Workspace Next Sprint Organization

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday, May 16, 2012 15:05:03 Alex Fiestas wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 16, 2012 01:04:13 PM Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > an answer to "turn my computer off" is not "manage applications".
> 
> Not a valid example, I never turn off my computer (suspend) and even if I
> did I turn off the computer once a day.

*cough* we're making this for everyone. not you. not me. everyone. minus the 
people we aren't making it for. so everyone minus them. which is still a lot 
more people than you and me. given that i waded through a looong thread sent 
to me on forum.kde.org about log in times, apparently a lot of people do log 
in / out and turn their machines on/off throughout the day. and i assume we'll 
continue to offer that feature since people rely on it. which means it needs 
design thinking applied.

but let's assume for argument's sake that suspend is the one true way of the 
future and we can afford to design in a way that only suspend is ever needed 
and used.

we still are left with a lock screen on unsuspend. and ways to inhibit that 
sleep process selectively ("just want to close my laptop lid and move a few 
feet, not lose all my network connections").

this all takes design thought, UI care and is one more thing that isn't 
"manage applications".

> > an answer to "have my music volume be appropriate to what i'm doing on the
> > system (e.g. mute it when i get an incoming call on mumble / jabber /
> > googletalk / etc)" is not "manage applications".
> 
> Good point, though we don't need an interface for this.

but we need a mechanism. that needs to go into the design even if it doesn't 
have UI. and often times it will end up having UI influence anyways. example:

with activities and powermanagement, my #($*ing screen finally doesn't go off 
when i'm watching movies or doing slidecasts.

i explained this to a lawyer i had dinner with last night and he instantly saw 
the value and said he'd love that exact feature because the screen on his 
laptop constantly goes blank when he's using it for slide presentations (or 
maybe the moral there is that lawyers should talk less in general so the 
slides go faster? ;)

the number of use cases on the desktop are obscenely large. many, perhaps even 
most, do not involve app launching or window management.

> > an answer to "how do i organize my information, which is the reason i
> > turned on this damn thing in the first place, so that it reflects what
> > i'm most interest in" is not "manage applications"
> 
> Well this is a need you believe people have, in my case I do but I'm not
> sure if the the average user have this problem.

i discovered the need by observing average users.

> Is there any user story written? which kind of users are we targeting?

we've done all this for plasma active, they are all relevant to plasma 
desktop.

more stories and more user archetypes would be great, and i think would help 
new comers grasp the vision more personally.

in fact, that should perhaps become a Rite of Passage for getting commit 
rights to the workspaces: write a user story and a new user archetype. :)

> Do you think that Penny[1] needs to organize information?

how many friends does she have on facebook, how many events has she accepted 
invitations to from friends, what is her work schedule like, how full is her 
music player, how many vacations / nights out on the town / special events 
does she have pictures from ..? yeah, i think Penny has a real need and desire 
to organize things.

it's why every photo app, on the web and off, has albums. nobody would use one 
that doesn't.

it's why tagging people in said photos is so popular.

it's why music players group songs by artist, album, etc.

it's why calendars let you associate people with events.

sadly, we don't do this very much for actual files on disk .. we miss a lot of 
opportunities with contacts. events are hardly touched (though facebook with 
their timeline is trying things there.. good or not, i dunno).

and when you talk to someone, how do they describe their various informational 
artifacts? by the context in which they experienced them. 

they might describe a company budget spreadsheet in terms of the company it 
relates to, who sent it to them ("my boss", "my co-worker"), when they sent it 
to them, which work projects it relates to, the content, when it is due to be 
finished, etc... 

they might describe an album of music in terms of when they like to listent to 
it most: when i'm driving down the highway, when we're having dinner with 
friends, when i'm happy, when i'm doing yoga ...

they might describe a photo in terms of who is in the picture, where it was 
taken ("on vacation to ...", "that christmas party...") and when.

these are all ways of organizing information so that it is not just manageable 
but *meaningful* to us as humans.

so yes, i think penny would bloody well love a "christmas" activity with all 
the christmas photos from the last N years on her computer, all the obnoxious 
christmas music she loves to torment, er, entertain people with during the 
holidays, the gift idea list she keeps for her friends, and the secret santa 
she is organizing at work.

she'd open it up in october/november and put it away in january.

just like her winter clothes.

> > > A user that use the computer for multiple things or in multiple areas
> > > (work, home) may want to.
> > 
> > which is more common, which do we want to design for? is one a super-set
> > of
> > the other? if so, can we design for that super-set of needs?
> 
> Well imho there are more people from the first group than for the second,
> most people I know don't want to use computers but they do because they
> need them to ex: play games, surf web, write documents, etc No doubts they
> will change the computer for something simpler when the alternative exists.

we can broadly categorize all simpler things into two categories (ignoring 
failures that failed because of poor execution on marketing, management, etc):

* things that failed because they were too simple and constrained and 
therefore eventually seen as "not worth it" after the initial adoption curve 
passed ("web tv" and "smart tvs" are both good examples there)

* things that became more complex and succeeded. the iPod was simple. now it's 
the Touch and iPhone which does near everything and which people use for near 
everything. try getting them to give it up for a music-only but easier to use 
iPod.

reality is a bitch, but when we examine her we learn useful things.

so ... if people are insisting on using devices that do lots of things and end 
up complex on the way to success, then we should ask why they "don't want to 
use a computer". because they will continue to. it just might look different. 
so let's make that thing. or rather, lets make a bunch of those things. Plasma 
Desktop can be the thing for what laptops are best suited for, perhaps.

> The need of "having to organize information" implies having information to
> organize, most people only have few mp3, few videos and few documents.

here are my numbers:

videos: 252
photos: 20417
songs: 10079
documents: 7120
contacts: (aprox sum across multiple sources) over 500

what are yours?

this does not get into places i'm an abberation such as email (each one of 
this is a "file") or source code. it also doesn't take into consideration 
things like events on my calendar or applications i use.

yes, there are people who have a few songs, a few videos and a few documents. 
they are increasingly few.

contrast with the fact that most people can keep 7 +/-2 things in their mind 
at any one time and the disparity is pretty clear.

btw, i came upon this issue not by theorizing in front of my computer but by 
spending time in the homes and offices of average (almost exclusively non-Linux) 
computer users.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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