Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve been plugging away at a Work Queue for Chandler Desktop. By we, I mean Grant.

The thinking behind the work queue is to isolate the half-dozen or so usability issues we feel are the biggest blockers to new users understanding what Chandler is, and how to set about using it. In that sense, the bugs in the Work Queue are not necessarily the most egregious bugs. For example, several serious crash bugs and the false-positive pop-to-NOW bugs were omitted from the list. They are also not necessarily the most ‘oft-requested’ features from our current users. For example, the ability to spawn sub-tasks, aka clusters and Print were omitted from the list.

Instead the focus is to remove the hurdles that all users run into within 30 seconds of downloading and launching the application. Many of the hurdles are conceptual. I’ve sent a number of messages to the Chandler-Dev list dissecting these conceptual barriers:

• Pared down Desktop UI - Part 1
• Next Usability Hurdle: Answering the question: What should an item be?

1. New users are confused by the abundance of email functionality in the user interface. Is Chandler meant to replace your email application or not?
2. New users are confused by what genre / category of software Chandler falls into. Is Chandler meant to replace Outlook? Apple iCal? My journal / notebook? Email, Tasks and Calendar functionality makes Chandler look like a traditional PIM. But there’s a lot of missing functionality typically associated with PIMS (e.g. contacts, full-blown support for email, scheduling, etc). You could also *try* to understand Chandler as a super-duper Task Manager, but again, there’s a lot of missing functionality typically associated with robust Task Managers (e.g. dependencies, assignees, %done, milestones, etc).
3. New users don’t understand what an ‘item’ is supposed to be, as a result, they have difficulty getting started putting data into Chandler. It’s not that mechanisms for creating new items are hard to learn. It’s that the concept of an ‘item’ is too abstract. When faced with the question: Do you have any items to put into Chandler, many users simply go blank.
4. New users have trouble understanding Chandler’s mental model for sharing. In particular, there appears to be a lot of cognitive hoops to jump through just to get your data up on Chandler Hub. This problem can be entirely addressed from the Desktop side. I’ve started a separate thread on establishing a similar Work Queue for the Chandler Hub UI.

We are addressing these issues by:

1. Doing a better job of introducing the product to new users (e.g. better demos; better, more accessible quick start guide);
2. Smoothing out crucial workflows (e.g. guiding users through sharing set-up);
3. Simplifying the user interface, removing concepts that might mislead users into thinking Chandler is a PIM / Task Manager when it’s not (e.g. removing superfluous email buttons from the toolbar; removing the concept of a task);
4. Tweaking Chandler concepts to be more immediately understandable (e.g. changing the concept of an item to a note; changing the task stamp into a star stamp - I will be posting a more in-depth discussion of this issue);
5. Doing a better job of communicating Chandler’s core value through the user interface (e.g. improving the Notes field in the item details to encourage users to think of Chandler as *the* destination for dumping ideas, stray thoughts and questions; providing visual feedback when a shared collection has unread edits to showcase the power of Chandler’s collaboration workflows.

That being said, it is still important for us to keep track of critical bugs, bugs getting in the way of day-to-day usage and features that would greatly enhance the Chandler experience for current users.

I’ve included a list of these bugs and feature requests at the bottom of the Work Queue. If any of these are expedient to take on and/or we end up with extra time on the Desktop side before we’re ready to declare 1.0 for the project as a whole, it would certainly be worthwhile to tackle some of these bugs.

There is also the larger issue of performance, in particular start-up time. There isn’t a lot we can do in the short-term to address performance. We have been working on a rearchitecture project that would address many of the performance problems people run into today, but a completely re-architected Chandler Desktop is not going to emerge in the next 3-6 months.

I can say that we hope to alleviate some of the pain caused by slow start-up time with strategically placed web widgets. For example, we hope to deliver a Quick Entry web widget in the next month or so that would allow users to quickly get ideas and notes into Chandler via Chandler Hub without having to fire up the Desktop app. These are the kinds of things we can realistically accomplish in the next few months.

In the meantime, our first and foremost priority is to turn the Chandler Desktop interface into an effective communicator of what it’s useful for and how it’s useful.