Way Too Much Information December 2, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Google Wave, Interfaces, Technology
1 comment so far
I received an invitation to Google Wave a few weeks ago. I was anxious to try it, but got little traction. Since then, a few more friends have joined, and I’ve been able to experiment a little bit. The jury is still out on the ultimate usefulness of the tool, but there is one “feature” that gives me pause.
If several people are actively participating in a conversation, the Wave interface actually shows their typing, in real time. This is the next logical extension of existing instant messaging platforms, which note when another party is actually typing. This was a handy feature, since it let you know if the person at the other end was actively participating. Wave’s extension, on the other hand, is unnerving.
Very few people, myself included, write complete, rational thoughts on the first try. Instead, we type, think, delete, edit, retype, and iterate until we have composed a complete message. We often start out with something that we later contradict, or use a word or tone that we might regret and subsequently remove. The end product represents a finished thought.
Google Wave exposes that entire process. It is weird, and a bit voyeuristic, to watch someone in the act of composition. In one conversation, I actually began responding to a person’s message, only to have them edit and change it before after I had posted my now-inappropriate response. My response made no sense, and they knew I had been privy to a thought they later chose to retract.
It should be obvious by now that I am a big fan of all these new-fangled communications tools. I like the idea of being instantly connected, and I enjoy the immediacy of keeping up with other people. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn: I get it, and I use it.
But this crosses a line. I am happy to share what I am doing, but I am not willing to expose my actual thought processes before they are fully formed. Rapid communication is fine, but at some point there are aspects of what I am doing that I absolutely do not want to share.
I suspect that the folks at Wave did not set out to design a “thought exposure” feature. Instead, I suspect they think that this is just a cooler way of showing that the other parties are typing and interacting. I’m hoping that they’ll see the error of their ways and at least let me turn this feature off.
The whole experience reminded me of a scene from the show Married… With Children. Peg Bundy and her long-suffering husband Al are sitting silently on the couch. Peg finally tries to break the ice by asking, “Al, what are you thinking?” Al, speaking on behalf of every man on earth, replies, “If I wanted you to know, I’d be talking.”
Google, if I want people to know what I’m thinking, I’ll click “Done.” Until then, I’ll keep my keystrokes to myself.
Now What? November 11, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Interfaces, Technology, Users
2 comments
I received an invite to Google Wave the other day. Having heard lots of buzz, I was looking forward to learning more about it. While Google Mail is not my primary mail platform, I already have an account and use lots of other Google stuff.
I accepted the invite, went through a few setup choices, and was dropped into the main Wave interface. And stayed there. Now what?
This is not an indictment of Google Wave; it’s too early to pass judgment. My real concern is that every new tool we confront seems to have the same “now what?” moment.
Twitter is awash with people who never made it past “now what?” You can see these abandoned accounts everywhere, with three tweets from six months ago. The first is upbeat: “Trying out twitter!” A bit later, an effort to fit in: “Meeting Harriet for dinner; we’re thinking Italian.” Finally, their last tweet, a few weeks later: “Need to use twitter more often!”
Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymez, Ning, Xing, and all the rest: every collaboration platform has the same problem. They make it easy to sign up, they promise to change your world, and they leave you high and dry, wondering how to unlock all that promised value. This is a hard problem, and I’ve not seen too many good solutions.
Facebook tries. When they aren’t annoying their entire user base with gratuitous attempts to be more like Twitter, they pop up little messages on behalf of the newbies: “Harriet has 7 friends. Help her find more!” Although inadvertently making Harriet the laughing-stock of her limited social world, the idea is that others would reach out and help Harriet use Facebook more effectively.
In most other platforms, there is little help for the new user. Instead, users must work to get engaged, figure out the tools, figure out the culture, and find people to interact with. It takes time and is not for the faint-of-heart. Those not up to the challenge fade away, lamenting that they “never got much value out of it.”
That’s unfortunate, and it’s the fault of the platforms, not the users. New users should be welcomed with open arms and drawn into some sort of quick start program that yields quick value. Instead, people are confronted with creating a profile (again) and wrestling with CSV files to import their contact list. Hardly a nice way to start out; it’s not so much a warm welcome as it is a hazing ritual.
I don’t have a ready answer for this. Every platform is different, so each one needs a different solution. But regardless of the details, having a Welcome Wagon for new users would go a long way to broadening the value of these systems to a big group of interested new users.
I Feel Your Pain November 4, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.Tags: Development, Interfaces, Software, Users
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Users are in a tough position. They’ve evolved to the point where they cannot do their jobs without computers. The systems that they use are becoming more and more sophisticated, with equally sophisticated interfaces. Worst of all, they have little or no control over how those systems are built.
Our users rely on us to build systems that are easy to use, reliable, and consistent. They have no idea how we do this, not do they care. They trust us to take care of the awful details of system design and development to make things that they find useful. Regrettably, I don’t think we on the IT side of the house do as good a job as we could on their behalf.
We often make design decisions that cause users great angst. I’m not talking about sweeping design changes; I’m thinking more about the small, subtle things that can make a big difference in a user’s life. The layout of a screen, the ordering of a menu, the arrangement of a list can dramatically affect the usability of a tool. Poor usability results in unhappy users.
Many times, these kind of decisions get made on the basis of how complicated it can be to implement a better alternative. In short, we reduce development time and expect the user to deal with a less-effective interface. We reduce developer pain at the expense of user pain, and that’s wrong.
I’ve written about this before. One of my biggest peeves in just about every web site on earth is that you cannot enter anything but digits into a credit card number field. The developer will not set the field to “numeric only;” instead, they’ll put some awful text near it that explains that you should not type dashes or spaces in the field. Here’s a big idea: how about you write some code to strip out dashes and spaces, so I can type the number in a way that make sense to me? The developer saved twenty minutes; users spend collective years trying to type things correctly.
There are countless examples of this in every system we use. Time and again, developers and designers make their lives easier by asking users to do a little bit more. The problem is that the development time is incurred once; the user time incurred over and over and over again, for years.
We owe our users better. They trust us to build systems they can use. We need to feel their pain, take it on ourselves, and remove it from their day-to-day lives. Users are the most important part of any system; we need to show that we understand that by building things that respect their time and energy. Show your users some love: build things that put them first.
Chief Guinea Pig October 12, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Customer Service, Interfaces, Users
3 comments
As technology penetrates every aspect of the business world, those of us in IT find ourselves deploying tools more and more frequently. These tools are more tightly integrated to everything our users do. In days gone by, we provided green screens for data entry and green bar for rudimentary reporting. Now we control every aspect of communication, including voice, email, and text messaging, and provide interfaces to every system in the business.
Most shops do a lot of testing before rolling out new stuff. Typically, testing begins on the IT side of the house and ends up on the user side, with qualified end users signing off before something goes into production. Is there a place in that process for the CIO?
I think there is. I think I have a responsibility to know how our systems function and what the overall user experience is going to be. I’m the first to admit that I am not qualified to test the business processes behind these systems, but I do think I have a voice in the general experience.
Generally, I consider myself the primary guinea pig for almost everything we deploy in my company. I usually try out each new laptop, many new phones, and almost all user interfaces that we develop. I try to see how these tools would impact a typical end user. Are they easy to use and understand? Do they have confusing options or weird configuration choices? Would users be confronted by tedious, pointless interaction sequences?
In short, if I were an end user, would I be happy with the device or system? I feel strongly that I should never ask a user to use a device or participate in a process that I have not personally experienced.
In conversing with other CIOs, I find that some do not wish to engage at this level. They don’t have time to go through this process and don’t feel that they are qualified to make a reasonable judgment. However, most of them do have trusted coworkers that fulfill the role of guinea pig for them. They value the testing experience; they’ve just outsourced the task to someone else.
There have been times I find myself doing the same thing. Some new phones are only available on other carriers; I’ll find someone I trust to see if the phone is acceptable. Some business processes are beyond my reach (or security level), but I’ll find someone else to give me the unvarnished truth about a new system.
CIOs should be operating at a strategic level above the details. That altitude, however, does not absolve of us from having the ultimate responsibility for the quality of everything we deliver to the business. Ironically, our distance from a tool or system gives us a different perspective from the developers who toil so closely with it. By being closer to the forest than the trees, we can often see problems that are overlooked by the tactical developers and testers.
Although it may drive your developers to distraction, simply asking “why?” as you walk through an interface or use a device may ultimately create a better experience for your end users. And that, regardless of your preferred level of engagement, is what our job is all about.
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