Collaboration convergence - how collaborative workspaces are like mobile phones

20 May 2008 in Usability

There's been a huge increase in the diversity of mobile devices on the market over the past couple of years. From the simplest bare bones phone (e.g. the jitterbug) to the most feature bloated windows mobile device, there is a market for diversity because every consumer has different priorities. The same goes for collaborative workspaces.

It has been interesting to watch trends in the market for online collaboration tools. Some tools started out as wikis and a have added more structured collaboration functionality such as task management, file management, and discussions. Other, more structured tools, such as SharePoint, have gone in the opposite direction, adding more flexible features such as blogs and wikis.

So just as phones, mp3 players, video cameras, and PDA's have converged into all-purpose mobile devices, many of the online collaboration and groupware tools out there are converging in the same way. For sophisticated users this works great, they can quickly adapt and understand what different features do. For others, especially those that are just being weaned off of e-mail, it causes feature overload and stifles adoption.

Overcoming this starts with understanding what your group really wants to do. Do they want to share and manage files, have discussions, post news, crease a list of best practices? Few groups want to use all the features that many tools provide, and way too many collaborative tools are launched with one useful feature buried under numerous unwanted ones. Second, having a simple and intuitive user interface is more important than cramming in every last possible feature. Just like mobile phones, no one wants to have to read an instruction manual on how to upload a document. Third, it is important to give workspace administrators at the both the organization and the project level the ability to tailor features to each groups needs. They often need a little help on this, especially on folder / tag taxonomy. However, this doesn't necessarily mean giving full control over layout and the position of navigational elements, as that can lead to chaos for organization running many workspaces. Users get confused if every workspace is completely different.

Lastly, be prepared to learn as you go, users might tell you one thing while you are researching different options, and then behave completely differently once you are up and running. After a month or two of use, talk to some users and figure out what is really working and what is not and make some additional refinements.

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