But I think that imposition of workflow is not taken kindly by users, users only like things in line of the status quo.
I think the greatest sin by Google was shutting down Inbox. I swore by it (the little travel cards, the ability to see and search email quickly -- e.g. the image previews, every day Gmail angers me because I cannot do things I could once do with incredible ease).
They should have had Gmail as a conservative conventional email tool, and slowly morphed Inbox to have Wave-like features. Slowly, iteratively, so that users could discover and organically make their own workflows.
Absolutely, our problems are not technical they are social and you overwhelm them with a lack of direction and too much choice, most folks, myself included will get paralyzed with what they should do next.
Checklists and linear flows are extremely important. Just look at how different bug systems or wikis are used by groups, same tools, different groups and their usage patterns are totally different.
Wave should have been a platform, and the workflows should have been curated as an organization specific behavior.
Somehow that didn’t seem to be a problem in Minecraft or git.
I think that there is a value in making software that is powerful and does not immediately make apparent precisely how best to use it. Examples also include NLE video and audio suites, and much CAD/3D tools.
Your tools do a thing. The operator makes the workflow. Make good tools, not a yellow brick road sold as one-size-fits-all.
The first few times I opened Live or Illustrator or After Effects or Sketchup I had no idea how to use them; I had to watch tutorials on YouTube to learn the mental models.
What webapps are like that? I offer that they have a corresponding loss of power.
Git is a problem for a lot of people. And A/V tools only become useable if you follow tutorials or courses - there are entire companies making their business on selling pro tools or after effects tutorial videos.
Maybe we should allow a market for education rather than assuming everyone should be able to use a starship with only 5 seconds of looking at the user interface.
I don't think this works in a market economy - some people are able to "use a starship with only 5 seconds of looking at the user interface". So they will always be incredibly more advantaged that people who aren't able to.
> Somehow that didn’t seem to be a problem in Minecraft or git.
Quite a few people are paralyzed by exact that issue in Minecraft. And quite a few people overcome that paralysis only because their friends or parents play and show them what to do or because they run into entertainment channel that is primary fun, but also guides them later. There is significant network effect in Minecraft.
The lack of initial guide combined with worlds being set on survival and with third person being default means that someone has to explain the game to you, else it is boring crap.
Git is perceived as more complicated to use then it should be by many people. The thing with git is that you dont have choice and have to use it.
Git got massively popular, largely because Linus Torwarlds made it and started to use it for Linux. The mercurial was competitor, but was commercial and did not had such popular person and popular project behind. That does not mean problem did not happened, that means that when enough people have to use it (due to Linux) then you can start network.
Minecrafts ability to overcome the paralysis due to there being sufficient social pressure to overcome it so that you join friends and there being basically universal adult approval of the game does not mean the paralysis does not happen for many people. It is also sufficiently youtuber friendly, meaning you can do things even non-players find fun to watch on youtube. These things help to overcome paralysis which absolutely happens, especially when they are attempting to play alone and did not learned from youtube videos wtf they should do with it.
The wave could not possibly have "there will be fun with friends" nor "you wanna be like the other kids" attraction Minecraft had to overcome the same issue.
Mercurial was not the commercial competitor to Git. The commercial predecessor to both Git and Mercurial was Bitkeeper. The Mercurial and Git projects were both started as a response to Bitmover (the company behind Bitkeeper) announcing changes in how it would license Bitkeeper for open-source projects.
I used inbox regularly as a task/todo scheduler -- something I've never been able to get in the habit of despite many attempts with various techniques and softwares.
Get an email that means I have to do a thing? Swipe and schedule the email to come up when I have to do it. It comes up and I want delay, tell it to come up the next day. And use the exact same interface to create reminders for things that didn't originate in email. It made me more reliable and less stressed.
But I think the killer feature is it changed the way I interact with 90% of my email: I didn't. It was very good at showing me exactly the emails I care to interact with and no more.
I try to stay unsubscribed from all sorts of mailings but back on gmail I interact with way more mail I don't care about than I did with Inbox. Which has got to be bad for google, so when I say killer feature, I guess I mean it probably killed Inbox.
I never really understood inbox, and definitely didn't know that it was gone. I had some vague awareness that GMail was being rebranded as "Inbox" or something, when android pushed me a notification once. I guess I never figured out what it was.
By “many”, Google meant exactly two. The snooze function, and an Archive icon that appears on hover. Of all the Inbox features to migrate, those were all we got.
I was so disappointed when they dumped me back into what was essentially a legacy product. It would be like if Apple randomly decided to forcibly downgrade every device to iPhone OS 1.0. “You really didn’t need any of those non-phone functions anyway!”
In addition to Snooze and Hover Actions, there's Undo Send, Smart Reply, and Nudges which were all built and tested on Inbox before being added to Gmail.
Undo Send was definitely a Gmail "labs" feature long before Inbox existed [1].
You're right about the other two though. Nudges are nice. Ridiculous, though, that a useless gimmick feature like smart reply made it in but not actually useful features, like travel bundles or even the "finance" category.
But I think that imposition of workflow is not taken kindly by users, users only like things in line of the status quo.
I think the greatest sin by Google was shutting down Inbox. I swore by it (the little travel cards, the ability to see and search email quickly -- e.g. the image previews, every day Gmail angers me because I cannot do things I could once do with incredible ease).
They should have had Gmail as a conservative conventional email tool, and slowly morphed Inbox to have Wave-like features. Slowly, iteratively, so that users could discover and organically make their own workflows.