Re: Design + Usability, Useful + Usable

At 01:40 PM 12/10/2007 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
>+ Overlays are called overlays and have special widgets because they 
>don't behave the same as checkbox, multi-selection.

That seems like a circular argument: they're different because 
they're different.  How is it *helpful* that they're different?


>Triage and Stamping are examples of ways in which I feel we've 
>up-ended existing models.

How so?  I don't really see how stamping is especially different from 
what, say, Outlook or Ecco can do.

Meanwhile, automatic assignment of triage status based on date 
information is a nice feature, but it doesn't seem to up-end anything 
compared to manually setting a status, or just sorting by date with 
an option to exclude "done" items, or any of the other ways that 
other tools have handled the problem.

Perhaps there's something I don't understand?

Sometimes it seems to me that Chandler is a difficult application to 
understand because it's too timid to be an "opinionated" application 
(one that tells you how to work), but too opinionated to be a "tool" 
application (one that simply gives you a uniformly-constructed model 
and expects you to shape it to your own opinions).

For example, calling it the "dashboard" instead of something like 
"current work" or "for review", hides the opinion that this is where 
your stuff is supposed to go.  It's almost like the program is 
ashamed of telling you what to do...  but does it anyway.  You just 
have to understand the code words.  :)

For an example in the other direction, look at Hank Williams' 
comments, which are trying to drag the application to the "tool" end 
of the spectrum, where the user is given a uniform model and allowed 
to make their own decisions about how things should work.

I think either approach can work and be easy to learn *and* useful 
for a chosen audience, but the middle ground doesn't appear to work 
without a lot of hand-holding, explanations, and "huh?" 
moments.  I've been doing OSAF work for years and the application 
itself still baffles me at times.

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