Experience Creator: Timeline

Contents

• Core Concepts
• Icons and colors on the Timeline
• Adding Tasks, Messages and Automations to the Timeline
• Positioning elements on the timeline
• Batching Tasks
• Reordering tasks within the same Batch

The Timeline is one of the most important parts of Dado. It's where you'll create the core of any employee experience by defining Tasks, Messages and Automations, and assigning them to specific roles.

Core Concepts

To make sure you can proceed with ease, here are a few key concepts:

• Participant: the main person who will be going through the experience. Usually, this is an employee in your company. The completion status of an experience depends on this person.
• Supporting Actors: additional people who may be asked to complete a task in the experience, but who are not the main person in it. Examples of Supporting Actors are managers, buddies, HRBPs or IT technicians. To learn more, see the article Supporting Actors.
• Message: use messages to communicate with Participants or Supporting Actors at key moments of the experience. Unlike Tasks, Messages don't have completion criteria or statuses.
• Task: a task that must be taken by a Participant or Supporting Actor. A Task always has a deadline, completion criteria and status: Pending, Started, Done or Late.
• Automation: a task for systems and integrations. They happen automatically without input from the Participant or anyone else. Examples of Automations are adding the Participant to calendar meetings, or creating tickets in task management systems. Like Tasks, Automations have a status; but they don't have a deadline. To learn more, see the article Automations: Overview.

Icons and colors on the Timeline

Every Task, Message and Automation on the Timeline has icons and a color code to provide more information at a glance.

• The color on the left-hand side indicates who must complete this task or who will receive this message. The colors for the Participant and the Supporting Actors are shown above the timeline. Purple indicates this is an Automation (and therefore neither the Participant nor Supporting Actors need to do anything to complete it).
• The icon on the left-hand side indicates what this is: a Message (envelope icon), Task (tick icon) or Automation (lightning bolt icon). 
• The icon on the right-hand side indicates which channel will be used for Messages and notifications about Tasks

Adding Tasks, Messages and Automations to the Timeline

When you create a new Experience, the Timeline will be empty, except for a single Message. By. default, Dado adds a welcome message to the first day of the experience with the title "A new experience starts today!". This Message includes a list of the tasks that the participant will have to perform in the future. You can (and should!) customize this Message to fit your experience and company culture. 

Click or drag anywhere on the Timeline, and you'll be presented with a choice of adding a Message, Task or Automation. Selecting any of these options will bring up the Message Editor, Task Editor or Automation Editor screen. Learn more about these in the following articles: Messages Overview, Tasks Overview, and Automations Overview.

After customizing your Message, Task or Automation, press the "Add Task/Message/Automation" button to close the Editor screen and return to the Timeline. Your new element is now shown in the Timeline. The width of the element indicates the time the participant has to complete it.

Positioning elements on the timeline

When multiple Tasks, Messages and Automations are added, they automatically position themselves based on their start-dates and durations in the most space-efficient way possible, so that you can see as much as possible in one screen. The order in which they were created is not relevant to their position.

It's possible to adjust the start-date of any Task by clicking and dragging its gray bar to a different position. Similarly, you can click and drag from the right end of the bar to extend or reduce the Task duration. Alternatively, start-date and duration can be edited by clicking on the Task to launch the Task Editor screen.

Batching Tasks

Rather than sending employees a separate email or instant message for each Task and Reminder, Dado intelligently batches together these notifications. This batching happens based on the Task position on the Timeline and Tasks are grouped both by Message, and by type:

By Message: multiple Tasks can be 'rolled up' into one Message, if the tasks are assigned to the same person and they start on the same day the Message is sent. This kind of batching is an optional setting. To learn more, see the article Messages Overview.

By type: when multiple Tasks start or are due on the same day, the initial notifications and reminders will be combined so fewer emails/instant messages are sent. This also applies to reminders sent after Task deadlines have passed. This kind of batching is not an optional setting.

Reordering tasks within the same Batch

As described above, all tasks sent to the same recipient (eg Participant, their Manager) on the same day and time are batched together, and sent as one notification.

The order these tasks appear in the batch (and thus the notification) is determined by the vertical order they appear on the Timeline. For instance, in the example shown below, the order of content in the notification to the Participant (color-coded blue) would be:

1. 'Welcome to Acme!' message
2. 'Sign your contract on Docusign' task
3. 'Shipping Address' task

Here is how to change the order tasks within the batch: