This weekend, we released another great new Woobius feature: the weekly at a glance report of your projects.

Over the last few months, several people had asked for a passive way of finding out what’s going on with your projects. Many other collaboration systems send out a daily email listing events and outstanding actions and tasks. In today’s information-heavy world, it’s probably too much to ask for every user to log in every week to find out what’s been happening with their projects. Information needs to be pushed out to busy people so they can decide whether they need to log in and take action.

Designing the report

However, we didn’t want to rush the implementation of this report. Here’s our thinking process as we approached this task.

First of all, we felt that a daily email would have been far too noisy. We’ve observed that most projects have things happening only once or twice a week at most. Very few projects have things happen every day. We also believe that emails that go out every day tend to be quickly tuned out and ignored, or even disabled or marked as spam. So, we chose to make the email weekly rather than daily.

There came the choice of when to send that email. Two ideal times presented themselves: Sunday, or Monday. There’s no point in sending a mail that will be ignored because it is lost in a tidal wave of other weekend emails, so we chose to send it on Monday afternoon so that it would fit into the typical architect or engineer’s workflows.

Next, came the content. Many other systems send out long or incomplete lists of tasks that need to be read carefully to find out if anything of interest happened. We strongly believe that the point of a weekly summary is to summarise. That means it needs to be as brief as possible, it needs to be skimmable, and yet it still needs to give all the important, actionable information.

The obvious starting point for this was to send a summary or extract of the dashboard events. This would have worked alright, but it wasn’t good enough. It was too noisy to be skimmed effectively, and it would have been difficult to highlight the key information. So we took a step back and thought: what is the most important information that a user might care about when receiving a project summary?

Highlighting the key information

We came up with three main areas of interest:

• General project events (invitations, removals, project admin promotions, etc)
• Dropbox uploads (who uploaded things to what folder)
• Vault uploads (who issued what)

We tried to keep that information as quiet as possible to make it easy to quickly scan through for events of interest. If you see something that you want to find out more about, just click the “Take me to the project” link and you can check the dashboard, which details all events on the project.

What do you think?

Is this email useful to you? What else would you like to see there? Let us know below.