Creating pre-filled Activities

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Friday 30 March 2012 22:26:56 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> this sounds cool. will it get used? in this manner?
> 
> would a more common use case be that when "Anne receives an email asking her
> to prepare a presentation for a meeting on very short notice." she wants to
> pull together all information related to that topic that already exists?
> or an activity that reflects / is based on / is the activity related to that
> task of the person who sent it to her?

If the system already has enough data to "know" the related information then 
yes, sure, that would be even better. Btw, that's what I meant by "activities 
based on semantic connection". But this is the highest - and probably hardest 
to achieve - level of machine knowledge. If we have it, all the better. If 
not, creating an activity based on the resources used within a specific context 
ex post is still better than nothing.

> i don't have enough usage data to know. i doubt any of us do because this
> kind of data will only come through people using it. right now it is
> speculative: it could be a feature lots of people use fairly frequently,
> one that is used by a few people lots, or used by lots of people rarely. or
> by "no one".

Of course we don't know that, and we can hardly predict it because no user 
will tell you "I want that" without even knowing it's possible.
 
> my concern is that implementing this kind of feature (including Ivan's
> expansion of it into activity clone-and-reduce) increases the UI load for
> all users of activities. if it ends up not being a common use case, we'll
> have degraded the experience.

I don't see users creating new activities very frequently as long as filling 
them with resources is done all manually (which is pretty tedious even with 
the best UI). So why make the creation of new empty activities as fast as 
possible if actually filling them with content is much more work anyway?

> honestly: i really do not think we should be doing much more work on the
> shell right now. it will likely only make it more complex before we have a
> strong user base that has learned what we have already (which already comes
> with some learning curve, but an approachable one right now), and we have
> tons of things that actually do need doing elsewhere in the user
> experience.

The thing is: We have (or, to be exact, mostly Ivan has) invested quite some 
work into the recommendation system. It can already do quite some fancy stuff 
technically, but the practical usefulness is currently close to zero. So we 
sat together and thought "Hey, how can this system actually serve the user?" 
The current recommendations layer obviously isn't the answer. And that's 
because it offers recommendations proactively, mostly without the user needing 
them at that moment.
So we asked ourselves "Okay, so when _will_ the user need - or benefit from - 
recommendations?" And one of the situations that came to our mind was "When 
she creates a new Activity". It wasn't the only one, but we'll tell more about 
the other situations when we have fleshed out the concepts further.

I don't say that we should make the pre-filled Activities a top priority for PA 
3 (besides, it looks like Ivan does not find it any realistic soon anyway). 
However, it is important to keep possible future developments in mind when 
talking about current changes, if only to make sure that we won't make them 
harder to implement later.
I'm not sure what priority the Activity creation wizard has for Fania. For me, 
the priority is not very high, though I think it's very likely that we'll need 
one eventually, in the future. I only wanted to put her suggestion into 
context.

> example: i have received _numerous_ requests for shared and/or synchronized
> activities, based on actual not-made-up use cases. implementing that would
> be guaranteed to grow out user base. it may not sound as sexy, but it's
> completely practical and desired and could probably be done without
> impacting the shell itself.

Actually, I find that _very_ sexy! In fact, I even think I was the one who put 
it in the "business user" scenario we created during the PA sprint last fall! 
And I'd be totally fine with giving this a higher priority than the pre-filled 
Activities. 
I completely agree that right now, we still need many things to make Plasma 
Active really useful for the end-user, and that is our top priority. Remember, 
I am an end-user myself, using PA every day, so of course I'm highly 
interested in getting a product that is as useful as possible.
But imo it's the more unusual stuff - for example the recommendations, but also 
shared Activities - that offer the chance to really set us apart from anything 
else on the market in the future. So I want us to keep these in mind, even 
when their realization is still a thing of the future.

In the end, it's all a matter of communication. It may seem like our goals are 
very different at first, but in the end they're the same, only maybe with slight 
variations in priority ;)
 
> another example: we have recently received a possible entry for ebook
> reader, and it needs UI love. i already gave the author some feedback and
> they are currently setting up a repository on git.kde.org for it
> (previously was hosted elsewhere).

Does the ebook reader also read simple PDFs? If so, you have my full support 
as an end user, because that's currently my one and only - and very frequent - 
usecase for my PA tablet :)
Since that is my personal prio 1 app, I eagerly want to help making it as good 
as possible. So could you please tell me how I can contact the author to offer 
him my help? Thanks.

Cheers,
Thomas