This is the second in a series of posts about UX Camp London. The first one can be found here.

Back to the Roots: If email is the past, is Google Wave the future?

Ex-Flowster Johanna Kollmann, now doing great things at Vodafone, shared her experience of using Google Wave with a tightly-packed audience. Her main argument was that Wave is a great advance on email, offering us something much closer to natural, oral communication, but with the advantage that it can be stored and traced.

Now, there’s a discussion to be had about what constitutes “natural” communication, and whether what we consider to be natural is just the result of using technologies that we are more used to. But we didn’t manage to have that discussion on the day.

Instead, Johanna gave a demo of Wave, and then took some questions. Though much of the discussion focused on the details of the interaction design (which still seems to have a few kinks to iron out), several people said that they didn't “get” Wave. The problem seems to be that by combining the most useful features of email, instant messaging and virtual conferencing tools, Google may have created a product that, for all its advantages, confuses some people by not being immediately recognisable as one thing or another.

Ground-breaking new products can be baffling at first to people whose expectations are formed by older paradigms, but when we use them they begin to make sense, and we gradually accept them and change our behaviour accordingly (think Twitter, or for those with longer memories, the mobile phone). But on the other hand, some new products are insufficiently well-defined at the proposition level (that is, nobody can quite define what they are for), and our research shows that this inevitably has a direct negative impact on the experience of using them.

It remains to be seen which of these two possibilities applies to Google’s Wave, but I’m impatient to see which one it is.

Johanna’s Slides are on her blog, here.