Home › Notes on a Redesign

Notes on a Redesign

Submitted by Butch on Wed, 2010-01-20 22:02
in
Screenshot

Hopefully this is the last post on the way that the website now looks. But this is not really about the redesign of the website than it is about how I tried to do the redesign. I tried to run the redesign using Google Wave.

If you don't know what Wave is, I don't think that you are really missing anything. Wave is a "preview" at a much earlier stage than Gmail was when it was first released (in preview/beta/whatever). With Gmail, everyone already knew what e-mail was. While some of us think we know what Wave is, I don't know that anyone actually realizes everything that Wave is eventually going to be when it grows up (if ever). [I spoke about my initial feelings on Google wave in an earlier post.]

The redesign started as some notes scrawled in a notebook, including some pretty poorly done drawings.

I scanned the drawings. I build mockups of the drawings via cut-n-paste from a screenshot of the then current design. All of this was posted up to Google Wave. There was an opening blip describing what I was trying to do and an invitation to those I added to the Wave to provide feedback. There were then 4 blips, one for each of the mockups. And there was blip on the end, mostly to get the threading working the same on the previous blips. It contained some additional requiremens I had for the design, and another invitation to provide feedback.

As I worked on the design (mostly the one idea) I posted screenshots in reply blips with a description of the work done. The idea was that I was going to use the redesign to actually experiment with Wave to see how real people (I thought about risking the word normal there, but I can't type when I'm laughing that hard) would use Wave to collaborate on this type of project.

I can sum the overall project up in three words: Look For Yourself!

The colloaboration bit: FAIL!

There were a total of 13 blips in the Wave. Twelve blips by me and two blips by my brother. One of those blips went something like

Brian wrote:
Holy Shit! I checked wave today for the first time in a very long time and finally a wave i can participate in.
. The other was blank. I did get feedback from Brain, and others, via IM and Twitter (thanks, @keithlord). And I chased Natalie around the house with this or that laptop. But I got ZERO feedback, not even useless feedback, on the design via Google Wave.

Every project needs metrics. These are the metrics on the collaboration. The conclusion, given the 4 people invited to participate in the experiment, FAIL! So, is this failure a problem with Google Wave? Is the medium an issue? Is Wave just too new? Do we just not know how to use it yet? Or should i have just made the whole Wave public and dealt with the opinions of J.Random Waveuser? And if anyone wants to ask, I have about 20 Wave invites still.

Links:

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.sysmango.com/trackback/1056
  • Share this