfortunate effect of exposing a bug
where deleted items don't stay in the dashboard or move to the trash (I
fixed that over the weekend).

D switched to the Calendar view and played with the calendar.  When
trying to select collections, he repeatedly clicked the overlay tongues
in the sidebar and wasn't able to change which collection was selected
during a few minutes of trying because he was so strongly drawn to the
tongues.

After the feature was explained, D mentioned that he'd prefer that the
tongues not change to their mouseover state in the collection name area.

When experimenting with the minicalendar, D grasped the minicalendar
immediately, although he didn't notice the freebusy bars until they were
pointed out.  He was confused by a few things, though.

In calendar filter D didn't understand why the preview area didn't
change with the week selected.  When he switched to the All filter he
was *very* confused by the Today clickable area in the minicalendar.  He
interpreted it as a label emphasizing that either the preview area or
minicalendar were rendering today, which didn't seem accurate.

When I explained that Today is actually essentially a button, he
suggested that it either be rendered as a button, or, better, that its
text say "Goto Today" or "-> Today", or both.

After returning to the Calendar filter, D selected the Dashboard, and
was worried by the fact that the view changed from Calendar view to
table list.  At this point I explained that the buttons at the top are
really filters, and talked a little about the goal of managing focus and
filtering heterogeneous items in the Dashboard, at this point he seemed
more comfortable with the unexpected view shift.

When prompted to change the triage status of an item, D wasn't sure how
to do it, he tried clicking on the Triage toolbar button at first, but
immediately grasped the concept of triaging items once he was directed
to click on an individual item's colored rectangle.

The demo was undermined pretty dramatically in this case by the bug that
causes the quick-entry widget to cover the toolbar Triage button.  Later
that bug unexpectedly went away, so D got a chance to see the icon and
he said he liked it and thought he would've understood what the button
did if he'd seen the icon with different colored arrows changing.

He suggested that the tooltip language for the triage button didn't
really suggest to him that all items would be reorganized by their
triage color, Triage button tooltip.

Other impressions in no particular order:

- Web based access through hub seemed important, good that we
  (almost) have that
- Update item in place by email sounded useful
- Currently reminder can't be removed from the table view if they're
  15-minute-before reminders, as opposed to custom "at 5PM" reminders,
  (I filed bug 9831)

D's general impression was that there were *lots* of different,
orthogonal features, he acknowledged that it's hard to make a UI that
presents so many details cleanly.  Of course D could be described as
somewhat biased, seeing as how he's my dad :)

Sincerely,
Jeffrey