Wave on Business

This is a follow-up post to our blog last week about an experiment at a publishing company, which took place on Friday, the 13th of November.

After a brief introduction to the agenda, went through the basics of Wave in about half an hour.

This proved to be challenging, because there is after all so much to show in Wave by now, but we focused on basic usage on Wave and scoped the presentation for this.

The best way to present Wave is clearly to introduce a few concepts and then jump right into demo’s. I’ve done live Wave demo’s a number of times now, and it always helps to have a helping hand in the audience, who also is familiar with Wave and can participate in the demonstration.

Wave had a good day – DESPITE the fact, that this was done on Friday, the 13th – although there were minor sync problems with the Wave servers.

After the introduction the participants we’re asked to go through some basic exercises to get accustomed to the Wave interface and got their contacts set up.

The participants of the experiment had no previous knowledge of using Wave, apart from signing up for an account.

The participants previous experience with online collaboration had mostly been with emails, Google Docs and Sites, Skype and to a lesser extent, with chat tools.

They quickly got the feel of Wave and started chatting, using keyboard shortcuts and trying out private replies.

One of the users who had not used chat very much, said that Wave felt very convincing to use.

Experiments

After a short time of training the three users were thrown into the experiments.

During the first, a project initiator had to open a new wave and start a brainstorm on an idea for a new book with the users sitting away from each other in the room to simulate that the users were actually in different rooms.

The students and I were monitoring the discussion, and one of the students would give instructions to the users in a separate wave, termed the “command wave”, to guide the experiment in a certain direction.

The experiment worked out pretty well, and an idea for a new book was actually taking form as an added bonus

During this first experiment the communication was pretty chaotic with structure and contents mixed together in a pretty mess.

Also, there was no agreed way to form the communication – mostly replies would be used, but sometimes inline replies took place as well.

The evaluation of the first experiment got the following feedback from the users:

- structure is something that is made up along the way, using lists for instance (numbered lists were lacking according to the users)

- communication was constantly changing between creating structure and discussing contents

- the collaborative part in editing was very good.

- private replies proved valuable for on-the-side chatting (mostly one-on-one fact based discussions, not private chat)

- the chat in private replies, was usually done using other tools (Skype/IM) and the users liked the fact that they could stay in Wave and have support for private chat contained herein

- it’s difficult to see where the action in a wave is currently taking place. When you’re in a long wave and somebody is typing at the top, you have to scroll around to catch the activities going on.

When asked what the initiator would have done differently, he replied that he would have aimed for more structure to begin with.

And very interestingly, he also expressed that he felt like he was supposed to be organizing a real meeting in Wave and therefore aimed to keep some sort of meeting order, which was hard.

Organizing a wave brainstorm is a different proces than a physical meeting and therefore requires a different mindset – this was clear to the organizer during the first experiment.

In conclusion…

The experiments showed some progress in the ability to structure the communication and form the output of the brainstorm as well.

Overall the users enjoyed using Wave and saw a good potential for using Wave in their working process.

And who knows, maybe a new book will come out at some point as the result of these experiements