Better UI for activities tab

[samuelsov]

I like the generic way CiviCRM is handling activities. It can be customized in a lot of way by creating new activities, adding custom fields on it, grouping them by using CiviCase.

Now, from a user perspective, activity encompass a lot of different concepts and it can be difficult for a new user to understand what an activity is and find what he wants.

Just thinking out loud here but i think it could be more intuitive to categorized activities and display them differently (separate tab ?) depending on their category.

What I can thought of :
* all activities that are related to scheduling should be displayed in a calendar (already possible with https://civicrm.org/extensions/contact-calendar) or todo list : meeting, follow-up planned in the future. We could have specific display for today activities or late activities.
* all communications activities (phone, email, ...) could be for example displayed threaded as in a mailbox with an easy way to create a reply
* online recording activities should be in a specific log tab : these activities are just generated for logging purpose because there is a membership, contribution, participation, ... record created that contains the information needed for everyday tasks.
* other ?

I just want to see if it's seems like a good idea that could needs more detailed specs and if any thinking has already been done on the subject.

[Dave Greenberg]

Samuel - seems like an interesting idea. A few thoughts:
* Some folks like to see the different types of activities in a 'stream' of occurences since they "tell a story". For example, Susan Jones got the newsletter on July 3, on July 10 she registered for a meetup, on July 22nd she registered for CiviCon, on Aug 2nd a staff person called her about volunteering, on Aug 10th she joined the membership program, etc.

* I think categorizations would need to be quite configurable so each site (each user?) could decide what activity types to put in what buckets. They might even want some activity types to show up in multiple categories. (Could start with some intelligent defaults of course for the pre-configured activity types.)

[JonGold]

I gave a lot of thought to these suggestions - but the more I tried to put my thoughts together, the more it just sounded like I wanted Drupal Views for activities.  In fact, Views could do a few of the things being requested here.

I think an easy way to implement at least part of this functionality in Civi would be to add a feature that loaded a report into a tab, taking the contact ID as a parameter.  Anything you could do on a report (e.g. filter to certain activities) would be available as a tab.  You'd also get permissioning for (almost) free, and custom reports would be a way to easily handle the more obscure activity reporting folks have.

By combining with CiviReport, any improvements to CiviReport would be gained in the new tabs and vice versa.  Also, this could have potential applications beyond just custom activity views.

[samuelsov]

We definitely need a way to customize on a site by site basis. But, it's more another feature to what i was proposing.
Using a CiviReport in a tab could be a very easy way to do so but i think it will lack some interesting feature : UI corresponding to the type of activities you are viewing or specific actions (add new activity of the type you are viewing, reply to, reschedule some event, ...).

I like the idea to have a pre-configured activity types and a few way of displaying them that you could then modify to fit your specific needs. Maybe CiviReport can be improved to display things like a calendar view or threaded view for activities the same way there are Pie chart or Bar chart for contribution report but it may need specific UI there to be really intuitive for users.

[JonGold]

Samuel,

I agree!  I didn't mean to suggest that "CiviReport in a tab" was the solution to all your use cases - rather, it would cut down the amount of work needed to implement what you need, give us the flexibility to fit new use cases, and the work that IS done (e.g. adding a calendar view) could then be reused by the reporting modules.

I think a possible solution to making the interface intuitive is to make some pre-built reports either in core as an extension.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

Just wanted to +1 this good idea.  Not something I had thought of before, but I do think it would be useful.

I wonder how it would interact with those parts of the system that already have their own tab, like events? Just something to consider with the implemention I guess.