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Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this? I've seen a few spacial chat systems pass through HN in the past few months. Fr

Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this? I've seen a few spacial chat systems pass through HN in the past few months. From a pure social application standpoint both spot and other options seem to be reasonably well executed, though it seems at odds with the natural flow of workplace interactions. I guess it might be a perceived lack of privacy in conversations? When talking to another individual in an online case it's generally either fully public or fully private. Having unexpected intrusions in something with the base mentality of being private seems unpleasant. Personally given the corporate cultures I've been in using a spacial social chat environment feels like it would lead to rather forced interactions, unnatural intrusions, and micromanagement of execs seeing interactions as something to be mismanaged rather than an organic phenomena. When used in a purely social sense the tools seem great and plenty novel (due to lack of hierarchies and allowing multiple unrelated conversations to form and occur simultaneously), just not in the current application domain? Who knows, perhaps I just have been dealing with orgs with bad culture, but I struggle to see the concept adopted well. Great looking execution though despite my reservations.

remram 5y ago
That is my feeling as well. The whole point of having colleagues in your physical space is so that you are in the same physical space. Having a virtual space in a background window does nothing for me. I cannot see my teammates walking to the water cooler, I cannot see some teammates grouping up to discuss, I cannot give a sense of whether I'm interruptible or not. Because what we see are those avatars that do not reflect our current state at all. 3D spaces are fun and I'm very fond of games where I can pretend to do work. However I do not actually exist or work in there, and the moment I start doing actual work I stop role-playing my character around the game.
- frbr 5y ago
  This is where it gets interesting, because many of the things you've mentioned are things that we're spending a lot of time on thinking through. At the moment Spot has "headphones mode" which signals to others that you prefer not to be interrupted. It also temporarily mutes notifications and other things, just like putting on real headphones in real life would. We're very conscious of these things, and coming from UI/UX research I believe it's paying attention to these fine details that add up to a great product overall.
  - remram 5y ago
    If I have to step into that virtual space and put my headphones on/off it is probably not in sync most of the time. Most people won't consistently remember/spend time letting your app know what social clues to give to other people. This is the entire advantage of those clues. And if I do spend the time, why not put me in the "available for chat" Discord room or similar? What's the advantage of turning those explicit status settings back into subtle social clues in a virtual 3D world, other than making things complicated for coworkers?
    - frbr 5y ago
      An interesting hypothesis. Maybe the deeper question is, does the virtual world really need to reflect the physical world in a very accurate way, or does it suffice to represent a subset of that? And then, how accurate does it have to be? Does it map 1:1 or are there indirections that would work well to convey meaningful information and trigger actions that make sense? I guess many important clues get provided implicitly. For some reason you want to mute notifications for a while, so you do that, and your avatar reflects it, but it may not be necessary to truly be in headphones mode whenever you happen to be wearing headphones, or vice-versa. Our goal is to simplify things and avoid artificial complexity wherever possible.
      - remram 5y ago
        Did you consider that a tree list that people call "rooms" might be a sufficient subset already?
tommoor 5y ago
> Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this – I previously founded an always-on video presence startup[1]. We were building for our own problem as founders, as is often the advice you get given! – However I think this is a case where founders are actually unique and what works for a group of 2-3 founding folks really does not scale well to a broader team at all. This is also what we saw with our product, it worked well for small tight-knit groups but rarely did teams above 10 adopt in a meaningful way. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-remotely-less-lonely-more-awesome/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-rem...

remram 5y ago

That is my feeling as well. The whole point of having colleagues in your physical space is so that you are in the same physical space. Having a virtual space in a background window does nothing for me. I cannot see my teammates walking to the water cooler, I cannot see some teammates grouping up to discuss, I cannot give a sense of whether I'm interruptible or not. Because what we see are those avatars that do not reflect our current state at all. 3D spaces are fun and I'm very fond of games where I can pretend to do work. However I do not actually exist or work in there, and the moment I start doing actual work I stop role-playing my character around the game.

frbr 5y ago
This is where it gets interesting, because many of the things you've mentioned are things that we're spending a lot of time on thinking through. At the moment Spot has "headphones mode" which signals to others that you prefer not to be interrupted. It also temporarily mutes notifications and other things, just like putting on real headphones in real life would. We're very conscious of these things, and coming from UI/UX research I believe it's paying attention to these fine details that add up to a great product overall.
- remram 5y ago
  If I have to step into that virtual space and put my headphones on/off it is probably not in sync most of the time. Most people won't consistently remember/spend time letting your app know what social clues to give to other people. This is the entire advantage of those clues. And if I do spend the time, why not put me in the "available for chat" Discord room or similar? What's the advantage of turning those explicit status settings back into subtle social clues in a virtual 3D world, other than making things complicated for coworkers?
  - frbr 5y ago
    An interesting hypothesis. Maybe the deeper question is, does the virtual world really need to reflect the physical world in a very accurate way, or does it suffice to represent a subset of that? And then, how accurate does it have to be? Does it map 1:1 or are there indirections that would work well to convey meaningful information and trigger actions that make sense? I guess many important clues get provided implicitly. For some reason you want to mute notifications for a while, so you do that, and your avatar reflects it, but it may not be necessary to truly be in headphones mode whenever you happen to be wearing headphones, or vice-versa. Our goal is to simplify things and avoid artificial complexity wherever possible.
    - remram 5y ago
      Did you consider that a tree list that people call "rooms" might be a sufficient subset already?

tommoor 5y ago

> Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this – I previously founded an always-on video presence startup[1]. We were building for our own problem as founders, as is often the advice you get given! – However I think this is a case where founders are actually unique and what works for a group of 2-3 founding folks really does not scale well to a broader team at all. This is also what we saw with our product, it worked well for small tight-knit groups but rarely did teams above 10 adopt in a meaningful way. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-remotely-less-lonely-more-awesome/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-rem...