When I was in grade 8 I learnt French. I say learn, but it was a handful
of disconnected words and maybe a sentence or two that I couldn’t
possibly remember now. The problem for me was that I knew I was
going about learning it the wrong way, but relied on the teacher to
teach me the “best way”. See, when I wanted to say a word in French, I
first had to think of the word in English, then check my mental filing
system for the equivalent word in French. It’s a slow and cumbersome way
of recall that never really worked for me, no matter how many times we
repeated the words by rote.
I’m not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8
education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When
Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people
as “sort of like email” or “part instant messenger, part Google Docs”.
This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when
we “pin” it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one
thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in
8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something
on an advanced day-to-day basis.
Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider
how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.
The problem as I see it is how the tech-illiterate are going to learn
how to use Wave. I work in an industry where technology is secondary to
the primary business, and am constantly amazed to find that there are
still people who can’t use email and often even refuse to turn on a
computer. It’s sometimes my job to explain even the most rudimentary of
modern communication tasks. I might normally do this by comparing email
to snail-mail, email addresses to post office boxes and so on. The user
then keeps these analogies in mind the next time they use their email
without me around.
With Wave, the analogies are all different. There aren’t yet clear
real-world examples we can use to explain Wave concepts and so far all
the analogies I’ve heard compare it to other technology concepts. For
example, a wave is compared to a message board and individual blips are
like single emails. While somewhat helpful for technology types, these
analogies will fail with non-techies who are already struggling to map
these concepts to the “real-world”. I suspect the thought-process to
interpret these concepts might take two or three steps to “translate”
these new ideas into ones the user is familiar with. So we have Mr Jones
who has been told that a wave is like an email, which he remembers from
his grandson is like a letter. But He’s also been told it can be used
instantly like a telephone. Technically (and very loosely) these
analogies are correct, but are they useful?
Perhaps this is exactly the reason the Wave team abandoned terms like
“message” and “update” for brand new ones like “wave” and “blip” - to
give everyone a level playing field when learning the new technology. I
just can’t help wondering however if new names and ideas might be more
confusing.
What I’d like to see is a third party developer build a wave solution
(server and client) that addresses the new concepts in an involving and
intuitive way. It’s widely known that Google builds software the
engineering way - by doing it the simplest way they know how, then
testing multiple variations over and over and continually refining. This
incremental approach can only work when it’s almost there to begin
with. The huge shift in thinking that Wave requires might never make
sense to the non-technical when built by engineers. Another party
however may be able to research the best way to school new users in Wave
right in the interface.
A radically different wave-compatible alternative could open Wave up to
a whole new set of users that might otherwise pass it over as “too
technical”. If Google want to encourage the world to embrace Wave and
abandon email, they will need all the help they can get building a
translation-free wave experience for new users.
- Do you find Wave confusing?
- What do you think your less tech-savvy friends and family might
think of Wave the first time they see it?
- How would you make Wave more new-user-friendly?
Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hectorl/
/ CC BY-ND 2.0
