[Design][Sum] Improving the Who Column (nee Chandler IMAP folders and the mail-stamp)

[Mimi Yin]

I'm continuing this thread: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/ 
design/2007-September/007662.html with a more holistic title.

After meeting separate with Bryan Stearns and Philippe today, I have  
a proposal for how we can iteratively improve the Who column to make  
it both more understandable and more usable for certain core sharing  
scenarios.

Core scenarios we'd like to solve:
1. Just like dates, for any given item, there are many 'who (aka  
person)' attributes: Created by, Edited by, From, To, CC, BCC, Sent  
by, Updated by, etc... Our goal has been to try as much as possible  
to intelligently display the 'who attribute' users *most* associate  
with any given item.
- For non message items, the rule has been either Edited by or  
Created by (if the item has not been subsequently edited).
- For message items, the assumption is that depending on whether the  
message is fromMe or toMe, the user will want to see the opposite  
attribute. For fromMe items, show who the message is 'to' in the Who  
column. For toMe items, show who the message is 'fr' in the Who column.
- For shared items, it's important to be able to see who edited an  
item last.

As you can see, problems arise when you have an item that is both  
shared and a message. Currently sharing wins over message-ness and  
'fr/to-ness' is permanently lost in the Who column once a message  
item has been edited.

2. Sharing group task lists. When sharing group task lists, it would  
be nice to see who the tasks are assigned to in the Who column. We'd  
like to encourage users to start using the Addressing stamp as a way  
to assign tasks.

Currently this is hard to do because if an item is neither fromMe nor  
toMe (which will be the common case for shared tasks list, most tasks  
will be neither assigned to me nor assigned by me), we display the  
'fr' field in the Who column, when what you want to do is display the  
'to' field so you can see who the task is assigned to.

To better serve the 2 scenarios listed above, I've filed the  
following bugs.

Nominations for 0.7.1
10924 Leave Who column blank when user stamps an item but doesn't  
address it
+ Currently, we display the 'fr' field for fromMe items that are not  
addressed 'to' anyone. This confuses the model that all fromMe  
messages display 'to' and all toMe messages display 'fr' in the Who  
column.

10927 Make 'Edited by' in the Who column, transient for messages
+ This addresses the problem in Scenario 1 where if a message item is  
shared, the 'fr/to' attribute (which we think is the most important  
Who-attribute associated with message items) is lost forever from the  
Who column as soon as that item is edited. However, we don't want to  
be overzealous in preserving 'fr/to' metadata because it's also very  
important for sharing subscribers to see who last changed items in a  
shared collection. Bug 10927 would make it so that 'Edited by'  
displays 'temporarily' in the Who column, long enough for users to  
get an impression of who changed what in the shared collection...but  
not permanently such that 'fr/to-ness' is lost forever in the table.

10925 Display 'to' if message is neither fromMe nor toMe
+ This allows us to better server Scenario 2: Sharing group task  
lists and seeing who tasks are assigned to in the Who column.

Phase 2
10933 Don't change the Who column and Comm Status column when editing  
sent/recvd messages
+ I would have added this to Phase 1, but I have information that  
this is not a piece of cake to figure out. The reasoning behind this  
bug is that most of the time when users edit messages that have  
already been sent/received, they are not doing so to send it out  
again as an update. So until we have a way for users to explicitly  
specify whether they're editing just for the sake of editing or  
editing for the sake of updating, let's err on the conservative side  
and assume they're editing just for the sake of editing. This means  
that if I edit an email I received, I will continue to see no icon in  
the Communication Status column, as in, I will *not* see an outbound- 
draft-update icon AND the Who column won't replace who the message is  
'fr', which is really what's important to me, with who the message is  
'to' (which in all likelihood is me, since it's a toMe message).

10928 Temporarily display 'Last modified date' in Date column for  
Events and/or items with Ticklers
+ This is to make the Date column behave more consistently with the  
Who column as described in bug 10927 above. I only have this in Phase  
2 because I'm assuming it's a bunch of extra work. If it's the same  
as bug 10927, we should do these 2 things together.

10930 Better visual feedback for 'transient' 'ed' and 'last mod on'  
attributes in the Who and Date columns
+ This is to provide better visual feedback, to warn users that the  
Who and Date columns

Phase 3
10931 A way to specify what attribute you see in the Who and Date  
columns
+ This would provide users with the ultimate flexibility for  
specifying what they see in the 'Who column' to satisfy specific use  
cases like:
- Sharing group tasks lists and seeing which tasks are assigned to  
whom. If we do phase 1 and 2, we roughly have this scenario covered,  
but there will *still* be the case where a task is assigned 'to you'  
and is therefore considered a 'toMe' message and displays 'fr' in the  
Who column.
- Searching by a particular Who attribute

Future
10932 More specific flavors of 'From' and 'To'
+ Like Assigned by, Organizer and Assigned to, Invite
+ By making the semantics of From and To more explicit, users may  
have an easier time figuring how use the 'From' and 'To' fields to do  
things like assign tasks and send invitations.

Open Issues
Philippe also had a suggestion for suppressing 'Created by' and  
'Edited by' in the Who column for non-message items, even if those  
items are shared. This would in effect, leave the column blank  
whenever 'you' create or edit a none-message item.

There's been little controversy over suppressing this metadata for  
non-shared items. However, the thinking behind showing it for shared  
items was that it was useful for people to see what items they cr/ed  
versus what items other people cr/ed. However, Philippe pointed out  
that:

+ Even when collections are shared, they are often shared for the  
sake of sharing with yourself, not with others; OR they are shared  
with others who don't really edit the items very much. So mostly, all  
the items are cr/ed by 'me'.
+ For collections that are shared with and actively edited by others,  
users can still infer that they cr/ed an item by the lack of metadata  
in the Who column. In other words, blank Who column = cr/ed by 'me'.

I was about to log this bug and describe the above behavior. However,  
I realized that there is the funny case where you have a shared item  
that was last edited by someone else and then you come along and edit  
it and the Who column goes blank. Is that too weird?

Mimi



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