CS3216: Googler commenting on our apps

Many of the comments made by Pamela were about usability. If you're interested in making life easy for your users, I recommend reading "Don't Make me Think" by Steve Krug. I found that it's very succinct, and in a short 1 hour read, your application or website will be very much more user-friendly. If you have any other good books/links, please share them =) (That reminds me, it's time to start a new wave on usability.. ).
Making life easy for your users means that they will love you and hopefully pay you more.. it also becomes easy for them to pay you.. =p

Pamela made some other good comments about the apps. I was quite surprised that she said nothing negative about WavePlan. It's simple but generally quite useful. I guess that's my takeaway. It might be a simple app, but if it does the job really well, that's great. Far better than a complicated app that has lots of features, but horrible to use. Pamela did say that she did not get the colour scheme and she was unable to verify that which dates were selected by her. That means our interface was not intuitive enough. Time to think a little more for the design..

Pamela had no ready answers for why Wave was so slow. I'm quite interested to find out about the 16-yr-old developer who wrote a Javascript dedicated wave client that's 10x faster. (What the hell am I doing with my life?=) )

I'm still don't get what kind of apps are good for Wave, so I'll try to go through all the principles that they recommended.
http://prezi.com/egrptwqumq8j/making-wave-y-extensions/
http://prezi.com/sxuwendhwqsy/google-wave-apis/
(Btw, those 2 prezis are quite good uses of Prezi, not the horrible abuses I've seen.)

Principle 1. Make it wave-y.
If it's for real time, it's not working, cause it's just too slow. I think the slow factor is really irritating. I'm not sure if the people using netbooks will find it even slower.

I wonder whether a combination of desktop sharing software and Skype is still more usable than Wave. I know wave has a Ribbit conference call function, but given the overall speed of wave.. it just seems like a frustrating experience for users.

Principle 2. Make it easy to use.
Wave is quite easy to use.. but still quite difficult for people to switch from Gmail. Quite ironic that Gmail is so good that people find it not worthwhile to switch to Wave.

Principle 3. Make it easy to install
(No comments)

Principle 4. Make it look good
Hmm.. Some teams surfaced the complaint that Chrome messed around with the sizing, whereas Firefox was okie. (Pamela's reply was sweet:"At least it's not IE.. " Touche).

Principle 5. Make it useful - or fun!
I think the useful part is probably more important, since people are on wave for testing out how it helps their workflow and communications, not really for gaming.

Idea: Integrating Prezi with wave? Hmm...

Conclusion:

At the moment, the performance problems and the lack of a critical mass of people on wave are affecting the application of the principles.

I was also wondering about why the connection was so bad. Is it because of the network in Australia or NUS?

Thanks Pamela for staying up so late (and for answering my stupid question) =)