Summary

This document describes a proposal for dealing with item removal from a collection, trashing/junking an item and deletion of an item from the repository. It also describes the difference UI affordances for these related activities and how they differ.

Proposal

Collection categories

We categorize collections into 4 groups for this document

1. Trash and Junk, which we collectively call Removal Collections for this doc
   • Post Kibble (and definitely not 0.5), we introduce the Archive collection as items that you want to keep around but not reference on a daily or even weekly basis (Mimi's analogy is stuff you put in your attic or basement). For all intents, items in the archive collection will act like items in other Removal Collections
2. Library collections, principally, the Dashboard, In and Out collections:
   • For Kibble, the Dashboard collection (including its 3 sections Done, Processing & Deferred) represents all the content items that the user cares about. It is analogous to the iTunes Library collection, which lists all of the user's songs that iTunes know about.
   • In and Out represent all the users incoming and outgoing items respectively. It does not include items that the user creates that are not meant for communication with others (e.g. plain notes)
3. All other named collections and clusters whic we shall refer to as User Defined collections for this document
4. Ephemeral collections (e.g. search results). We will not have UI affordances to remove items from ephemeral collections or to delete the item in a view representing the empheral collection in the Kibble time frame. Thus, we shall discuss ephemeral collections no further in this document.

General Principle

The basic principle reflected in this document is that we deal with item removal differently based on which collection it is being removed from. If an item is removed from a Library collection, it is moved to the trash ready for deletion (as described below). If an item is removed from a User Defined collection, it is generally just removed from that collection. No other collections are affected.

UI Affordances

We list following different affordances to delete/remove an item and divide them into two groups:

1. Collection-dependent affordances

1. Toolbar "Delete/Remove" button
2. "Move to Trash" menu item
3. "Remove from collection" menu item
4. Delete key (from the keyboard)
5. Cut menu item

This group of affordances have differing behavior depending on whether the item acted upon is currently displayed in the context of 1) the Library collection(s) or 2) User Defined collections. For the former, activating the affordance moves the item to the Trash collection. For the latter, the item is simply removed from the current named collection or cluster.

2. Non collection-dependent affordances

1. Toolbar "Junk" button [Junk button is not in 0.5]
2. Drag and Drop an item to a Removal Collection

These affordances always move items to the respective Removal Collection. The toolbar "Junk" button always moves an item to the "Junk" collection. [Junk button is not in 0.5]

Specifically, the desired interactions when an item is selected in each of the following types of collections are:

Library collections:

• Toolbar displays a Delete button which moves selected items to the Trash
• Delete key does the same
• "Move to Trash" menu item is active and does the same
• Cut menu item does the same and saves selected items to the clipboard
• Remove from collection menu item is inactive

User Defined collections:

• Toolbar displays a Remove button (this is the same button which was labelled the Delete button for the Library collections) which removes the item from the collection
• Delete key does the same
• Remove menu item is active and does the same
• Cut menu item does the same and saves selected items to the clipboard
• "Move to Trash" menu item actually moves selected item(s) to Trash

Removal collections:

• Toolbar displays Delete button which deletes the selected items from the repository
• Delete key does the same
• "Move To Trash" menu item changes to "Delete" menu item and deletes the selected items from the repository
• Remove menu item is inactive
• Cut menu item temporarily saves selected items to the clipboard. If users do not paste items, they will be removed from the repository when user ovewrites the clipboard with a new cut or copy.

Removal Collection Lifecycle for Items

When an item is placed in a Removal Collection:

• It is removed from all other collections it belongs to (as far as the end-user is concerned i.e. it does not appear in a collection's summary view, it never appears in any search results, it does not appear in any cluster).
• However, there have to be UI affordances to place the item back, in a single step, from the trash to all the collections it used to belong (at the time it was placed into trash), except for the collections that no longer exist.
• The detail view of the item has a regular See Also section but with the collection names greyed out.
• An item has to be in a Removal Collection for it to be completely deleted from the repository i.e. it's a two state process: first move the item to a removal collection, then delete it from the repository. An item in a removal collection can either be deleted in this manner individual or all the contents of a Removal Collection can be deleted at once (e.g. empty trash menu command).
• Items in Removal Collections do not appear in search results

Deleting Collections

• Collections are never moved to the trash or junk. Only items. Collections are deleted through menu items (either in the menu bar or the right-click context menu)
• When a collection is deleted, there will be some affordance (e.g. dialog box) to prompt the user if along with deleting the collection, does the user want the items in the collection to be moved to trash?

Future Changes (not in 0.5)

• Once we introduce the Dashboard view and filters, we are thinking of optionally marking an item for junk or deletion with the toolbar button. These marked items continue to stay in the Dashboard view and do not move to trash or junk immeidately. Only after the user clicks on the Purge toolbar button will the marked items get moved to the respective Removal Collection.
• Post Kibble, we intend to introduce an Archive collection as described above

-- ChaoLam - 03 Sep 2004