Google Wave Input

I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now as a beta user.

I read an article about a survey Google put out to gather user feedback. The questions seemed… very … milk-toasty. As in, one of the reasons for liking Wave was that it is a shiny new toy? Er?

Having released the survey to a bunch of developers, I would think that the questions and therefore the feedback would be… more specific, maybe? Maybe they got tons of feedback in the free-form text field at the end of the survey.

So here’s my specific feedback for Google. I submitted a lot of these in the form of “ideas” in Google’s Product Idea area, which is a Twitter-like space where you can contribute or vote on other people’s ideas.

Widgets
The widgets are really, really important – as important as the App Store is to the iPhone. It makes Wave customizable, personalized. With so much going on, personalization is important.

Widgets need to be run like the App Store, installable to a toolbox/ribbon view, maybe, within the specific wave’s interface or the user’s consistent interface.

Widgets need to be interest-area-specific. As in, gamers need their own set of widgets; weather freaks need theirs. I need project planning widgets like mind maps and wireframes. People need to have collapsible toolboxes of widgets for the kind of waves they work in most often, and recommendations need to pop up every now and then for new widgets to keep them flowing into users’ toolboxes.

Update Rate
Thus far I’ve joined public waves for various topic areas just to get a feel for how a wave will work. One for project management dorks like me, one for that Getting Things Done guy, one for Kindles. They flex in how much people use them, but when traffic is high, and the update rate is immediate — I am able to see what someone is typing as they type it — those waves can seem like they’re on some kind of time-lapse. I get that it’s an international, open thread and people are playing with it, but I can see having a conference wave in which the conversation moves really, really fast; and waves in which I don’t really want people to see what I’m typing until I’m really done typing it (editing and checking for typos).

To that end, Google needs to make refresh rates a customizable option, by wave types (public vs. private, professional vs. personal) and by individual wave – this is another aspect of personalization. Some users will want to set them by wave type and be done with it; dorks like me will want to get more granular. I should be able to do both at any time.

The Interface
I get that there are lots of ways to communicate and that’s part of the beauty here. For the most part, the interface has been well thought-out to accommodate what’s going on. That said, there are an awful lot of little red, green and yellow lights, plus signs and X’s in this interface. As a user goes from the general to the specific, left to right, the interface should streamline, get more simple and be more customizable. Right now, in the left column is your contacts and chat list; in the center are current waves, sortable and searchable; and then on the far right is your actual wave. So by the time I get to the right panel (and I should have the option to collapse those left windows whenever I want), things need to get easier to see and do. Instead, my widgets and style buttons are sitting up there in a very text-heavy set of options for my current wave. Move the ribbons! Make them a popup control panel, or something.

Integration
People are talking about how it will need to integrate with apps like Outlook, that people in tech will be early adopters but to bring more people into the fold it needs to plug into current software.

To be honest, I don’t know how that can possibly work — it seems to me that it will end up looking like early Outlook/smart phone integration looked, which was just excruciating to view, much less use. The way Outlook is designed to work, with every discrete content type so specific and separate in its own silo of data, and the contact record being the primary key for all activity, I have a hard time seeing how it might work (then again, I’m no Google developer). Outlook is really a contact management system with task management layered on top of it. Entourage is the closest Microsoft product I know of to how Wave groups and organizes content and users — in Entourage, the project is the organizing principle and everything flows from that. Well, I’m sure they will figure it out. If it extends the platform to more users, they’ll figure it out.

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