3 ms·

The psychology of Google Wave

11 points by robg 17y ago

joe_the_user 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
ahoyhere 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago

11 points by robg 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.

ahoyhere 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago