Creating pre-filled Activities

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi all,
since it has become relevant to the discussion about the "Edit Activities" 
dialog, I will now present an idea that Fania, Thorsten Prante from Zeitgeist 
and me had at the last PA sprint.

The idea is to allow the user to create a new Activity based on what he's 
actually working on at the moment.

The scenario is as follows (this is still work in progress and subject to 
change, but this is roughly the direction we're heading):

Anne receives an email asking her to prepare a presentation for a meeting on 
very short notice. Since she doesn't have much time, she dives right into work 
without remembering to create an Activity for the task.
Anne does research on the web, opens webpages, source documents, other e-mails 
etc. Then at some point Anne realizes that all the resources she uses for her 
task call for their own Activity. She pulls out the Activity Switcher and taps 
"Add Activity".
A wizard pops up, presenting her with a choice between an empty Activity and one 
pre-filled with the resources relevant to her current context. She chooses to 
crate a pre-filled activity. Next, she chooses the last hour as the time-frame 
of her current context. In the next step, Anne chooses a name and wallpaper for 
her new Activity and finishes the Activity creation.
A new Activity is created, containing all the resources she has worked with 
during the last hour.

This process of choosing between empty and pre-filled Activity and adjusting the 
time-frame (we might even offer different sets of resources, e.g. some based on 
time and others based on location or semantic connections) is something that is 
only done during Activity creation, not when editing an Activity later. 
Therefore the two processes differ if want to offer users the benefit of 
Recommendation during Activity creation.

I hope this explains why Fania is pushing for a wizard to create an Activity.
Yes, this does make the Activity creation process a bit slower, but having an 
Activity which already contains relevant resources right form the start instead 
of having to manually connect them all should more than compensate for that.

Cheers,
Thomas