Post in Group Invitations

2008 Jun 24 03:06 UTC

I have been working on the Group Invitations enhancement
  https://svn.iopen.net/projects/groupserver/ticket/277
and my design has come a long way.

The system is simple in the simple case.
     1. The user is invited to join a group.
     2. The user receives an email message that contains links to accept
        or decline the invitation.
     3. The user clicks on one of the links. If the user accepts the
        invitation, the user is taken to a message delivery settings
        page.
     4. Success!
The invitation would be generated by either the Add New User, Add New
Users in Bulk, or Invite Site Members pages.

I thought it would be nice to add some more features that make it easier
to invite a user to multiple groups. My proposal is designed to carry
out the following scenario.

        Jane expressed interest in joining the Knitted
        Frisbees Christchurch and Knitted Frisbees Announcements
        groups, so Kate decides to invite Jane to join the groups. Kate
        navigates to Jane's profile, and finds the Invitation page. She
        selects the Knitted Frisbees Christchurch and Knitted Frisbees
        Announcements groups [see the first image below] and clicks the
        Invite button. An email message is sent to Jane, inviting her to
        join the two groups.

Now things become more complex. Jane has multiple invitations, which she
may want to accept or decline. So, I propose an interface to support the
following scenario.

        Jane receives an email message from Kate, inviting her to join
        the Knitted Frisbees Christchurch and Knitted Frisbees
        Announcements groups. Jane clicks on the single link in the
        email message and is taken to the Respond to Invitations page
        [see the second image below]. Jane accepts both invitations, by
        leaving the Accept option selected for both groups. However,
        Jane decides that she does not want to receive an email message
        whenever a post is made to Knitted Frisbees Announcements, so
        she changes her message delivery settings to Web only for that
        group. When everything is to her liking, Jane writes a short
        message to Kate, and clicks the Respond button. Kate receives an
        email message containing Jane's message and the invitations that
        Jane accepted and declined.

The interface to accept or decline multiple invitations is complex, but
only two actions are required to accept membership of multiple groups:
      * Click on the link in the invitation email message, and
      * Click on the Respond button in the Respond page.
[Time for an expert user to complete the task is around 5.46s, not
including page-load times and assuming no scrolling.]

This leaves one hole: what should happen if the user is invited to
multiple groups by multiple people? I propose showing the Respond to
Invitations page, whenever any link is clicked in any invitation email
message. This allows the user to quickly accept all the invitations,
which will be the most common task.

All of my proposed interfaces will supplement the existing Invite Site
Members page [see the third image below]  which I am planning to tidy.
Mostly my tidy-up will involve showing a thundering-great-list of users
with check boxes, instead of a "normal" list of users without check
boxes. There is also a possibility of creating a page for inviting
multiple site members to join multiple groups, but I will leave the
visualisation of that interface as an exercise for the reader.