The life of an activity - Contour UI concept part I

[Fania Jöck]

Hi,

Today I want to start the series of sharing our thoughts about the 
Contour User Interface Design. Its going to be about the big topics in 
Contour like Activities, Recommendations, Resources and Context and how 
they are represented in the screens.

So, today I want to write about the "life of an activity" to provide a 
bigger picture about activities in general. Activities are one on the 
central points in Contour. They are the stable part of the UI while 
recommendations, context and resources are dynamically changing over 
time and usage.
Definitions for activities are:
- Activities can be created or removed only by the user. The system can 
suggest new activities when the user drasticaly changes the way they 
normally use an activity. But the system will never create activities 
automatically.
- There is always exactly one current activity.

The average "life cycle of an activity" is described in the attached 
document. It gives an overview over the principle actions that occur to 
an activity: create new activity, add resources manually and via 
recommendations, delete/unconnect resources from activity and the 
deletion of the activity itself. Some parts like the 
create-new-activity-Screen and the add-new-resource-Screen are still 
missing and will be defined later in our project.

So, the following elements are displayed on the Activity screen (see 
Contour_ActivityScreen.jpg for visual design):
- Name of activity as title on top
- Resources
- Group boxes of resources (automatically created by the type of 
resources or a mixed and individualised group)
- Widgets (active apps, etc)
- Recommendations to resources (displayed in the context menu 
individually on each resource icon, see last Emails from notmart)
- Recommendations in general in the recommendation overlay (highlight of 
the recommendation icon on the left)

The following interactions are possible on the activity screen:
- SCROLLING: Within the boxes the user can scroll the list of resources; 
a small arrow appears if more resources are available in the box; also 
the number of resources on top of each box indicates how many elements 
it contains.
- DRAGGING: rearranging and dragging boxes in different order might be 
helpful as well in supporting the user to create his own customized 
activity. Right now the system just adds more boxes and sorts them 
alphabetically. Also the different devices can display different amounts 
of boxes then, on the smartphone maybe a more linear order while on a 
bigger surface the boxes are arranged in multiple lines.
- RENAMING: Renaming the boxes would be a nice feature as well, as the 
user could not only create type-boxes (grouped resources of the same 
type) but also individualized, mixed boxes
- ZOOMING: After short usability testings, most users wanted to zoom in 
and out of the interface to get a bigger picture. This might be a nice 
and intuitive gesture to get in a short amount of time a bigger picture 
of the activity, orientate and zoom in again in the box you searched 
for. The details of the screen would change in this case: big view: only 
boxes with names - normal view: boxes with resource names and icons.
- MINIMIZING: Another option to the zooming interface would be the 
possibility of minimizing the boxes, as seen in the UI Design example 
Screen (Contour_ActivityScreen.jpg). So the user can collapse the boxes 
so that only the title of the box is shown; maybe also the function 
"minimize all" or "maximize all" can help here to give a quick overview 
over the content of the activity.

Adding new resources to the activity could be done in 2 different ways: 
first there could be an add button directly on top of every box or 
second there could be a general add-button.
* Pro's for add button in every box:
- direct correlation of the newly added resource to relevant box, so 
type of newly added resource is already clear
* Con's for add button in every box:
- a lot of call to actions on the screen
- can be unintentionally be touched while reorganizing the boxes and 
dragging them around
* Pro's for general add button:
- only one element on the screen that supports that function, no 
duplicate call-to-actions
* Con's for add button in every box:
- the box to which the resource should be added, has somehow to be 
selected, for example by dragging the item directly into the box or by 
selecting the box-types by a list (in case if we support "mixed boxes", 
not only type-based boxes)

So, I would suggest to display just one big "add resource" Button on the 
top of each activity. Then we have to decide whether we let the user 
drag the resources into the desired box or if he chooses from a list 
somehow.

Ok, thanks for reading and feedback is welcome :)
Fania

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