In refining our product message, one question we want to answer well is: What kind of information does Chandler help you manage?

The short answer: Chandler helps you manage all the notes you write to yourself.

The long answer: Chandler helps you Collect, Share and Follow-through all the “stuff” you:

• Email yourself,
• Scribble on napkins,
• Stick in random text files and electronic sticky notes, and
• Put down in paper notebooks.

“Stuff” includes anything from ideas you need to develop and questions you need to follow-up on to things you forgot to do, things you can’t forget to do, meetings, appointments and the odd flash of revelatory inspiration.

In short, your day-to-day life is overflowing with ideas, thoughts and questions you need to Develop, Follow-up on and Get back to and you don’t have a good way to manage it all.

Traditional task managers are too rigid. But you need something more structured than your paper notebook.

Also, almost everything you do involves other people and you find that just managing the communications about what you’re doing as a group is a second job in an of itself.

Some more specific examples:

1. You come out of a meeting with a dozen new “things” to “research” and “think about”. You’ve scribbled them into your notebook. But now you don’t have a good way to develop and track those things as you make progress on them: Follow up with X about Y. Where do you keep track of what X tells you about Y while you figure out what it is you need to do with Y?

2. Pulling a meeting agenda together always generates an algae bloom of email. Once everyone’s input has been gathered and re-gathered over email, you’re the one that has to do the work of collating everybody’s responses.

3. You keep making the same lists all the time and every time, you forget something that you would’ve remembered if you had seen the last list you’d made. But you don’t have a good way to manage all these lists! e.g. Travel packing lists, grocery list, present ideas, thank you notes.

4. When working on drafts with others: Write-ups, status reports, proposals etc., you’re always torn between just sending out what you’ve got so far or wait a little longer. In the meantime, everyone else is unaware of the work you’ve done and working blind.

5. You tried sharing a calendar with others, but you’re the only one who ever looks at it! Whenever you add or change something, you end up having to send email out to get people’s attention anyway. The same thing happens when you try to collaborate on tasks or brainstorming ideas with a wiki. In the end, you always go back to using email.

Why is “What kind of information does Chandler help you manage?” a tricky question to answer?

In a previous post, I talked about using the phrase “personal information manager” to describe Chandler. Taken literally, yes, Chandler is a variant of personal information manager. But, using the PIM label confuses people in the software industry because it’s associated with specific software products that Chandler does not resemble.

The general population doesn’t have such specific product associations, so they might take PIM at face-value. However, the phrase “personal information” is now understood in the vernacular as shorthand for “information about me” (e.g. name, address, social security number, bank accounts, health records, etc.) This is especially true amongst computer-literate, white-collar workers, aka, our target audience.

In case there was any confusion, Chandler is not optimized to manage “information about me”.

Going forward, our task is to re-craft our product message with this in mind, both so we attract the users Chandler was designed for and we set expectations for new users trying out Chandler for the first time.

We often get the question: Is Chandler first and foremost a personal information manager or a collaboration tool?

The latter has groupware connotations we don’t want.

The former makes some people think of Outlook and then begs the question: Why don’t you have Contacts? Why aren’t you an email client?

At the end of the day, Chandler is first and foremost a personal information manager. Not in the way the software industry understands the phrase (Email, Scheduling, Calendar, and Contacts Suite), but in the civilian English sense of the phrase; you put information that is personal in Chandler and it helps you manage it.

(We may yet shy away from using “Personal Information Manager” as a way to market the product, but I find it helpful to think about what Chandler is in terms of the “plain” English meaning of the phrase.)

However, today, no personal information management tool is effective unless it has collaboration baked into its core. For “traditional” PIMs, collaboration means email plus scheduling.

For Chandler, collaboration means full-on, read-write, equal-access sharing. Chandler is for full-time, high-bandwidth collaborators; people who are working so closely together that email and traditional scheduling with it’s formal, moderated process of accepting and declining invitations feels like too much overhead and not enough bandwidth for true collaboration on ideas, goals, open issues and decisions.

Takeaway: Chandler is for personal use and it is effective for personal use because it is an individual-centered way to collaborate intensively with others.

We’ve decided to remove the notion of Task entirely from Chandler and add the notion of a ‘Star’.

The Star isn’t so much a replacement for Tasks. Tasks are nouns, they are a Kind of item, like Notes, Messages and Events. By contrast, the Star is simply an adjective, a way to describe Note, Message and Event items, similar to Triage Status. Below is a discussion of how we arrived at this decision.

One of the more common pieces of feedback we get from users who use Chandler daily is:

I have trouble figuring out how to use the ‘Add to Task list’ button at the top of the item details. I take this to mean: I have trouble figuring out when to call something a Task.

This dilemma is a reflection of how information work has evolved. More and more, the distinction between a task or todo and the substance of the task itself (ideas, thinking, writing) has becoming increasingly blurred and it’s unclear that it helps people to expend a lot of energy drawing that distinction.

I believe this is why for many people, text files, outliners, paper notebooks and email are generally preferred over more structure task / project management tools. None of these things require you to decide what’s a task and what’s a thought about a task.

If you want to maintain a list of “Ideas for new charter for company blog”, is that just a note-to-self? Or is it a task? It depends on how you choose to frame it: “Brainstorm ideas for new charter for company blog” (Task) or “Ideas for new charter for company blog” (Note).

What about “Write up proposal for new charter for company blog” versus “Proposal for new charter for company blog” The first is a task. The second is the substance of the task: the proposal itself. At the end of the day, both amount to the same thing.

For more details about what this conceptual change means for the user interface, see:

• Chandler-Dev list proposal for a ‘Pared down UI’
• Bug 11771 to change the Task Stamp to the Star Stamp.

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.

Mimi and Katie talked in ealier posts about expanding the Chandler Universe by developing a Plug-in for Thunderbird.

The plug-in would allow Thunderbird users to interface directly with the Chandler Hub.

Some of the current ideas on what actions the Thunderbird Plug-In would perform are:

1. Sync messages in IMAP Drafts/Sent folders with Chandler Drafts/Sent messages.
2. Stamp a message and add it to a list of collection(s)
3. Assign Triage status to message items
4. Map individual IMAP folders to collections
5. Receive notifications from Hub Service when: a. New / Edited items in a collection b. Items tickled to NOW

What features would others like to see?

Is the idea of a plug-in to Thunderbird useful to the Chandler User base? Will a plug-in help attract new users?

If you have any suggestions for features that you would like to see implemented in a Thunderbird plug-in now is the perfect time to share them.

We’re working on solidifying our plan over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I find it helpful to think in terms of the following analogy:

OSAF is a ship approaching harbor.

We know where in the harbor we want to dock, it’s called Small Workgroup Collaboration. We have a growing number of users today. We need to build on that to get to the dock.

But there is a difficult reef to negotiate in order to get to the dock.

We can only cross that reef in a little dingy, which necessarily means fewer people and a clear, singular focus.

So, what’s the reef?

Caveat: What I have here is not meant to be ‘official OSAF thinking’ or the ‘final plan’. This is simply my best articulation of where we’re at, at this point in time. I’m expecting that the real plan will emerge over the next few weeks.

Extend Chandler to reach into places where there are already users. Some ideas we’ve discussed include:

• Thunderbird plug-in
• SMS to/from mobile devices
• Facebook app
• iGoogle widget

Improve our marketing messaging. This includes things like:

• Converge on a crisp articulation of Chandler’s core offering. In particular, who is Chandler intended for, what problems does it solve and how does it solve them? More specifically, we need to answer the question from the ‘Chandler as a Managed Workspace’ design list thread:

Why is what we have already good enough for some people such that they have Chandler open all the time and use it as a source of truth? Why do they use it even though I know everyone has a long wish list of features they’d really, really like to have?

• Revamp the landing page,
• Pull together a demo build around real Chandler usage scenarios,
• Post more regularly to this blog to improve transparency into our planning and product decision making process,
• Reach out to build a community around evangelizing Chandler.

Improve usability so that we don’t lose users who are interested in Chandler but get stuck trying to do basic set-up tasks. This includes:

• Smooth out the sign-up process, in particular, setting up the Desktop to sync with the Hub Service,
• Round out basic import/export, share and subscribe functionality in the web app,
• Improve initial split-second visual impressions of both web and desktop apps,
• Implement multi-select to delete/triage/drag and drop multiple items at a time,
• Allow users to re-order collections in the sidebar.

Solidify our offering so that people stick with the product and pass it on to others, aka Remove roadbloacks to people seeing and experiencing Chandler’s core offering.

• Fix pop-to-NOW bugs that are obscuring collaboration workflows and usage scenarios,
• Display the # of unread items for shared collection in sidebar,
• Separate Detail View,
• Finish Month View,
• Print,
• Ways to sub-section the LATER section,
• Reference / Resource / Document Kind for managing reference notes and materials.

Solidify our offering so that we attract a development community.

Lifehacker: Previewing Chandler, The PIM for the People

A month back, we were mentioned on the lifehacker blog as “the PIM for the People”.

What have we done to deserve such a title? Gina Trapani, the blog editor picked out this phrase from our vision statement:

“Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.”

I’m glad that this resonated with her. It’s something we should certainly build on and refine.

On the other hand, she also said: “As for the preview release, well, it has some ways to go” and “it’s not stable software ready for primetime”. She cited inability to sync completely with Gmail as her personal blocker. (She’s not the first to have this reaction.)

We’re certainly taking these kinds of concerns seriously. We’ve found that most people who show up on the users list and are using Chandler for tasks and calendaring find the desktop sufficiently stable to meet their needs. However, if you’re running on an older machine (e.g. PPC Mac) or if you’re hoping to get all your email into Chandler, the app might feel unstable.

But she did follow up with: “…the Chandler preview IS an exciting tease at a unified inbox/calendar/task list that keeps all your stuff in one place while offering decentralized sharing capabilities.”

She also sees us as potentially “delivering users from the evil of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server”.

The lifehacker post illustrates both what’s best and worst about our efforts thus far to communicate to a wider audience about what we are and what we hope to become. Questions we need to answer in the coming months include:

1. Is it really a given that people won’t use Chandler until it replaces their email client? The response to What is Chandler supposed to be for, anyway? shows signs that with the right messaging and relatively lightweight feature improvements, we could convince people to use Chandler as an add-on to their existing email client.

2. There is something appealing about Chandler as an open source project and Chandler as an attempt to up-end existing information management paradigms. It would be interesting to better understand: What in the product itself gives people a sense that we’re living up to our promise? Or is it just our verbiage that’s convincing?

3. What about Chandler as Outlook/Exchange killer? Do we need to have that to keep people interested? We try to repudiate it wherever we can, but it’s a label that’s stuck. How do we set expectations correctly without presenting it as a lack, deficiency?

We’ve heard from many corners that starting up Chandler is an intimidating experience, the app feels heavy, over-bloated with features. It’s taken me a long time to ‘get’ what that means. Here’s one explanation: (As usual, it has to do with context and history.)

When Chandler began, it was going to be the alpha and the omega of information management. It was going to swallow traditional PIM functionality wholesale (Email, Notes, Tasks, Calendar, Contacts) and extend to manage non-PIM data as well: Documents, Media, URLs, etc.

The theory was: The reason why information management sucks is due to a lack of integration. Integration in terms of data types and integrations in terms of workflow.

In the meantime, the world around us changed. Instead of a trend towards more ‘integrated’ solutions, people are adopting a wider range of tools and workflows are knit together via a wide variety of interoperation techniques.

What does this mean for Chandler? Do we still have a place in this new world?

I think so. I think we’ve actually been evolving with the rest of the world. We have not been working in a vacuum for the last 2 years. Instead, we’ve dramatically re-framed the way in which Chandler integrates. Chandler is no longer about replacing your email client, enterprise email, calendaring and content management systems, wiki, project manager, IM, news reader…

Instead, Chandler is meant to live in the middle of all these tools as a way to pull all the disparate bits and pieces of information we receive out-of-context, into a contextualized, personal and shared ’source of truth’.

That being said, the user interface we have today is misleading. It contains vestiges of the ‘old’ way of thinking about integration which has the potential to scare new users away, both because there is provokes a gut-level sense that the app is big and complicated and that you can’t get started without moving your entire world into Chandler.

For example, there is an out-sized emphasis on email functionality, left over from the days when we were adamant about being a complete PIM solution. In reality, email in Chandler today plays an important, but supporting role. We talk about it as a means of:

1. Outreach: A way to get information out of the ‘Chandler’ eco-system into other people’s Inboxes; and as a

2. Bridge: A way for Chandler users to get information from their email clients into Chandler.

So, how do we proceed to lighten-up the app so that it’s a more accurate reflection of what Chandler is meant to do? Here are some ideas:

1. Remove the Reply, Reply All, Forward buttons from the Toolbar; and
   

2. Add a Reply/Forward menu item to the Item menu

3. Remove the the ‘New’ button from the Toolbar and really focus on the quick item entry bar as the way to create new items in Chandler.

4. Rename the Mail application area Messages so that it’s more of a ‘Message Center’, a place where you can see the messages you sent/received from Chandler (not un-like Inboxes for social networking sites like Facebook or Linked In), and less of a “Mail Application”.

I will be thinking about this in the coming weeks and am interested in other perspectives. See discussion on the list: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2007-December/008035.html

Robert Scoble interviewed us for 51 minutes. Still, I realized that there were significant things I had left out while caught in the headlights of the camera.

Here’s a brief description of some of the neat features in the Mini-Calendar and Preview Pane on Chandler Desktop.

More egregiously however, when showing the Triage Table, I failed to showcase the considerable ‘Brain’ that decides what metadata to show when for each item of information.

The idea of having a heterogeneous view of data is not new. In the ‘real’ world, our ‘collections’ are more often heterogeneous than not. Just open up your desk drawer and take a look.

It’s a simple, accessible idea until you try to normalize that data by cramming it into a table where every row of information needs to conform to the same 5 columns of attributes.

How do you fit

• Notes that have creators and editors and created on and last edited dates; in the same table as
• Messages that have a sender, recipients, and date sent;
• Tasks that have owners, reminder dates and due dates; with
• Events that have organizers, invitees and start dates and end dates.

The few places I’ve seen this done, normalization was achieved by whittling down what’s displayed to the lowest common denominator: Titles and Date Last Edited. This approach generally yields an information-poor display of data that is not very useful.

We achieved normalization without losing data by adding a layer of abstraction.

We grouped all of the ‘Who’ attributes into a singled column

• Created / Edited by
• To / From / Updated by

and all of the ‘When’ (Date) attributes into a single column:

• Created /Edited on
• Sent / Received on
• Starts on
• Remind on

The problem is, most Chandler items have all of these attributes so we needed a way to decide which attribute to show under what circumstances. This is a tricky path to negotiate and we’re continually refining our heuristics.

What is ‘most important’ is subjective, but there are a few rules that we believe hit a fair majority of use cases:

• Message items always display From/To in the Who column depending on whether the message is Inbound or Outbound.
• The Who column always displays ‘Edited by’ when an item has been modified by a fellow subscriber.
• Depending on ‘the current time’ we figure out the ‘Next Important Date’ is to display in the Date column. For example, event dates usually trump all other dates, but if an event has past but there’s still an alarm set for next Tuesday, we display the alarm date.

Either way, the bet we’re making is that it’s better to display something even if it’s the wrong thing some of the time than to display nothing at all.

(My Space + Facebook are heretofore referred to as My Face.)

Maybe not if My Face means the following to you:

1. Here’s me gone wild at happy hour after I got laid off.

2. Here’s a picture of my boss gone wild at Mardi Gras I found on the internet.

3. Gold text on silver background.

4. Blink tag.

5. Repeating zebra background that makes it impossible to read anything that isn’t blinking gold text on silver background.

6. Altar to Slash from Guns N’ Roses. So hhhot!

But if you step away from My Face and take a look at it in the abstract, the difference between My Face and ‘adult’ modes of communication (email, mailing lists, IM, SMS, blogs, feeds) essentially boils down to layout. My Face is full-on, full-boar, multi-channel communication with pictures, video, music all coming at you *at the same time, NOT a long scrolling page of text occasionally wrapped around embedded images and video.

Gen Y communication is concomitant. Even as your reading this long blog post, some of you are probably skimming up, down and around the page, reading in figure eights, trying to take in linear text all at once, as a picture.

How overwhelming, not to mention tacky. But the multi-channeled hodgepodge experience My Face provides is more true to life. Life in the ‘real’, physical world is a multi-media affair (an oftentimes tacky multi-media affair). But hanging out with friends on My Face is in some ways better (or at least more scalable) than hanging out with them in real-time / real-life because like email, IM and blogs, My Face is virtual and not bound by the limitations of time and space.

1. Location is not an issue.

2. Like email and IM, hanging out on My Face is an asynchronous activity. Unlike face-to-face interactions, leaving a friend hanging for a few seconds, minutes or even hours as you switch focus to engage with othes isn’t rude, it’s routine.

Nevertheless, like IM, the irreducible unit is still the friend, contact, person…so My Face isn’t as granular / flexible as email which comes in discrete units (messages) organized by topic (threads) addressed to an ever-changing cast of contacts.

But what we gain with the loss of granularity! My Face gives you a wholistic(ish) view into your friend’s comings and goings. The gestalt of your My Face companions are offered up on their pages. They’re open as a book, but unlike a book, they’re consumed with a 3 second glancing shot down the page (assuming it loads quickly enough).

It turns out that the very granularity that makes email an unparalleled productivity tool is also the very thing that is its undoing.

Instead of managing people we’re managing individual messages. Topic areas span dozens of emails and email threads. As we vigilantly stand over our Inboxes devouring every morsel that comes in, we lose sight of the big picture.

The fluidity with which individuals can be added and dropped from threads means that through the filter of our individual Inboxes, we are each touching a different part of the proverbial elephant.

So we’ve come full circle, can My Face be applied to the workplace, if so how? Even more interesting, could modeling My Face around the small work-group collaboration scenarios we’ve been focusing on make for a better My Face experience overall?