Teammate Task-Assignment Form: Choosing Fields, Handling Errors and Weighing Drawbacks

You and I work on the same team. You are designing a form in an app that lets you assign a task to me so that I complete it. The form already includes one field: the assignee's email address. Decide what else the form needs, then work out what can go wrong with it. ### Clarifying Questions - Is this a standalone task app or part of a larger team collaboration tool, and will the form be used on desktop, on mobile or both? - Can anyone on the team assign tasks to anyone else, or only certain roles, such as a manager or a project lead? - Can the assignee's email belong to someone outside our organization, or only to colleagues in the company directory? - Does each task have exactly one assignee, or can it be shared among several people? ### Part 1 — Choose the fields Which fields would you add to the form beyond the assignee email, and why? Say which are required, which are optional and what their defaults are. ```hint Picture the moment the task arrives Imagine I open the task you just sent me. What do I need to start work without coming back to ask you, and what will you need later to follow up on it? ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Fields that let the assignee act without follow-up questions, each with a reason. - Required versus optional fields, and sensible defaults. - Keeping the form short enough that people actually use it, with less common options available but out of the way. ### Part 2 — Errors and drawbacks What errors does the form need to handle, and what are the drawbacks of your design? ```hint Go field by field, then press submit For each field, think about what someone might enter wrongly, including entries that look valid but are still wrong. Then think about what can fail once the form is valid: when it is submitted and when the task reaches me. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Input errors for each field, and how each is shown and fixed. - Errors that pass validation or happen after submission: a wrong but valid assignee, missing permissions, failed or repeated submissions, notifications that never arrive. - The design's drawbacks, including identifying the assignee by email, and how to reduce them. ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The form's purpose stated in terms of both people: the one assigning and the one receiving. - A prioritized set of fields that balances complete information against the time it takes to fill in. - Error handling that covers bad input and plausible but wrong input, with clear recovery that never loses what the user typed. - Honest drawbacks with mitigations, and metrics that show whether the form works. ### Follow-up Questions - Many tasks are reassigned within an hour because they went to the wrong person. How would you change the form? - How would the form differ on a phone, where typing is slow? - Should the assignee be able to decline a task, and how would that change the form and its notifications?