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PPT, PDF The Chandler Knowledge Worker
Slide1.png Chandler's Target User is more than just a glutton for information. Information is the substance of their work and more information is the output of their work: Research, proposals, priorities, direction and decisions? Somewhere in between, knowledge is gained and shared.
PPT, PDF Preview Target Users
Slide1a.png Target User Group: 2-30 people working together towards a common goal. A family, a work group, a book club, a community center. A 'Start-up' style organization with a notable lack of bureaucratic processes. Collaboration is high bandwidth. Typically IT-poor.

Target User: Helen the Hub. Often called a project manager or product manager or program manager. Helen however is a special breed of PM. She works closely with every member of the group, asking the right questions to gather input, identifying problem areas, facilitating discussions to drive the group towards informed decisions. She defines goals and is ultimately responsible for achieving those goals. In the end, Helen's day-to-day reality busts the seams of most to-do lists and is too fluid and unpredictable for most project management systems.

Chandler Hub Target User: The Casual Collaborator. For all the people you need to work with who aren't ready or don't need to make the leap to Chandler Desktop, collaborate with them anyway through the Chandler Hub web application.
PPT, PDF The Design Approach
Slide3.png We wanted to build Chandler around how people actually work. So we went out and interviewed some real people doing real work. We learned (too) many interesting things, but managed to distill them down to two takeaways:

There's something wrong with the way data flows, or rather doesn't flow between the tools we use to manage, process, organize our information. Information is being modeled around software tools, whereas really software should be modeled around information. What's the difference between a proposal you write up in Email and a proposal you write up in Microsoft Word? What's the difference between an event you jot down and email to yourself and an event that arrives on your calendar? A lot if you look at the technological barriers in place that prevent doing something as simple as filing Email Messages and Word Documents with the exact same content into the same container. The symptom? There's entirely too much copying and pasting going on. One person we interviewed had 2 identical sets of two dozen project folders: One for organizing documents on her hard-drive, the other for organizing documents in her email. Who kept them in sync? She did.

The diagnosis? There is a basic assumption underlying the software we use that information is essentially static. It is born, it lives and it lives and it lives and it lives (data never dies, it just gets lost) and the whole while, it stays more or less the same. As far as your calendar is concerned, an event is an event and always has been an event. But in reality, looking at how information actually comes in people's lives, that's simply not true. But your calendar application doesn't know that. It doesn't know about the note you jotted down about Lunch with Pam next Wed. It doesn't know about the email you received yesterday Re: Sync-up with Roland this afternoon. The only way it will know is if you make it known, with Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V and a lot of context-switching.

PPT, PDF Two Sides of the Same Coin: Staying Focused and The Iterative Approach to Making Progress
Slide25.png Are you Done or Not Done? The binary approach of most productivity apps fails to accommodate the iterative way people actually work with information. As a result, it's incredibly easy to get sidetracked to deal with tasks as they come in, not because they're high priority or especially urgent, but simply because we're afraid we'll lose track of them if we don't do something about them right now. Usually however, before you've had a chance get anything done, another load is dumped into your lap to process. Chandler recognizes the fundamentally non-linear, non-binary nature of information work and instead, has built an environment for processing and re-processing information to help you stay focused on the task(s) at hand without losing track of everything you can't and shouldn't be doing right now.

PPT, PDF The Iterative Approach Applied to Email
Slide1-1.png Collaborate with others via Email. We realized that many of the messages we send are really still drafts, lists that are incomplete, write-ups that await several rounds of heavy editing and half-baked proposals. As a result, email in Chandler feels more like sharing. Collaborate with others via Email. Propose meeting agendas and ask others to add their own agenda items. Send a message. Edit that message. Send it again as an Update. Repeat as necessary.

PPT, PDF Chandler as a System
Slide10.png Task and information management software needs to be more than a Storage and Retrieval device. They need to transcend Organization and Search to become true processing, digesting, managing systems that help you gain an understanding of the work you do through the information you work with. Chandler keeps the reality of minute-to-minute decisions in sync with your best laid top-down plans. The hope is for better, more informed decisions based on real-time data.

PPT, PDF Convergence: Collaboration that doesn't take you away from your Personal Information
Slide2-1.png Collaboration in Chandler is anchored in personal information management workflows. The sharing experience has an inward focus that integrates personal and shared information management in a seamless experience where data can flow between the two and live with no effort in both worlds. We've integrated sharing with other Chandler users and communicating with everyone else you need to work with by providing a single focal point for sending, editing and updating items. Other Chandler Desktop users receive your items in Chandler and can edit and send them back as updates. At the same time, everyone receives the contents of your Chandler item as text via email.


Extra Credit

Warning Material in here is slightly out of date.

PPT, PDF Nuts and Bolts: The Basic Elements of Chandler
Slide2.png What are the nouns, verbs and adjectives in Chandler? Items, Collections of Items, Kinds of Items, and Attributes of Items. What are they? How do they interact with each other? And how will you interact with them?

PPT, PDF Software Built Around Human Semantics
Slide2-2.png Chandler is organized around your data and the semantics you attach to it...Not around technologies and features. Collections of Items are centered around concepts that are meaningful to you: Projects, Agendas, and Events, not around which feature you used to create them: Tags, Categories, Facets, Folders, Threads, et cetera. Items are centered around objects that are meaningful to you, Events, Resources, Communications...Not around which file format they're saved in or over which transport protocol you received them: IMAP, Journal.WebDAV, IMIP, iCal, RSS, IM, mailing lists, list-serves, et cetera.) In sum, Chandler strives to break down the technological walls that superficially organize your information into silos that are meaningless to you. In their place, we hope to provide an information management environment that is instead rich in human semantics.

PPT, PDF Beyond the Preview Horizon: Chandler as a Platform
Slide6.png Furthermore, Chandler, the platform is designed to let you re-define what it means to be a PIM. Add new Kinds of Items. Extend the existing schema of Attributes. Customize the PIM to work around your personal definition of "Personal Information".

More research

For more research on Information Architecture and Information Design in Chandler:
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