Re: Designing "Finding and Reminding"

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 21:08 +0100, Allan Day wrote:

> I'm not convinced that a journal view is beneficial. Why do I need to
> know which day or week I touched something? Most of the time, I just
> want to see what I handled recently (trip and slip) and what I've marked
> to come back to (the grip).

That segmented, by-day view was just a mockup, and it is not what we are
doing now (the central point of the presentation was just the time-based
view and the general problem of everyday file management).  We are doing
something closer to the FindingAndReminding mockup in the wiki, where
the journal is divided into

  Today
  Yesterday
  This week
  Last week
  Last month

We can play with the actual groupings, but it sounds like it makes sense
to make older periods longer, just like that.  Your episodic memory
fades quickly and ends up very fuzzy, so it doesn't make sense to have
fine-grained time slots for old data.

> I also don't see how a journal is useful for non-recent items. The
> further ago it is that I used something, the less likely I am to
> remember when I used it. :)

The journal is not useful for old items, and doesn't intend to be.  A
lot of the HCI literature after Nardi and Barreau seems to agree that
there are three kinds of data; ephemeral, working, and archival.  The
journal is completely for ephemeral data, somewhat for working data (it
easily lets you see your working set of things that bubble up), and
definitely not for archival.  It *may* help you find year-old stuff if
you have a good memory for time, but that's not its purpose.

Archival is hard, but it's a completely different problem.  For that I'd
look into real full-text searching, and semantic file management.  Look
around www.organise-fw.org - the author, Sebastian Faubel, went to
GUADEC a couple years ago and presented his incredible work; we need
*that* for long-term archival, and it would be a good future direction
for Nautilus.

Again - for FindingAndReminding we are tackling ephemeral and working
data.  For archival data, we'll have a lot of work to do later.

> Both the task pooper and the tickler idea sound a bit annoying. I don't
> want things jumping up at me when I'm in the middle of something. The
> design ethos of GNOME 3 is that people shouldn't be interrupted.
> 
> Right now, my preferred solution to the reminding element would be a
> bookmarking (or 'starring') facility.

Agreed!

I'm writing a narrative for Finding and Reminding, so that we can use a
story to drive the design and look for what it needs; I'll post it
tomorrow after I draw some mockups.

What I have right now is the journal's area split in two, with one part
for the journal itself, and the other for reminders.  "This week", "Next
week", etc.  Those items will bubble up in the Reminders area as time
passes, and when they are overdue they'll just slip back into the
journal.  We can experiment with this.

[Showing related files to the one you selected]
> How is this useful? What kinds of relatedness have you got in mind?

Think of a linear sequence of items, where some of them appear multiple
times in the sequence (e.g. you access a file several times over a
period of time).  Zeitgeist has a data-mining algorithm that can give
you groups of items which you've accessed frequently within small
windows of time.  So if you opened thesis.odt and thesis-todo-list.txt
frequently together, they'll show up in each other's related files.

In general, proximity in time is a good indication of relationship.
Zeitgeist can compute that.

> I'd be interested in hearing how you think your design proposal compares
> to the one that Jon set out a little over a year ago. I presume you
> think that yours is better. ;) Why?

I'm basing this narrative and design on the existing
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/FindingAndReminding
- I hope that is the work by Jon that you mean.

This is just a continuation of that.  Jon was diligent enough to read
through the HCI literature and make an initial design, but AFAIK he
hasn't been able to continue working on it.  We are using that as our
starting point for design and implementation.  If you have seen Seif's
blog (seilo.geekyogre.com), you'll see that we currently have is pretty
similar to the mockup in that FindingAndReminding page.  It's not
finished and it doesn't look *exactly* the same, but it's a work in
progress.

As I said, I'll post the narrative and mockups tomorrow.  These will
make things much clearer, I hope.

  Federico