Thoughts on the Google Wave Beta

Google Wave Screenshot

I recently joined a wave of about seven user experience professionals, with all of us participating and discussing, in real-time, the merits of Wave. In fairness, if you send seven UX snobs to review almost any interface, you can expect some berating. And this is a closed “preview” (read: beta) version. But what occurred was an absolute evisceration. In this post I attempt to distill the feedback by providing three criticisms and three suggestions about how Google Wave can be improved.

Criticism 1: An Identity Crisis – What is Google Wave?

“Google Wave is all this interesting stuff on the screen, all around me. A wave is a shared space, where you can discuss, and work, and communicate, with friends and colleagues, using text, and videos, and photos, and maps, and all sorts of interesting stuff.” - Doctor Wave

Holy crap! It’s everything! In the instructional video that Google expects the user to discover floating in their inbox, the Google-PM-turned-mad-scientist “Doctor Wave” point out that, really, they aren’t too clear on what it’s for either. Herein lies the first problem with using Wave: it has no idea what need to fulfill.

Criticism 2: Out of Context – Why am I here?

Upon receiving the invite to use Wave and signing in, I found myself staring at a bunch of functionality. The internal conversation went something like this:

“Why am I here?”
“To check out Google Wave”
“Yeah. It’s pretty crazy.”
“… What now?”

This highlights the second problem with Wave: many people arrive in the software with no context. Because it’s not marketed or designed as an application to solve a specific need, it’s up to the community to discover what problems can be solved in a better way by using a wave. You have to come at it with a goal: to plan a trip, to organize a project. If your goal reads vaguely, like “figure out how Wave can be useful to me”, you will probably walk away frustrated. Unfortunately, you can’t help but enter the application with this goal at the moment.

Criticism 3: Do I make you nervous?

As you type in a wave, other participants can see you typing in real time. (There is a feature to disable this, but it’s not implemented yet). Imagine yourself sweating, nervous, your hands shaking as you mash out typo after typo in front of a conference chat. You type something which you decide you don’t want to say, but by the time you erase it, everyone has read it anyway.

Google Wave Real Time Chat

Furthermore, when a few people are typing and clicking around at once all the “blips” (messages) in the wave start jumping all over the place. Text appears and disappears everywhere, things move around, the other parts of Wave ping you with chat messages and unread inbox items, and you can’t see the screen because it’s covered in the remnants of your brain, which has just exploded in protest. Imagine everyone in a big room, standing in their own spots and just yelling in all directions at the same time.

Finally, and this just confounds me, anyone can edit anyone else’s messages, even while they’re typing them. Imagine the disaster that happens when four people start editing the same content at once.

So what should Google do?

Suggestion 1: They should start small.

Instead of telling people that Wave will solve all their problems, if only they could figure out how, Wave should introduce itself to solve a single problem. This could be something like.. Plan a party. Google Wave is your new party-planning software. Give people a reason to be there, and a goal to work towards as they navigate and discover Wave’s features. People will naturally discover new and interesting applications of their software, and the use will broaden over time. But people have to use it first, and right now they have no clear reason to do that.

Suggestion 2: They should end the closed beta.

I cannot imagine what made Google think that it was a good idea to give out limited invitations to a closed space that is fundamentally social. Many of us arrived in Wave staring at an empty contacts list and no idea who else was using it. Furthermore, the invites tend to spread to the ultra-connected early adopters. But most of my real friends aren’t that person. How do I plan a camping trip on Wave when none of my friends use it? It will open up someday soon, but the taste is already bitter. Google should open things up now, so that we can begin to contact the people we actually need to communicate with.

Suggestion 3: The real-timeyness needs changing.

But I don’t know what. Moderation? Guidelines? Established etiquette? Outright deletion? Currently, any lively real-time conversation between more than two people evolves into mayhem. Either some sort of social rules that keep things in order will arise from the user base, or Google needs to change how this feature works. They can start by turning the real-time typing off by default.

Google Wave may turn out to change how we communicate after all, but they need to build a lot of bridges. The large gap between novice and effective use of the system, in its current form, will stifle its success.

http://icosidodecahedron.com Michael Kozakewich

In the most basic sense, Wave is a Collaboration Platform. Collaboration and planning. They’re trying to pretend it’ll replace email, but that’s just not what it is, at the moment. It’ll also fail as an instant messager without some sort of template.

When you get right down to it, even email is open-endeded:
“What do I do?”
“You can send a message to someone.”
“Well, what should I say?”
“…Anything?”

It would help to say it’s a planning software, though.

Also, if there’s one thing I’ve found out from my repeated exposure to Google’s open alphas (whatever they call them, they’re basically pre-beta) is that the not-so-bright users will complain about how it doesn’t work, and they’ll sometimes just put it down and never use it again. It’s better to keep the vast majority of the users waiting high and dry for a stable release.