The Employee & H9 Meeting Notes: March 2, 2023

Hi Josh & Lauren,

Thanks for today's meeting!

Please find below our meeting notes from March 2, 2023, starting with “next steps.” As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

See you Tuesday for an email exporting extravaganza!

Have a great weekend,

Alex

Next steps:

• House9:

• Prepare interactive wireframes for review

• Support Josh with exporting emails into spreadsheet

• Check with Max to decide the best way to format redaction

• Josh:

• Meet with Alex on Tuesday, March 7 to export emails into spreadsheet

Agenda:

• Meeting recording

• Review entity relationship diagram: https://gitmind.com/app/docs/#redacted 

• Email export update: 

• We figured out how to painlessly export email metadata + text content to a spreadsheet that makes it much easier to redact, parse, and upload content to the website.

• See Chrome Extension: Export Emails to Google Sheets by cloudHQ

• See example spreadsheet: label Email exchange with privatejosh@gmail.com 

• Alex can walk you through this in a separate meeting. It should take less than 30 minutes to set up.  

• Questions

• Review wireframe draft

• Recap personas (if time permits)

• Book next meeting to review wireframes

Discussion:

• Let’s make sure we’re on the same page:

• How do you envision your user’s journey through exploring the website? Choose a persona and let’s riff on it. What do they see first? What is important to them? How do they make sense of it? What do they find relatable? Why do they keep going? What makes them log off?

• Josh: First thing. The size and scope of the material, of the project. It’s a map of all the conversations. The function of organizing the emails is to convey people through the conversations as narratives. The first experience will be to see a massive work.

• Visually as a map, but also could be quantified

• Initially it was also visual, just to see the AMOUNT of stuff

• Lauren: intro to project there?

• Josh: via link, not first thing you see / tunnel in

• Alex: communicate overall view, is more a container that shows the scope

• Josh: you can be carried thru one convo, choose your own adventure, you make one choice, you follow that line, you come back out and follow another line

• Alex: most imp for user: browse by what?

• J: initial convo was to do by time and date, primary structure of narrative. Not sure if I want it by subject. Seeing it like a tree, how convos branch off. Two central lines: josh with various people to get proj going / parallel structure of josh tracking camille’s work. Camille’s line ends with end of performance. Josh's line continues. The lauren joins.

• Rn, organised by sender (Josh, Camille)

• Conclusion: sender and time

• Alex: how open are you to website being structured like email inbox?

• Josh: i like this. Hadn’t thought about this. It a functional structure

• A: intro could be the map view. Stepping stone into the main view which is an inbox. People already know how to engage with this, how to use it, also grieved home the concept that all this communication happened via email.

• Josh: makes sense, follow logic of usable things that i really like

• L: I agree. Something kind of clandestine of reading someone else’s email. Seeing it thru this interface…

• Alex: Justin said “voyeuristic” 

• Josh: I really like this, great idea!

• Wireframe of email inbox

• Josh: what will the entry page look like?

• Alex: sharing ref from louis

• Lauren: I really like that

• Josh: I like the calendar a lot, it shows the temporality of the project. If there’s a way we can connect the two…

• Alex: Yes, that’s the challenge we’re working on. Maybe the inbox landing can have two views (calendar, inbox)

• Alex: the inbox could be very tongue and cheek, could reference gmail…

• PDF view of each email

• Lauren: what about the PDF view? Josh wanted that initially

• Alex explains all the accessibility issues of using PDFs / small screens, screen readers, etc.

• Lauren: ok, something for is to consider after our call

• Alex: that said, we could mimic the gmail layout

• Josh: this is fine, but it’ll be a lot of extra checking. Ikeep finding things I need to redact in these emails. Not necessarily things we can search and find. If there’s a way we can do this together so we can make sure all the redactions follow through. 

• Josh: Do I have to export all the emails?

• Alex: You (Josh) and I can spend 30 mins to come up with the export logic. After we generate the spreadsheet, we have another meeting to discuss everything that needs to be redacted.

• Josh: I don’t know how to redact in a spreadsheet, so I’ll need help to know the process. Let’s sort that out together later.

• Alex: we will bring Max into the conversation. He will come up with a logic.

• Josh: it’s very important to keep the little details that are important to the vernacular of email, like quoted text, attachments, icons, etc. The visual vernacular should be consistent with what we expect. Don’t want to move the experience into a different realm. Should be mundane, as it is, keep the vernacular of Gmail. As long as it looks believable, the format of the inbox makes a lot of sense. The calendar idea as the front page makes a lot of sense.

• Alex: this opens up options for different interface options. 

• Josh: for me, the PDFs were a way to transfer the info in a way that feels familiar, but it’s not really representative of reading email. I’m not as attached to have it be a PDF. Rather would show as email.

• Lauren: attachments: what do we do with them?

• Josh: they shouldn’t lead to attachments. 

• Alex: like when you get an email forward, but you can’t open the attachment. So the icon, name of file, etc. are there but you can’t click on this. Or we can open a note that says “attachments have not been included”.

• Josh: in almost every case, there should be a limitation to how much extra info people can access.

• Alex: next steps: make proper wireframes

• Josh: for me, i’d like to tour the export. I have to rebound from a year of work being thrown away.

• How do you want to represent redacted people?

• Numbered people (i.e. person 1, person 2, person 3, etc.)

• Roles, perhaps also numbered (i.e. administrator 1, grant official 1, etc.)

• Fake names (i.e. Holly*, Jennifer*, Matthew*) with a note in the “About” that says names have been changed to respect privacy?

• Josh: Roles are fine for me, like ‘Job applicant 1’, ‘Canada Council officer’. It doesn’t make sense to fictionalize or make up names. The presence of the black bar as a redaction is useful as a way of indicating information having been removed. There are a lot of redacted places, but in those cases it makes sense that the redaction shows as a placeholder for information that can’t be shown, but it’s there. It’s a one-sided reveal of a 2 way conversation.

• Are you open to the website being organized / visualized like an email inbox?