Open eyes Working brain

The more i read about psychology the more i feel it’s compelling knowledge to anyone especially in the software business.

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz is enlightening on this respect. Humans inherently crave control, autonomy, self determination and so choices which are natural means to express this essential demand of freedom. Yet, humans used to have simple lives with limited amount of choices. Now, in these days of exponential growth and exploding options, they just can’t cope anymore. They’re overwhelmed by escalating possibilities in all fields of life ending up paralyzed, frustrated, dissatisfied if not plain depressed.

Schwartz comes to the conclusion that, to relieve distress, they have to fight back their inner impulse and learn to accept some constraints are good, that simplicity, more often than not, can be the golden path to well-being. In a later talk at Google, he goes as far as pointing out that software/product makers should embrace libertarian paternalism, which in a nutshell means: give them choices but also apply soft contraints to ease their path to “good” decisions. Those that will probably make them better.

Greek Diners in New York City. Their menus are about a thousand pages. There is no dish anyone has ever eaten it isn’t somewhere on those menus and tucked in the front cover of the menu there’s a little piece of paper with “today’s specials” – four or five items. Inadvertently you create an insoluble problem by giving people 10,000 things to choose from and then you solve it for them by giving them today’s specials and people are driven to choose, take your advice, take your recommendation.

This sheds new light on the company vs customer, simple vs full featured software picture i’m still trying to figure out. As Don Norman puts it “People want the features” and “Features win over simplicity” and as Joel Spolsky notices “With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing.”. That’s obvious. That’s what people naturally do, the way society drives them to do: Manifest control by claiming more options, more variety.

But then there’s the other side of the coin. Many of them will reject using such software or at least defend themselves by restricting to very basic usage and, in the end, they’ll feel bad about it. Empirical evidence is already there in stats about unused features. People also seem to feel it as the great success of “for dummies” books and simplicity buzzword in advertising underline. Using Schwartz words:

A majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. the paradox of our times.

Customers bombarded by never ending stream of choices and responsabilities are to me much like children in need of a good parent. So companies as anyone really or virtually in charge of other human beings are subjected to the same old ethical question:

Do we care for us or for them?

Are we in the business of making money or in the business of making happy customers?

If you like me value the latter, then maybe, it’s time to start acting as a lovely father who takes best choices for his offspring but as they grow safe, empower them day by day. Instead if money drives your actions, i just got one more question for you:

Do you think such economy is REALLY sustainable?

Google Wave is an impressive product. If you haven’t seen the Google IO Preview video, i highly suggest you do it know and come back later. Even if you don’t care, there’s a long list of smart ideas, patterns and neat technical solutions packed into Wave that deserve to be studied. Let me mention a few:

• One unique state, on the server
• Operational Transformations
• Statistical spell checker
• Real time collaboration
• Real time search
• Federation
• Playback of changes over time
• Applications as Robots
• Openness of protocol, api, extension

and much more, but even though all this goodness and google involvement are exciting and indeed already suggest a planetary success, i am a little skeptical.

First, in our times of overwhelming complexity, when products like Twitter can WIN not by augmenting capabilities but by restricting them (to a single short answer), Wave  rich complexity will have to prove itself. But there’s more. Something feels wrong to me in this catch-all approach to communication, and i came to believe it’s how all this empowerment is unevenly distributed among different facets of communication itself.

Let me explain trying to determine a few of those facets:

• Retention. How long information will remain available. e.g. From ephemeral spoken words to durable written words.
• Responsiveness. Whether information is taken in immediately or at a later time. e.g. From asynchronous mail to synchronous phone.
• Relevance. How much information is specific and important to a certain matter or goal. e.g. From generic chit-chat to focused articles.

It’s easy to see that high retention and asynchronicity are symbiotic. There can be no asynchronous transfer of information if that information is not stored somewhere waiting to be consumed. What’s harder to see, but empirically true afaic, is that high relevance is related as well. Maybe it’s the effort traditionally required to store information in a durable form, maybe it’s because people have more time to think on what they want to say, maybe it’s that information is produced in isolation helping to concentrate, but it seems asynchronous highly persistent communication tends to be more focused, worth and relevant.

• You’d write a book about origami, but probably not about your last vacation.
• You’d write a blog post about your last vacation, but maybe not about today’s weather.
• You’d twitter about weather, but hopefully not that you’re turning down volume on the ipod.
• Yet you could say that to a friend being around.

Conversely, as communication responsiveness bar raises up, we keep putting in more and more trivial, irrelevant, conversational stuff. That’s easily common sense. Take the word “chat” and how it often has negative connotation. Chat as a waste of time. Chat as enemy of focused productive work (pomodoro technique anyone?). It would be foolish to say that all real time communication is irrelevant, or that irrelevant information is always bad, yet down that path, we often digress from the meaningful and, in that circumstance, high retention is at least useless if not undesirable.

So what’s the problem with Google Wave?

It innovates by opening the entire spectrum of responsiveness possibilities. Users can communicate from asynchronous e-mail to true real time chat. Wonderful. But what about other facets? 

• Retention is fixed and very high. In fact so high that waves can be viewed as conversations or even documents. Stored forever in the cloud. I guess they have or will have a delete button but that would be quite coarse-grained anyway.
• Relevance has even weaker support. You have wave title and tags and that’s it.

Without further control, i don’t see how people will be kept from mixing those different kinds of communication in wrong ways, especially as number of participants goes up. I imagine carefully built documents polluted by real time blabbering, collaborative flame wars producing endless amounts of noise and whole branches of waves slipping out of topic. Trivial fast-paced conversations and relevant slowly crafted documents, all together in a persistent rich beautiful mess called the wave.

I hope to see odds of such hellish prophecy mitigated by some good moderation system and/or by giving better control on retention, otherwise Wave may become yet another perfect illustration of “giving enough rope”. In conclusion, some pretty tentative attempts to contribute:

• an additional chat system orthogonal to wave content
• tags and votes on content and ability to show/hide based on that
• content that fades away unless marked “important”
• content time to live

For the man who had wisdom to seek truth and knowledge and love to teach us.

thank you

Fravia+, searcher and reverse engineer, 1952-2009