[Design] [Proposal] Sidebar Virtuality

[Mimi Yin]

Again, in the interest of having something experimentally usable, if  
not entirely useful, sooner rather than later, I'm putting forth a  
proposal for some changes to the sidebar that will hopefully help  
users understand 'What the deal is' with how the Sidebar works.

1. Add a divider between the out of the box collections and the user- 
defined collections (see divider in sidebar of OSX Finder)
2. Restore icons for the out of the box collections
3. Disallow overlays for the out of the box collections (no rollover  
icons at all)
4. Rename the 'All' collection 'Dashboard' across all App areas
5. Have the 'Dashboard' come up as a Table view across all App areas
6. Have the 'Dashboard' collection icon change depending on the App area

Why rename the 'All' collection to be Dashboard and turn it into a  
Table view across all App areas?

+ Make it clear that it is a special collection that includes all  
user-defined collections, unless the user has explicitly said  
otherwise. The 'Dashboard' is our equivalent of the iTunes and iPhoto  
'Library' collections.

+ Make it clear that this is where we expect users to spend most of  
their time

+ Because of sharing, no one seems to be using the My calendar as  
their main calendar. Instead, we can repurpose the 'My calendar' to  
be the calendar 'Dashboard': a way for users to keep on top of and  
triage:
a. Sharing invitations they receive and send out; and
b. Changes and edits to shared calendars.

+ Lacking an explicit Accept/Decline/Tentative workflow, we need a  
way to "quarantine" invitations from being automatically plopped on  
the user's calendar. By turning the 'My calendar' into a calendar app  
area 'Dashboard', invitations are quarantined in the 'Dashboard'  
unless the user explicitly adds them to a calendar, either via:
a. Drag and drop
b. Labeling the item

Things we should hold off on:
+ Collection icons for user-defined collections
+ Improvements to sidebar icons in general (collection icons, sharing  
icons)
+ Sidebar Collections defined around a specific Attribute: Attribute  
value pair (e.g. From: Mary)

===

Preserving selection when switching App areas.
In the interest of not rocking the boat too much. I propose that we  
keep the model we have today for the Alpha releases.

I would however like to look into ways we can replicate the overlay  
behavior in the calendar in the summary table, e.g.:
+ Grey out text for activated, but not selected collections
+ Add a column to display the collection color(s) of items

Q. How hard is this?

Otherwise, having any overlays at all in the non-calendar views is  
just annoying and users will always want to turn off all the checked  
collections when switching out of the Calendar app area.

Also, we will have an intern on the PPD team this summer (Ashkan  
Soltani) who is going to instrument Chandler in order to study user  
behavior. How users want the sidebar checkboxes and sidebar selection  
to work when they switch App areas is high on our list of questions  
we want to answer with real user data.

Thx, Mimi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/attachments/20060517/ef20726e/attachment.htm