UI Design Aspects For Google Wave
Umang Jain
Google Wave’s UI maximizes their users’ performance and usability by enabling them to accomplish lots of tasks and sharing them in a single product. But, as far as user’s experience comes under consideration, it fails to deliver.
UI Design Overview
In the UI design, the top left navigation panel enables any user to locate her folders, see her extensions, and search for keywords. The panel in the bottom left allows the user to manage or search her contacts. The large panel in the middle, makes the user access her waves, follow them, un-follow them, archive them, move them to archive folder or to spam folders, trash them or mark them read/unread. The panel on the right shows the wave clicked in the inbox. A user can browse waves from this panel and also can reply to the waves using text, images or various gadgets.
UI Design Metrics
User Performance Time
The Google Wave was very slow when it was launched. It used to crash very frequently. But, now that it has stabilized it is quite fast and has a good performance time.
User Learning Time
The user learning time is very large, as the UI is very complex and the terminology used is not understandable.
Users’ Retention Time
Learning Wave looks very complicated which makes its users’ retention time very small. Also, its backward incompatibility with Gmail made it of no use for quite some time just after it was launched.
User Subjective Satisfaction
Google Wave has a questionnaire that enables users to give their feedback but only if user wants to. It never asks for feedback by itself.
Good Aspects of the Design
New technology of real time communication and collaboration.
Every feature is on the same page. No re-loading of features again and again (dynamically handled). Makes it fast.
Character-by-character live typing.
Ability to drag and drop files from desktop.
Sharing images and other media in real time.
Improved spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word.
Personalization with extensions.
The editing history timeline is a great User Experience feature.
Attractive widgets like Yes/No/Maybe widget, Map widget, etc.
Google’s new scrollbars were designed and they completely merge with the design. They do not take space as they are on top of other elements.
New waves for discussions, meetings, brainstorming, or task tracking.
Excellent logo design, it makes people go for it.
Bad Aspects of the Design
UI is very complicated.
A user’s posts can be edited by other users if not marked as un-editable. This process should be reversed, i.e., a user’s post should be un-editable by default which is not the case.
It isn’t backward compatible with Email (or Gmail).
Terminologies like waves, wavelets, local wavelet, etc. are not clear to general users.
Privacy issues are there, like a message send to someone cannot be restricted from being forwarded.
It is not designed to tell if your message was ever received, read or even opened.
New things move to the top regardless of how important they are. Important things should remain on top (see work desk as a metaphor, important papers always remain on top on a desk).
Once posted, a user cannot take it back.
A user cannot lock out everyone else.
Wave is not designed to control spamming which takes a lot away from its users’ experience.
Wave was very buggy and slow when launched. This drew the people away from it.
Conclusion
Although, Google Wave was an exciting project and pushed the boundaries of computer science with its exciting features. It gained numerous loyal fans for its innovativeness and extraordinary features. But, it did not get the user adoption as Google would have liked.
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