

Ask HN: Why do team collaboration webapps suck? - twiddl

Hi, fellow HNers. Is it just me or do team collaboration webapps suck?<p>Most of my collaboration/communication is still done through email and IM.<p>Whenever I've tried to get teams I have worked with to use a wiki or other collaboration tool I see a fall off in usage after an initial rush. Even if they do use it, the content uploaded/ gathered is sparse.<p>Usually only the content that people explicitly want to share(like minutes of meeting, presentations) go into the wiki, if they ever do, but most of the time its just sent as an email.<p>They either think its a pain to login, into the tool and put in stuff, when it could just be mailed in. Or just completely forget about it and go back to the old way of doing things.<p>- Is this a common thing when trying a new tool?<p>- How did you get across this hurdle?<p>- Is most of your collaboration done through e-mail, IM, Phone calls and twitter?<p>- Do you regularly come across more information/data (articles, tutorials, presentations) that your team could benefit from, but isn't as important as something you'd put into a wiki?<p>- what thought triggers you into putting something into a wiki or some other tool?
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mgunes
> _Whenever I've tried to get teams I have worked with to use a wiki or other
> collaboration tool I see a fall off in usage after an initial rush._

It's the "paradox of the active user" at work:

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/activeuserparadox.html>

Your collaborators fit the definition of "active users" very well: they are in
the middle of a project, they have specific goals, and they don't perceive the
effort put into learning to use a new piece of software as being beneficial to
accomplishing their goals within the project. They view it as an extra bit of
unrelated piece of work and responsibility to go under, with ambiguous
potential benefits, if any.

~~~
twiddl
Thanks for that link, though I've observed this never came across this
concept.

