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The drawing above illustrates the information provided in the summary of this design. The main view and sidebar make heavy use of an accordion effect to display relevant information to the user. By navigating the sidebar on the right the user can find events that are relevant to them. In the scenario John would create a new timer and share it with his partner via email, facebook, or location. When his partner logs on they would see a new invite in the sidebar if John invited them via email or facebook, or could find nearby timers using the local tab. Once John's partner accepts the timer, they both can see when the other completes the task. The creator of the timer is given editing and deleting privileges of their timers. So if the due date of the users assignment changes, John can edit the timer to reflect the change. On the same page of the application, John and his partner can scroll through other timers and mark them as complete.
Design 3:
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Summary
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This design involves two pages: managing/viewing all timers and working with individual timers.
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Storyboard
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John arrives at the timer creation page after clicking the link from the main page. He can enter the date by typing into an input field or by clicking a calendar icon which displays a calendar from which the date can be selected. The time can also be set via another input field. A title and description can be entered, and there is a formatting toolbar for the description. Sharing can also be specified here and is discussed in the next section. After creating a timer, its specific details are shown in a timer view window.
\[figure 1: create\] |
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To share, John can directly share from the timer creation page or at a later time. Let's suppose he shares it upon creation. A new window is displayed, and he can either add names from an autocomplete form, or by selecting from his entire list of contacts.
\[figure 2: sharing\] |
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To view timers, John goes to the main page, which has a list of timers that he has created or that have been shared with him by other users. Timers created by others are italicized, and the timer's creator is shown underneath. They are ordered chronologically with the nearest events at the top and later events below. A countdown is displayed next to the time for a particular timer. Pending timers that another user has shared with John appear in red text in his timeline. They are also displayed in a list of pending timers which can be found in the upper right corner. From either location, John can add the timer or ignore the sharing action. Clicking on a timer title goes to a new page showing details for that specific timer.
\[figure 3: viewing\] |
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Analysis
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In terms of learnability, this design is fairly good. The links for the main tasks are immediately visible, and the links for other tasks are visible on a specific timer's page or accessible from an arrow next to a timer's title on the main page. However, the sharing system is not probably great for learnability. Because there are two possible methods to select users to share a timer with, there is some inconsistency in how the same information is displayed across these two methods. Futhermore, it might not be obvious that a red timer in the viewing page is a pending timer share from another user. The pending timers button on the upper right helps the user eventually learn the notation unless he reads the instructions.
In terms of efficiency, the simplicity of the design makes a tradeoff for efficiency. In the current scheme, a user views the specific timer he just created instead of the main page with all timers. There is also no notion of grouping users in one's user list, so sharing with a subset of people for several different timers requires manual entry each time. The view mode is limited to chronological order; there is no way to filter out timers or change the sorting order. A feature included on the "view all timers" page is a prominent line along the timeline, indicating the current time. This allows a user to gauge at a glance the relative duration of timers.
This design is mostly safe. The sharing interface is fairly flexible, and timers can be modified or deleted after creation. Delete actions, such as removing a timer or denying a pending share, require an additional confirmation step, after which point the timer cannot be recovered.