[Design] Marking events as relevant to me & Determining thatcollections behave like categories

[Seth Johnson]

Mimi Yin wrote:
> 
> I thought the way Bobby described his scenario was a good example of
> how the line between
> 
> 1) "labeling or marking up items" with metadata AND
> 2) creating collections of items
> 
> is fuzzy at best.
> 
> When you're scanning the office calendar, figuring out which events
> are relevant to you...or when you're looking through a pile of
> invitations to meeting, you are in the "marking up mode"...primarily
> because you are focused on the individual items.
> 
> When it's time to step back and review your schedule, you're in
> "collection mode" where you want to gather up all the events you
> marked as relevant into a single view and overlay it with your
> personal schedule...
> 
> I'd like to add this issue to the list of "Design Session" topics we
> tackle post 0.7 planning...along with a more general exploration of
> "Organizational" workflows.


I'd add to this a third kind of collection mode where you aren't
marking up items, just grouping them (and perhaps marking them up
after the fact).  Collecting without programmatic semantics
beyond grouping as parent and children.  This is useful for
starting with a mass of unorganized data and trying to make sense
of it gradually (not to harp on it, but this is what mindmapping
facilitates).

This mode does create (if not mindmapped) long list-mode outlines
of heterogeneous data.  But this process of grouping by hunch and
guess and feel is important.  After awhile, you get a more firm
handle on what groupings mean, and that's when markup of a
different sort comes into play.  The markup you and Bobby
describe is more clear about a specific task you're aimed at:
what's relevant to me, to make a schedule of my own.

You should also give people the ability to plan how attributes
and categories are being used, so people can develop strategies
for using common attributes across contexts.  So you can list and
work out what contexts you want to have a "relevant to me" or
"impacts my schedule" category or attribute for.

As people move towards working with and shaping up data that's
been deferred, they would have access to established attributes,
organized in themselves such that they can better see a plan for
reusing attributes that have already been devised.

This does not necessarily mean attribute types of Who What When
Where Why How, but also giving attributes and categories scopes
of relevance and outlinability in themselves.


I went back to the previous thread on "Determining that
collections behave like categories" to see what that was about.

Now, I posted a series of images of a highly flexible "universal
application" interface at
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/TheProblemWithHeterogeneousInformation

. . . not because these images represent the greatest interface,
but because they show how generic concepts can help you work with
information across "applications."  I was dealing there with how
to deal with heterogeneous data in different applications, so I
left out a couple of images that show how categories fit into
this scheme.  I've posted those images now at:

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/pub/Journal/TheProblemWithHeterogeneousInformation/Seek2.jpg
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/pub/Journal/TheProblemWithHeterogeneousInformation/Seek3.jpg

These two show a menu for seeking a specific review instrument
(the current application type) by categories relevant to the
current "application."


While the interface once again may not be the one you want, you
might find this concept helpful.


Seth





> -------- Original Message --------
>     Subject: Re: [Design] Determining that collections behave like categories
>       Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 11:32:12 -0800
>       From: Mimi Yin <mimi at osafoundation.org>
>         To: Chandler Design list <design at osafoundation.org>
> 
> 
> Thanks for the links to the articles Philippe:
> ===
> From: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3181
> 
> 
> 
>   "The team at University College London found that the master 
>   memorisers have neither higher IQs nor special brain structures 
>   to explain their talent. Instead, when debriefed after the 
>   memory tests, many admitted they always use an ancient Greek 
>   mnemonic technique known as "method of loci".
> 
>   This involves visualising yourself walking along a well-known 
>   route, depositing images of to-be-remembered items at specific 
>   points, then retracing your steps during recall." So clearly, 
>   by having collections in the sidebar that can accommodate a 
>   single item appearing in multiple collections, we're 
>   undermining the brain's "location-based" mechanisms for 1) 
>   remembering where things are and 2) general orientation.
> 
> WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS IN THE SHORT-TERM: I'm wondering if one 
> way to understand why users get disoriented by having 1-item 
> appear in 2-places is the cognitive dissonance that arises from 
> trying to jam virtual concepts into physical metaphors. (ie. 
> search folders, where folders connotes
> 
> Because OTOH, people can be incredibly flexible and agile when 
> navigating concepts and ideas. I think very few people would be 
> confused by the idea that:
> 
> Joan would show up in both of the following lists: + Gender: 
> Female + Hair color: Brown
> 
> Instead, the model that is put forth with search folders is Joan 
> can be found in both: + Folder: Female AND + Folder: Brown
> 
> "Folder" is not a very helpful description of the semantics 
> underlying "Female" and "Brown". But the ability to define 
> "Female" and "Brown" as more than just generic Folders, the 
> ability to define them in terms of an attribute (Gender: and Hair 
> color:) helps the user to understand that they are simply 
> different characteristics or facets of items.
> 
> Another reason why the ability to "attri'bute at'tributes" to 
> collections helps to orient users is simply the "chunking" 
> benefits it affords. Instead of a long list of "Folders" you can 
> now segment the list into "categories of categories: categories 
> based on Gender, categories based on Hair color."
> 
> In Chandler, we're proposing to take this "chunking down" of the 
> sidebar one step further, which is to group the "attributes" into 
> attribute types: Who v. When v. Where v. What, etc.
> 
> The final step (in the short-term) is to provide graphical-visual 
> indicators (aka icons) that expose these various 
> "characteristics" of collections (ie. This is a Who-based 
> collection). 
> http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/LookingToThePhysicalWorld
> 
> WHAT'S THE REAL SOLUTION? These are short-term "compensatory" 
> measures for helping people navigate a virtual landscape 
> organized in terms of conceptual grouping as opposed to physical-
> location-based groupings. I say short-term because I am assuming 
> that we aren't going to reinvent basic UI structures (ie. the 
> triumvirate of sidebar-summary pane and detail view).
> 
> In the long-term however, it may make much more sense to allow 
> people to navigate this conceptual landscape in a way that 
> doesn't "duplicate or triplicate" items into multiple "locations" 
> simply because the "locations" are defined along conceptual axes.
> 
> Instead... + items are arrayed on a canvas that itself has 
> semantic meaning (ie. like a map or a calendar) + items are 
> displayed with visual cues exposing key metadata (ie. an avatar 
> for "who" an email is from, color for "hair color", size for 
> "file size" or "task size")
> 
> In this model, items would never "appear in" multiple locations, 
> thereby violating the "method of loci" described in Philippe's 
> articles. Instead, items remain singular and various ways to 
> "slice and dice" or "group" items emerge from visual groupings. + 
> All green stuff + All big stuff + All stuff in the upper-right-
> hand quadrant
> 
> We already have this kind of view for calendar. It would be 
> interesting to explore a similar UI framework for more generic 
> and heterogeneous displays of data.
> 
> For more detailed descriptions of what I'm proposing, see: 
> http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/LookingToThePhysicalWorld
> 
> Mimi


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