Re: Musings on the contacts user experience

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

(Sent again, didn't seem to reach the list last time)

On Fri, 2011-04-29 at 11:23 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:

> Another thing is that using Overview views for information types that
> are nearly unbounded like "people" is really difficult.  Browsing
> isn't really a good interface for things like this.  More on this
> below.

Clearly if we do this we'd show some limited subset, but even just the
local contacts can be sort of large.

> So, my quick recommendations:
> 
> 1. Contacts
>   * A new application exclusive to and designed for GNOME
>   * Searchable through the OS overview
>      - Activating search results opens contact in Contacts app
>   * App is primarily search based as well
>   * Browsing is assisted through index paging
>   * Primary way to initiate new conversations regardless of method
>   * Should seamlessly integrate contacts from various Online Account providers
> 
> 2. Chat
>   * We initiate a new design exclusive to and designed for GNOME
>   * Serves as the app backing the integrated GNOME chat functionality
>   * Message based - a historical log of "conversations"
>   * This serves as a record of what chats were performed / missed

This sounds good to me. The only thing I'm not sure about is that that
contacts app is the primary way to initiate converstation. That seems
very weird, as the rest of say an IM conversation will be done in the
chat app. It seems more likely that people would start in the chat app
when they're initiating a chat.

> > My main fears in a setup like this is:
> >
> > * Conceptually a "chat" app needs to be running all the time when you're
> > online (as you might get a message), but generally you don't want to see
> > it all the time. With us not having a "good" solution to minimize, and
> > not liking minimize-to-systray-icon we don't have a good way to
> > represent this "running in background" state. The one way to fit this
> > into the shell design is to just put the IM window on some other
> > desktop, but I think that might still be a bit too visible.
> 
> The chat app doesn't have to be running, really.  The OS shell itself
> will happily receive that new message for you.  The issue is really
> more about sign in and sign out.

I'm well aware that technically there is no need for a UI app to be running
all the time. When i say "chat app running" I'm talking about the "mental 
model" in the user, where you typically need something running to get feedback
from it.

But, you're right, this is really more about sign in/out rather than
the actual app running. So if we were to have sign in done via the shell 
somewhere (and feedback on whether we're online or not), then that would
probably be enough, and if you wanted to look at previous converstation or
start a new one you could just open the chat app as if you were starting
an app.