
The psychology of Google Wave - robg
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17955-innovation-the-psychology-of-google-wave.html
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joe_the_user
Ah,

The problem is that nothing I've seen about Wave indicates that it really
addresses the _real_ challenges that email has raised.

 __Challenge: email invites the user to put in too much text and factual
information into their communication knowing too little of
psychological/social context that the receiver will get.

Talking face-to-face lets a person judge what to _say and not say_ based on
the state of the other person. The phone is poorer than this but still works
better than Internet chat. The old personal letter worked better than email
only because it forced the person to spend time thinking about the context of
their communication.

Wave gives a "context" but there's little indication that this context gives a
solid, social foundation for saying and not saying. Instead, it sounds like
chat and worse than chat - the context each communicator is made aware of is
the previous text rather than the feelings of each person. And so, like forum
threads, the pressure will always be there to _get the last word_.

~~~
pohl
Is that the only real challenge, raised by email, that comes to mind? I can
think of another one right away: the protocol allows people to send me
messages as if they have come from someone else.

Another one: people can send me emails that I cannot reply to. ("Thank you,
kind sir, for offering me some Tadalafil, but you can exclude me on any future
offers.")

By my reckoning, Wave addresses both of those challenges pretty well.

I've noticed that not even talking face-to-face will guarantee that a given
participant will judge what to say or not to say. I've known several people
over the course of my life who seemed to be born with a missing mechanism that
allowed them to sense, from nonverbal cues, when it's time to terminate an
interaction.

~~~
joe_the_user
Those are more logistical challenges to email and could be changed with
technical means. What I mentioned earlier is more social and inherent to email
- and moreover, Wave actually would make these problems worse.

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ahoyhere
Sadly meatless article.

I recently created a Wave account, and the real "psychology of Wave" is that
the people who created it don't understand the reasoning behind all the
different types of communication people use, and so they decided that it'd be
dandy to mash them all together with -- horrors! -- live typing.

It's worse than IM, because of the live typing (not an option!), the fact that
people can see your mistakes, and you have to click the damn "Done" button
every time.

Not to mention, your replies don't necessarily end up at the bottom. I
experienced a situation where I was continuing my thread of thinking, and the
other person replied to one of my previous points. I could no longer add a
message at the end of the conversation, it always replied to their last
message. So message B was above message A.

It's worse than email, for many of the same reasons.

It, in theory, could be better for document collaboration, but the interface
is clearly designed with IM/chat in mind (even though it's badly implemented),
and so it's impossible to use it to create documents. There are many
competitors to it for document creation that work better, more fluidly, and
with less hassle. (SubEthaEdit, Bespin, etc.)

IM, email, and other media are used because of their inherent differences.
Asynchronicity has enormous usefulness, it's not just a relic of "inferior
protocols" as Google engineers seem to think. Having multiple channels for
different types and flavors of communication, too, is a GOOD thing.

Sadly, it's clear that they had no ethnographers, "design thinkers," or even a
person who "gets people" on the team. Their UI widgets may be pretty and make
sense in their incredibly narrow context (the mouseover stuff is nice), but
sadly, the whole ecosystem is simply not fit for survival.

Too bad.

I can think of 15 or 20 ways that they could REALLY improve communication on
the web, if only they had "people people" on their teams.

~~~
pohl
I think it's important to draw a distinction between Wave the protocol and
Wave the browser-based client implementation.

The problems that you mention seem to be specific to the web client (having to
click the 'done' button, where replies show up).

The concept & protocol doesn't seem to be related to those usability issues. I
do agree that, if they have any "design thinkers" working on this, it isn't
showing through, though!

~~~
ahoyhere
I've heard that about the protocol. Since I have no intention of building
anything with it, I'll allow that it might be good. But the proof will be in
the pudding!

I'm really sad that the Wave app is so bad. I think we all expect better from
Google (reasonably or otherwise).

