[Design] Bridging the gap - email options

[Mimi Yin]

On Jul 26, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Philippe Bossut wrote:

>> Personally, from a design standpoint, I don't feel that Chandler  
>> will be ready to deal with both noise AND signal. The NOW section  
>> of the Dashboard (given the design we have in the Alpha 4 spec)  
>> could be easily overwhelmed with too many irrelevant emails.
> Well, may be we shouldn't get everything in NOW per default then. I  
> mentioned in a design session that, IMO, having a Not Triaged  
> status was important. To me at least, the 3 important status are  
> Now, Later and Not Triaged. Done is not very important (shouldn't  
> be under my nose at least, more like some sort of archive status).

Yes, the ability to turn on/off an Inbox that is separate from NOW,  
LATER, DONE would be an example of a feature that we should add if  
we're going to deal with large influxes of unprocessed mail. An  
alternative might be the ability to auto-defer things like mailing  
list emails as Maybe Later, aka I'll Get Around To It When I Get  
Around To It.

Mostly it seems like the configuration of Triage status and sections  
in the Dashboard should be a function of the user's noise-to-signal  
ratio.

If you have a lot of noise, you might want the separate Inbox or auto- 
deferral rules to kick in...If you have mostly signal, you might  
prefer to conflate your Inbox with the NOW section.

Something to experiment with would be to set up some thresholds so  
that the Dashboard could reconfigure or offer to reconfigure on its  
own (e.g. when more than 20 messages get dumped into the NOW section).

Mimi