Project Hamster

How to let user know that there is a feature

Posted in News by Toms on April 12, 2009

In Project Hamster a little while ago we added ability to add description to activity on the fly, by typing it in after comma.

So, for example, if you would like to start doing handstands but with no hands this time, you maybe would type in:

“handstands, no hands this time!”

applet

Figure 1. – You can add description to your activity after comma

Hamster will look on the magic comma (nothing magic about it) and figure, that everything that is after the comma, is a description. Descriptions appear in UI and in the HTML, errm, report thing. I think comma is good, because you could use it in a sentence “My friend is nice, a little stupid though” and mumble the last part and get happily away with it. This is exactly how the descriptions work here.

The approach “of the flying comma” is not quite discoverable by itself (unless you feel like experimenting, and most people really don’t, and we should not encourage them to break their data anyway), so my question is – how do we tell him/her about this terrific feature?

First i tried to put some text under the input box itself. But it didn’t look too good and was begging for way too much attention.

Then i thought – how about i put it, where somebody might be looking for it – under the description field in Edit Activity dialog:

edit_activity_with_hint

Figure 2. – There is a Hint ‘on the dance floor’

What do you think? Maybe alternative wording? Maybe not bold? Maybe gray and proper size? Would it be enough? Any other ways? What do i, oooooh, do?!

Oh, and yes, happy egg hunts, egg squashing, egg fights or whatever you do with your eggs.

Update: This is how it looks now (Apr 14)

tell_me_more

So, basically, if there is no current activity, a hint what to do is displayed under the textbox, and a “Tell me more” link leads to following alert.

What do you think?

16 comments

16 Responses

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  1. Satya said, on April 12, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    This comma feature is cool!

    Btw, is it possible to also show the ‘Update activity’ screen the moment I type the comma after the activity? ;-)

    Reply
  2. Toms said, on April 12, 2009 at 10:52 pm

    I wonder what would be the use case, Satya!

    Reply
  3. Stefan Stuhr said, on April 12, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    “Hint: You can add descriptions on the fly by entering them after comma”

    “After comma”? Which comma? And where’s the “entering them” supposed to take place?

    Now, I know the answers to these questions, but only because of this blog post. The hint itself lacks this information.

    Reply
  4. Toms said, on April 12, 2009 at 11:06 pm

    Thanks Stefan! Any suggestions? I mean – how to rephrase.

    Reply
  5. dflock said, on April 13, 2009 at 1:04 am

    How about:

    “When entering new activities, everything after the first comma becomes the description.”

    Reply
  6. Max said, on April 13, 2009 at 1:34 am

    Hint: If you supply a comma, the subsequent text becomes a description.

    Reply
  7. Satya said, on April 13, 2009 at 5:15 am

    Toms!

    On second thought, the comma invoking the ‘Update activity’ screen is not really needed! :)

    I initially thought Description field on the “Update activity” screen is like a memo field and it would be much more convenient to type in it, rather than typing in a single line in the Activity drop-down box. But I realized it’s a not a memo field (or it’s single line text in both the places anyway).

    Thanks!

    Reply
  8. Satya said, on April 13, 2009 at 5:32 am

    Regarding the clarity about the less obvious feature(s), how about adding a data entry example right below the Activity drop-down control like this:
    Example: Activity@Category, Description

    Reply
  9. Pedro said, on May 28, 2009 at 9:18 am

    Why did you choose a comma?

    It’s annoying. Comma is a very common character in tasks.

    It is common for me to write tasks like “Added x, y & z to the website”. And the sentence gets cut. It happens to me every day and I’d like to write commas in tasks. You should at least let choose the character in preferences.

    Reply
    • Tchalvak said, on November 9, 2009 at 3:46 pm

      Yeah, the comma is just such a basic english-usage feature that it causes a lot of unintentional “descriptions” when you’re just looking to list things or otherwise write properly in english.

      Reply
  10. jeblad said, on July 8, 2009 at 10:27 am

    It seems like the category sometimes get dropped when you do an update of activity. Not sure why. If you use a category for tracking activities assigned to a specific customer then the overall numbers will be wrong and it is difficult to identify the missing categorization.

    By always making the category show up in the update category window it would be simpler to spot the error in time.

    Reply
    • tm said, on July 8, 2009 at 11:24 am

      Can the error you are describing observed in the git version?

      Reply
  11. jeblad said, on July 8, 2009 at 11:39 am

    I haven’t checked that version. It seems to me that sometimes (?) the last action are used no matter what the category are, instead of using an action with a specific chosen category.

    Reply
  12. jeblad said, on July 8, 2009 at 1:14 pm

    Seems to be the same bug.

    Reply
  13. quasipedia said, on July 30, 2009 at 9:10 pm

    Hi. I know this post is quite old and surely things have moved forward in the development. Yet my two cents to the debate: what about changing the hint sentence below the textentry with a blue dot with either the “i” of info or the “?” in it.

    IMO this is quite a standard for many applications (eclipse, drupal, just to mention two which are open right now on my desktop) and has the advantage to be visually uncluttering, and much more noticeable.

    Reply

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