Google Wave has been out for almost a year now and its strengths and weaknesses have been analyzed by every blogger/pundit/opinion maker on the planet at this point.

That said, since this is the Internet, I am going to put my $.02 in. So without further ado here is my Wave experience.

Scenario

Once a quarter or so my team rolls a release to our production servers. This is a very scripted event with ‘pilot checklist’ steps that we go through, one by one, confirming each along the way (Step 12: database dumped, confirmed. etc) . When we encounter any unknown problem we stop, analyze and decide whether to continue. Our ‘points of no return’ (or problematic return) are clearly noted and overall this approach lends itself well to our release process

Since we do our releases in the late evening and would rather not sit at the office all night the entire event is conducted via chat a group session. Traditionally this works well with some caveats.

• Gtalk randomly likes to bump people and people tend to hit the wrong button or close the window or have browser crashes. This leads to some tense moments in mid-roll while we invite them back etc.
• When things get fast and furious the interleaved conversations get really difficult to track
• The inevitable off-topic chatter gets in the way while we wait for things to complete
• Reassembling a record of events, even with chat logging, can be difficult since its not threaded making the post-roll analysis we do a bit more tiresome (‘was he saying ’shit’ because the database crashed or was this when his cat knocked over his beer?’)

So, in the interests of all of the above we decided to do a release on the Wave.

I fully acknowledge that I am a Wave Newbie and possibly every single point I raise is invalid. However, as the Wave Newbie who is accustomed to picking up Google tools and just Using Them I feel that my perspective is valuable.

Riding the Wave

First Impressions

Initial tests were confusing. Coming at it from a group chat paradigm, we did not really understand what we were supposed to do in this new world. Our confusion was quickly dispelled when someone uploaded a funny picture into a new thread. The game was on.

We then all very quickly realized how boring it is to watch people type. I mean seriously boring. In fact, I miss the suspense of ‘xyz is typing’. What is xyz going to say? How long will it take him to say it and when he is done will I care? Oh xyz, hurry hurry and type to me! Instead of ‘xyz is typing‘ we now were treated to a stream of consciousness. Random threads popping up empty and disappearing as they were deleted. Thoughts half baked and other thoughts that normally would not be expressed were exposed as the poster forgot that he has, essentially, lost the ‘draft’ mode that non-realtime chat provides (Note: This can be very embarrassing!). Finally, if I have to watch someone mistype and studiously correct the word ‘the’  again (‘teh‘ for anyone curious) I may go insane.

Once we got over our annoyance at our fellow developers typing skills we proceeded to treat it like chat. Every post was a new thread, nothing was connected and it just seemed like really annoying, standard issue chat. Finally, with some discipline imposed by one of my leads, we got herded into a threaded mode and started into our process.

Second Impressions

Once we got into the mode of thinking in threads the inevitable dispute broke out, what sort of threads should we use? Topical? Checklist related? Eventually it just evolved into a semi-chaotic system of topical threads that ran at different paces (See ‘The Good’ below). It was interesting to watch the team self-organize into little pockets of discussion and to be able to jump in and participate as required. In a strict group chat setting many of these probably happen in one-on-one chats outside the group and are both lost to the record and less collaborative then they could be. We are big on ‘roll night records’ so pulling these chats in was very valuable for us and avoided a few confusing situations.

This multitude of threads was taxing though. Thoughts seemed disconnected and hard to follow. The amount of information quickly became overwhelming and everyone was resorting to constantly scrolling up and down, hunting for updates and looking for information. This lack of ‘indexability’ really made keeping track of things difficult and time consuming. In more then one instance we had to revert to chat to let someone in the wave know that a thread had been updated. Compounding this problem was the fact that there is no Quick Search feature for just the wave in question. Google without search? Totally odd. Yes, you can create big mega-searches etc but in my case I just wanted a quick intra-wave search that let me navigate the content.

Eventually we hit a nice rhythm. Less threads created, more centralized discussion and the pace picked up. People were able to step in and out of the release process as required, picking up and getting immediate context to the task at hand. It was pretty fun in an odd sort of nerd way. Definitely a different experience for us and a different sort of chaos then we are used to. Not less or more, just different. It was less boring as well since you could have multiple discussions on screen, in real-time, at the same time. Much more ‘CNN news ticker while watching a debate’

The Good

Comment Editing: The ability to edit, with changes tracked, threads is fantastic. It allowed us to keep a ‘notes’ thread and a ’status’ thread that were continually updated. Not only that but you can keep the root node ‘current’ and then do threaded comments beneath. This was very handy in tracking our status and noting deviance from the script.

Addictive: You pretty quickly find yourself addicted to the amount of information you can consume at once. It was a bit thrilling to be watching one person troubleshooting a code problem, another guy running automated test scripts while yet another guy ran update tools to bring the database up to date. It was as close to a birds eye view as I have ever seen for our process.

Totality: We were able to capture everything that happened in a clear way. When I had to call my QA engineer to come online 30 minutes early it was a side-thread and did not bother anyone that did not care about that thread. More then just content and context is the temporal nature of it. Being able to replay and easily see the context of a comment in both time and space is invaluable. This 3 dimensional view of our software releases is fascinating.

Pacing: The threaded view allowed us to run different threads at different paces. Some were fast and furious as live problems were debugged while others were very slow as they tracked overall release status. In a group chat everything is Now and Urgent and (for us) the slow lead items are paper based to ensure completeness. Wave seems to have done away with that by allowing us to pace different conversations differently.

The Bad

Comment Editing: Confusing as all can be sometimes. The change tracking in that context can make your head spin and you never know if its authoritative, what has changed etc.

No Navigation: The lack of a table of contents, index or any other sort of thread navigation tool outside of the scrollbar was the most painful (‘tedious‘ as one engineer commented) part of the evening. Having to scroll up and down constantly, trolling for updates, sucked and made the tool very difficult to use. It almost forced us to use the tool much less collaboratively then we would have, reverting us back to group chat mode with minor side threads for the most part.

No Quick Search: Without any sort of index to the wave some sort of quick search is imperative. I fully expected to be able to type anything into a box and have a list of thread matches pop-up with anchor links to them. Nope. Really? No Search in a google App? Sigh. Yes, I may have missed the big green ‘Search The Wave’ button but I doubt it.

The Ugly

Scrolling: Its completely apparent to me now that everyone at the GooglePlex working on Wave has at least one 3280×2048 WQSXGA monitor. The only way these long waves make sense is if you make them Tall and Wide so as to reduce scrolling and the sheer amount of screen real estate they scream for is incredible. My pathetic little 15″ MacBook Pro was not up to the task of giving me a good view of the action.

Extremely Easy Thread Creation: I get it, it needs to be easy to use but does it need to be THAT easy to use? We spent a lot of time deleting empty threads when all someone was doing was trying to respond to a thread.

Extremely Difficult Thread Maintenance: 5 pixel click region to stay in a thread? This really made things disjointed for us as people failed to click in that 5 pixel boundary and Very Easily Created New Threads.

Inability to Reorganize Content: Once your cast yourself out of a thread because Its So Darn Easy To Create A New Thread  you must STAY OUT! Some drag/drop tools would be great here.

Take Aways and Ideas (haha, ideas? really? for google? sigh..)

The jury is still out but I think we like Google Wave and will use it again. With more experience under our belt it might actually make some sense and it did not truly detract once we wrapped our heads around it. With a bit of discipline I think our org will be successful Wavers soon enough.

So, in the spirit of a know it all, mostly anonymous and definitely uninformed blogger I will now proceed to tell Google what they should fix so that the Wave is easier to ride. Hold on to your pants because this anonymous and uninformed blogger is about to tell the uncountable Top Notch Product Managers and UX Developers who spent millions on design, research, usability analysis, market testing and prolonged beta-testing exactly what they need to do with the Wave!

Quick Search: As discussed above, I need to quickly search my wave and get a nice list of Google Like results. It would even be neat to do a narrowing search so that the threads that do not match your criteria disappear, one by one (think iTunes). That would be huge for navigability.

Index: Give me a thread index tree that I can collapse and expand and use as a quick nav for the wave. This would let me bounce around more easily. Bonus points: Let me give any node my own name so I can reference it more easily.

Bookmarks: Let me bookmark locations in the wave so I can anchor link back to them. Being able to click a ’star icon’ and name it ‘Status Report’ so I can quickly reference it without wearing out my 4 year old microsoft mouse would be fabulous.

Quick Links to Updates: The inbox nicely tells me ‘6′ if the wave has 6 new entries but it doesn’t tell me WHERE THOSE ARE. Once again my mouse-wheel suffers as I frantically scroll up and down scanning for the ‘new item’ indicator amongst 300+ posts.

Browser Tab Should Reflect Current Wave: There is a nice number in the browser tab. It usually reads ‘1′ and indicates that ‘1′ wave has updates. I was off doing other tasks expecting this to reflect the number of updates IN MY CURRENT WAVE (you know, like GMAIL and my INBOX) rather then the fact that my one and only wave was updated. I clicked back, wondering what was taking so long, and noticed that about 40 messages had scrolled by. Lets make this number reflect the number of updates in my open wave.

Hopefully the myriad of Google specialists who live and breath usability and probably possess PhD’s in ‘Waveology’  take my advice and make Wave a better tool for me. We’ll probably try it again with the knowledge gained and see if we can make it more sensible for us. My feeling is that the Wave is growing on the team and we’ll be doing a lot more with it soon.