- The keyboard design isn’t as slick as the iPhone keyboard design
It’s not quite a MacBook keyboard layout and it’s not an iPhone keyboard layout either. Commit actions like, done, go, search aren’t colored like on the iPhone. The dashes, dots, commas are hard to distinguish. On the iPhone a typewriter like key pops out so you can visually confirm that you hit the right key. On the iPad there is no feature to deal with occlusion. - How you hold the device really alters the user experience and how apps should be designed.
On the iPhone the design is done in such a way to accommodate the way you hold the device. For example in mobile Safari and in email the command buttons are along the bottom of the screen. This puts many buttons in thumbs reach. On the iPad key buttons in both email and Safari are across the top. This means that if you’re holding the device along the bottom you can’t reach many of the buttons without moving your hands. Since the home button tends to be along the bottom there’s no comfortable rest-state. - About my laptop
It starts out with just email and some web-browsing but pretty soon you realize that most of the things you do can be done on an iPad. Not all, and this gap is closing. In particular heavy typing tasks (blogging for me) and heavy editing, especially visual and graphics editing is still better with a laptop. That being said I am much happier bringing a light iPad to a meeting then a heavy laptop. - You don’t use this device like a giant iPod.
I’ve never read a book or a magazine before on either my laptop or iPod. I’ve never played a four person multi-touch game on either of these devices. The experience is different and fun. In a new way. Magazines and books are key here. This is the future of digital content. - Certain people could use this as a replacement computer but I can’t.
Email and web browsing without compromise. (Well maybe the Flash thing) Other then that you have a pretty nice device for doing the core things my mom uses her computer to do. For technical users the iPad doesn’t do enough to replace their laptop. - Screen orientation is flipping me out
When you hold the screen in vertical orientation you get 4 icons across and 5 icons down. When you flip the screen you get 5 across and 4 down. The annoying part is that the icons re-positions so you can’t use spacial memory to find an icon. Was that icon on the top right? Ohh, sorry now it’s in the middle left. - The web is not ready for the iPad (yet).
There are still plenty of sites with embedded video/flash and when I hit these sites I am likely to move on. I almost never stop what I’m doing to go grab my laptop. As the iPad sails past the 1M mark the tech-savvy sites will transition over to H264 video. The issue is primarily video although other flash goodness will still be missing.
Flash sucks but HTML5 is worse then Flash on many things, more on that in another post.
Subscribe to this blog to hear more on that.
- The battery lasts a freakishly long time
It’s nothing like a Kindle but compared to other bright-screen electronics. Wow. That’s all I have to say about that.
- A different user experience is fundamental to touch computing
I remember a program manager from Microsoft talking about the Tablet PC back in 2000. He said, in the history of computing there has never been a product category that has failed as often as tablet based computing. From the Alan Kay to the Apple Newton and even Windows for Pen Computing. The history books are filled with these ‘slate’ computers that have failed. He then went on to explain how the Tablet PC would be different because it focused on the input experience.The truth is that the tablet/slate experiences of the past were not that different. It was Windows with a great input editor. It’s too early to tell if the iPad will succeed or fail but the iPad user experience is so different in a fundamental way that it will change how people interact with computers.
How do I know? My two year old is now reached out and trying to scroll the screen on my laptop. If that’s not the future I don’t know what is.
Archive for the ‘Review’ Category
9 Things I didn’t know about the iPad
May 10
14
Quick Calendar UI Review – Google
Nov 09
19
This is a simple UI critique of a simple feature burried in Google Calendar. Here’s the original:
It’s a relatively simple form. It’s certainly not bad but I think it could be better. Here’s a quick mock up:
Here are the key design points:
- The body of the form has “What, When, Where” but doesn’t have “Who” if you’re having a meeting it stands to reason that the people attending are pretty important. I always felt that having guests hidden in the right didn’t make sense.
- The majority of meetings are measured in duration. 30 min, 45 min, 1 hour, 2 hour, all day, etc. It’s much easier to pick a common duration and allow “custom end time.” as a fall-back rather then making users select end times.
- Most meetings don’t repeat. Logically this is a secondary consideration. This can be moved to the secondary area on the right.
- Checking availability should be a secondary area action as well. Plus over on the right there’s more space to present availability in-line.
- It should be really easy to preview a location with a map.
- The current UI makes it difficult to add people to a meeting without the system automatically emailing them. You have to place names into the description area. Having a simple checkbox to email guests could solve this.
- There are a lot of simple UI 101 alignment things that can make the UI look cleaner and simpler just by lining fields up.
- The right hand side could be extensible with new modules, plug-ins, ala Google Labs.
Drupal User Experience
Aug 09
8
Over the summer we overhauled the Raizlabs website. It was originally developed in 2001 using Frontpage (yeah, I know). The site had accumulated a number of HTML files, a collection of ASP files, a number of blogs for personal and company use, some newsletters and assorted client scripts.
In re-designing the site I knew I wanted a content system. We evaluated Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and custom solutions. Joomla and Drupal looked promising. WordPress was a good blog system but not designed for larger site structures. We started implementing a Joomla site and were perhaps a week into the process when we decided to change paths and go with Drupal.
The Joomla front-end experience is easier to get started with but makes it difficult to setup and interact with content quickly. The Joomla system had a lot of out of the box features but it required too many steps to do simple things.
The Drupal user experience was by contrast amazingly stark. After downloading Drupal I couldn’t figure out how you could possibly build a site using it. It later became clear that the real value of Drupal was with it’s module system.
Critical flaw: Make sure things work out of the box. Batteries should be included.
While Drupal is truly a powerful system this is easy to overlook. The default install that you get from Drupal.org has nothing included. It’s like getting a car engine without the seats.
Dries: Oh, you want seats in your car? There’s a module for that.
There are more complete solutions and downloads available from providers like Acquia but this is not obvious. The modules are the most critical part of Drupal and if you’re not familiar with modules it’s not clear what modules you need. They have many names that are also not obvious: CCK, Views, ImageCache, AdvancedHelp, Devel, Mollom, TaxonomyMenu.
Too much flexibility can cause problems.
Everything in Drupal is customizable. Not only can you customize your content but the system also makes it very easy to customize the admin structure, menus and commands however you want. It’s so easy to customize the administrative interface that it’s easy to get into a state where nothing works.
The admin interface should be designed to be quick and efficient for creating and editing content. Some amount of customization is great but the system as it stands is overly abstract making it easy to get into trouble.
Be good at certain things. Don’t try to be good at everything.
When evaluating Drupal it seemed that it has support for blogs, forums, discussions, groups and pretty much everything else. It was only later that we decided that even though Drupal could do these things it couldn’t do them well. For instance Drupal has a blog module but it’s so much harder to use then WordPress that there’s really no reason to fight Drupal to do what you want, it’s easier to integrate WordPress. Same story for PHPBB and the Drupal Advanced Forum module. As a content system Drupal should make it easier to integrate these external products. Instead they try to re-invent these components and it doesn’t work. Drupal is a good content system but it’s not a good blog and it’s not a great forum.
More then anything I wish Drupal would be a better cross product citizen for other PHP projects. For example: Gallery, PHPBB, WordPress, ZenCart, etc. Plugging in other stuff that’s not part of Drupal should be encouraged. The attitude that it has to be Drupal for everything is simply not practical.
Views and CCK
Views and CCK allow you to create all sorts of queries onto your content and allow you to customize the fields of content that you collect. It’s basically like creating your own database columns for your content. The problem is that you can’t just take someone elses database you have to build them yourself. If I want to setup a bunch of content and views to create a little client database I have to start from scratch. It would be so much easier to take a good solution as a starting point and customize it to specific needs.
There should be a number of popular and useful views that should be included. I shouldn’t have to create my own “random post of the day” or “most popular articles” these should be canned views.
Modules and Blocks
A module encompasses a portion of functionality. It’s actually not ‘modular’ in that sense of the word. It’s more like a plug-in that extends the functionality. A block is a component that gets shown on a page.
The block model assumes that you have one core site template and that blocks are either shown or hidden on each page. As your site grows you have to have rather complex rules for when certain blocks are shown and when they are hidden. The UI to customize this show/hide functionality is rather broken. Rather then having page tempaltes with visual drag-drop interfaces for multiple pages you have to manually specify all your blocks and pages within one block template page.
I wish I could define a site structure then drag/drop content and widgets to each page in the site structure.
Terminology
With any content system there’s a certain amount of learning that has to happen. For some reason content systems don’t use terminology that is used when designing a website. They use their own abstract terms: Page, Story, Book. If you take these terms literally you may expect that stories compose a book and a page is one page of a longer story. This isn’t how it works.
Drupal uses the term “Menu” for everything. Even if certain things are tabs, other things are trees and still others are actually menus.
Making things practical, not just possible.
Drupal has the ability to do a lot of things but in many cases these things are possible, not practical. Solutions for certain tasks are not ‘turn-key’ they involve a lot of customization and configuration. As a simple example I wanted to create a special “clients only” section on my site. Reading the docs and forums there were at least 10 different approahes for how to solve this problem. Some solutions suggested advanced permission modules, others suggested Organic Groups, still others suggested a CCK/Views approach. This seems like such a basic security scenario that there should be a simple solution to make this work (there was not).
I’m sure this problem has been solved many times over using Drupal however there is no current way for people to share these “solution recipes” in a way that I can download them and have things just work.
Long term experience
I think Drupal’s user experience has a lot of potential and I’m encouraged by the efforts I’ve read about for the Druapl 7 release. Focus on the user experience is really the thing that’s going to make this not just a powerful system but a practical one. I’m looking forward to it.
TechCrunch50 Roundup
Sep 08
14
This year I had the pleasure of heading out to San Francisco to join 1700 other tech-startups, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in an event called the TechCrunch50. The event brings together 50 companies that are launching new technologies and another 150 companies that are demoing or showing off their new products.
While I didn’t get the chance to see all the companies because I was demoing my own product Pic.Me I did manage to see a lot of great startups. These are my favorites:
- GoodGuide - Find out if your products are poisoning you
- Yammer - Twitter behind the enterprise curtain
- Swype - A new way to type on a small screen
- BlahGirls - Cartoon content with product placement
- BoJam - Jam with people online and sell the music
- DropBox - Sync files from your Mac and PC mostly automatically
- OtherInbox - Send spam and subscriptions here to save time
- BirdPost - Post your bird sightings with your GPS IPhone
- Atmosphir - Create your own Lego video game
- TrueCar - Never overpay for a commodity car
- FotoNauts - Photo albums with public pictures
- VideoSurf - Search inside the video for content
- HangOut - Online 3D world with real merchandise
There are many more companies that were showing off new technologies and it helped remind me of the global tech community. It’s not just San-Fran.
The speakers were great. The startups were top-notch. The food was mediocre and the facilities were lacking both in terms of wifi and bathrooms. (Not always in that order).
I had a great time and have already been contacted by several companies so it sounds like the event will be a success from a business perspective as well.
Google Chrome Browser Review
Sep 08
3
Google surprised everyone when it recently released a web-browser named Chrome. The surprise was primarily due to the fact that Firefox seemed to be the Google darling for many years. As Google has grown, the dependency on browser technology has also grown.
As a search engine Google primarily displays HTML with some minimal JavaScript. But as an email, calendar, ad-network, blogging platform, news-reader and more, the dependencies on the browser have grown. To alleviate this Google has used projects like Google Gears, Google Toolbar, Google Web Toolkit and more to fill the gaps of the browser. Now it seems the stop-gap solutions are not enough.
First off… Google Chrome is not for everyone. In fact I may even say it’s not yet for anyone. It’s a Version 1 and it does a lot of things well but it’s not perfect and there are still a number of issues that need to get worked out. It also only works on Windows. That said it’s a pretty good V1.
Google stands on the shoulders of both Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s WebKit for many pieces of the browser. This could not have happened without open-source software. The primary rendering of pages seems quick and crisp and all pages in my initial testing seemed to work without a problem.
The key areas where the Chrome browser is different:
- Opening a new tab
- Auto-completing a URL
- Overall look and feel
- Incognito
- What’s missing – Plug-ins, spellcheck, etc.
Opening a new tab
Opening a new tab in Chrome brings up a page with the top sites you visit and allows you to quickly pick either an existing site or browse to a new site. This is a great idea. Reasearch shows that users re-visit the same 5-7 sites over and over again and often they type the website name each time. Firefox 3 keeps track of your recent sites but this takes it to the next leval and allows you quickly and visually identify and open a site. I love it and expect to see this in other browsers very soon.
Auto-completing a URL
When you start typing a URL into the address bar Google chrome automatically starts searching your history, your bookmarks and Google itself via Google Suggest. As anyone who’s done reasearch on search knows that one of the most common things typed into any search engine is a URL. By combining search and URL’s you have one stop shoping for typing a site name, a bookmark or a search. I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse then Firefox it’s just a little different. Some users may appreciate the change while others may find it annoying.
Overall Look and Feel
The overall look is very clean and minimal. It reminds me a lot of Safari on the Mac. The buttons are minimal, there are no draggable toolbars, no hidden menus when you hold Alt, no bookmark manager, no spinning logo, no toolbar customization. The browser does it’s best to stay out of your way.
- The find on page dialog floats cleanly within the window
- The download page doesn’t get lost in a secondary window
- The status areas comes and goes as you hover over links never stealing space from your overall browser.
Showing IE, FF and Chrome displaying 1px of vertical content you can see that Chrome is much thinner:
In general this means that more space is given to your content and less to the ‘chrome’.
Incognito
In Safari it’s called “Private Browsing” in Mozilla there’s an extension called ‘Distrust’ in IE the often talked about but never implemented ‘promiscuous mode.’ In Chrome the feature is called Incognito aka ‘porn mode’ creates a seperate window that is free from the browser cache, history or other identifiable data.
I’ll just say it’s an interesting feature to include considering the other features that have not been included.
What’s missing
As I said previously I don’t consider Chrome to be a complete browser. There is no bookmark managment, no visible support for plug-ins, no spellchecker, no way to set a home-pages, etc. etc. Some of the tools you depend on may not be available. For some people this isn’t a big deal for others it’ll be a show-stopper.
The big deal is performance
In initial testing Chrome seems to be significantly faster at rendering complex pages then both IE and Firefox. The difference is visually noticable as pages pop and complex interactive sites like Gmail load with new found speed.
This performance is undoutably one of the key reasons that Google decided to invest in it’s own browser. The engine driving Chrome’s Javascript is a new peice of technology that does for JavaScript what Java had promissed to do years ago.
The added performance does come as some cost in terms of memory:
Sure it’s faster but look at all the memory it’s using. 80 megs for a browser is about 4 times what firefox and Internet explorer use. On modern computers memory performance tends to be cheap. Of course you want fast and minimal memory but if you had to choose one I’ll take the performance.
Other details
- Chrome has a feature to turn a page into a desktop appication. This is simlar to the Prism concept from Mozilla. This is the future. I was very happy to finally see this in a shipping product.
- There is a development mode that’s preety slick. It’s not quite Firebug but it’s pretty good.
- View Source formats and displays a good looking source page
- Browser settings, bookmarks and other data import nicely
- Spell Check. I miss you.
- Tabs can be ‘torn’ off similar to Safari to create a new window, tabs can also be re-ordered by dragging.
- The browser passes the Acid-test 2 and does OK on acid test 3 (77/100)
- Accessibility and keyboard shortcuts seem to work well
Overall a good V1. It’ll eat away market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox in limited places but for the most part I see this as a technology preview. The power of Firefox is still it’s extensive plug-in and customizations. The power of IE is it’s enterprise deployments and OEM’s. In the short term Chrome doesn’t change that but longer terms it’s certainly a large peice in this puzzle. Either way the Google browser will help push the state-of-the-art in open source web browser development.
Review – Remote Support with Crossloop
Mar 08
16
A new product I’ve been using recently to provide remote support is called Crossloop. It’s a bare-bones simple remote assistance application that allows you to see and help users remotly. The technology is based on VNC. It works well and it allows easy remote control and assistance without those pesky firewall issues.
I’ve been using Crossloop for remote support but it also works well for remote presentations. While services like WebEx provide many more features in the years I’ve used WebEx I’ve never seen any of those features actually used. Like it’s expensive counterpart Crossloop allows you to view/share a monitor remotly only it allows you to do it for free. Crossloop is limited in that it only allows one-to-one connections. You can’t do a one-to-many. However for most of my client-consultant meetings this is perfect.
Getting custoemrs to install Crossloop and call me up is easy and allows me to solve problems faster with less back and forth with the customer.
Overall I like it. It’s not as polished as Fog Creek’s Copilot for support isues but Crossloop is free to use and can be used beyond support. Check it out at Crossloop.com
Review: UserTesting.com
Jan 08
9
I’ve always been a big believer in usability testing. It’s the perfect parallel to functional testing. You just don’t know how people will use your product untill you watch people actually using your product. One of the problems with usability testing is that it can be expensive and time-consuming. I was excited to hear about a new startup called UserTesting that is looking to solve both of these problems.
The site automates many aspects of usability testing and it makes it affordable. This allows companies large and small to run tests quickly and cheaply. The process is very straight forward and can be used to test both web-software as well as desktop applications (Windows Users).
To begin you setup a basic account and specify the instructions and tasks you want your participant to performs. Each participant costs $19 so for under $100 you can run a five person usability study. Participants are recruited from across the web and have a range of demographics, houshold incomes and other factors. You can also specify additional requirements for your participants if needed.
Each participant installs a screen-recording application that will record them running the test as well as their voice describing what they are doing and why. Each test runs 15-20 min but can be more. You can view tests online or download a flash file for archival or later playback.
One of the downsides of the service is that it’s not interactive. If users hit a roadblock or can’t get past a certain step you can’t step in and give them a hint. You’re only viewing the video once the test has been completed. You also can’t follow-up with additional tasks or additional questions, each test is a one-shot deal.
Another portential downside is that you can’t specify particpants yourself. So this wouldn’t be appropriate for very industry specific products or internal tools.
In an in-person test if people get stuck you would let them struggle for 2-3 minutes and then give them a hand so you can learn more about other parts of your application. Without this ability you get to experience true customer pain as they struggle to perform tasks with your appilcation. This is a good reality check but you may find yourself screaming at your monitor with the same frustration that your customers may feel. This can be a good thing as anger is a good tool for getting bugs fixed.
The service doesn’t have many bells or whistles but it does provide a great core value and I highly recommend it to any company that hasn’t run usability tests before. UserTesting.com
On Wikipedias design (or lack thereof)
Oct 07
21
The content of the Wikipedia is amazing. What’s more amazing is that this content was created despite many obvious flaws in the design of the site. Here are the main ones I’ve seen.
There are two ways to use a large information site like the Wikipedia. Browsing and Searching. Wikipedia does both fairly poorly. The site is difficult to browse since there is little primary navigation and it’s difficult to search because the search results are presented poorly. While the content of the site grows by leaps and bounds the interface and design of the Wikipedia has seen seemingly little change.
- Search belongs near the top of the page. This is now a general convention across sites and this is where users are likely to look.
- The top level navigation belongs at location number 2. Instead of top level navigation we have tools for editing the content and viewing history. A typical user will consume content and only 1-2% will create content. Having the editing features front and center gives a bias to the editing and makes the navigation harder to use.
- The main navigation doesn’t help users find content. An appropriate top level navigation will encourage browsing and may include high level headings for an encyclopedia. Things like Glossaries, Global Timelines, People, Countries, Animals, etc. All this stuff does exist but it’s not organized in the navigation or in a well structured way. Instead the navigation encourages users to go to a random page.
- The Wikipedia is overly-hyperlinked. In other words since it’s easy to edit. Lots of people don’t contribute content but instead add brackets. This creates a link. While creating some links is useful the absurd amount of linking actually makes the content more difficult to understand. Instead of consolidating articles things seem to sprawl and branch off into their own articles. Why is the word speedometer hyperlinked in the User Interface article? Maybe I should have fixed that? It’s bad information architecture and bad design. There’s no easy way to find related articles or know if you are reading the main article or a branch.
- When editing a page the toolbar is inappropriate:
We start off ok with bold and italic and underline. Then we go off the deep end. The icons are non standard and the commands are awkward. I’m not sure why this wheel was re-invented and why it was done so poorly. WordPad and TextEdit have had this worked out for 10 years. - It’s 2007 can we have a WYSIWYG editor for content? Every other site has figured out how to do this. You can’t see what you’re doing and the markup is a bastardized version of HTML. This creates an unnecessarily high hurdle for people who want to add or edit content. Doing something simple like adding an image is unnecessarily complex for a site that encourages end-user participation.
- Search results should show a basic synopsis, last edit date and hit highlighting so you can tell if the search hit is appropriate. The lack of information about a particular search result makes it difficult to pick a match. it’s also difficult to tell if an article is fresh or stale and how stable a particular article is. Without exploring the history of an article you can’t tell if it’s undergoing a lot of change or if it’s been solid for years.
Because the content of the Wiki is editable by anyone it’s important to convey how stale the information is. This is true in search and on the page iteself. Providing some metric of article age & volatility in search results and on pages will help users find more accurate and appropriate results.
- Search pageination belongs at the bottom of the page, not the top. Why would you want to page if you haven’t even seen the first page of results?
- It’s customary to provide a way to perform an advanced search to help you find the right topic. For example show me results for ‘Apple’ that match the fruit not the computer company. Search works for exact matches but not for concept matches.
- This one is a bonus tip for Google. Don’t list wiki articles in the main section of results. The same way that dictionary listings aren’t shown in the main area of results. A dictionary and encyclopedia are special and should both be presented differently from natural search results.
20 things the iPhone should do
Sep 07
15
I broke down last weekend and got the iphone. Apple Computer Inc has created a design that is great with UI that was lovingly hand polished.
Of course no matter how good it is you always want more. This is what separates great products from mediocre products. With my old cell phone everything was crap so my wish list started with things like… “i wish I could get reception” and perhaps… “How do I edit a phone number for a contact?”
Because the iPhone is by far the best phone I’ve ever had I want it to do all the things that all those other devices promised.
- The iPhone is great but the lack of games and certain applications like to-do-lists, chat applications and specific business tools leaves a gap that many developers are filling. While it’s great that this “is possible” it would be even better if this was encouraged and supported by Apple. (SDK please) Update: Done
- I should be able to use any song that I own as a ring-tone for free. If I bought the song why should I pay more to have it play automatically? Isn’t this what fair use is about?
- The Google Apps/iPhone connection is weak. You can sort of get things to sync but email has to use POP settings (not imap) and syncing calendar and contacts is awkward. Update:IMAP DONE
- Let me connect and sync my MacBook using bluetooth or wireless.
- Support rotated and non rotated mode on more screen (like the home screen, youtube and my inbox.)
- Add some texture or grips to the sides. The sucker is slippery. Update: Done
- When held sideways to watch YouTube videos your fingers cover the speaker of the iPhone.
- Use a headphone jack that will be compatible with normal headphones. Update: Done
- Sync my contacts, calendar and music between two computers. I have a Macbook at home and a PC at work but I have one life, one set of contacts and one calendar. Update: Done
- Support bluetooth GPS pucks. This would be a killer accessory for my car. GRMN+GOOG+AAPL
Update: Built in GPS - Better camera. The images the current camera takes are blurry.
- Calendar events synced from Google calendar can’t be edited so you can’t add a reminder. This is similar to #2 but seems like something that Apple could fix without Google’s help. Update: Done
- Video podcasts have two ways to view them one is from the Podcast section and the other from the Video section. The two sections aren’t really connected and it’s not obvious when a podcast has video content.
- I wish I could sync my stock portfolio via an RSS feed. If this existed e*trade, fidelity and others would have feeds right quick.
- Speaking of RSS I would love an offline RSS reader. Update: Done Via 3rd Party Applications
- Whenever I take a picture with the camera and plug-in the phone to charge suddenly both iPhoto and iTunes want to load and sync. Why can’t this happen under the covers with no UI?
- The browser should support Flash & the file browse dialog to upload a photo to a site.
- I should be able to share a business card (vCard) over bluetooth
- I should be able to use the internet connection with my MacBook. I haven’t been able to find anything useful that you can do with bluetooth on a Macbook/iPhone. Update:Done Via 3rd Party Application
- Open up access to other carriers. So far I actually have no complaints against AT&T but I would have preffered to have a choice on this.
Even though I want all these things the most important thing for me is to not loose the core user experience. The ability to create a great product is to add features without negatively impacting the overall experience. As more features, options and settings get added you risk the overall experience. If done well you get the best of both worlds if done poorly you get every other cell phone I’ve ever used.
Gmail Applications for Domains Review
Jul 07
10
About two months ago our exchange server died for the last time and we decided to move our email & calendar solution to Google applications for domains.
The reasons were easy.
- We don’t like running and maintaining servers. Like most small businesses we have better things to do.
- Certain collaboration features of Exchange just don’t work as we need. Sharing a calendar doesn’t work well. Stopping spam doesn’t work well. Public folders or public calendars don’t work well.
- Our requirements for email/calendar are pretty basic so a web solution that does the basics really well can be better then a feature rich solution.
- One of the key features of Exchange is being able to take your email with you. The problem is you’re always syncing or repairing PST files. If you’re usually online the syncing pain isn’t worth it.
- We now have Mac’s and PC’s, using Parallels to load Outlook isn’t that much fun and having a consistent experience as I move between computers is very desirable.
- Cost wasn’t a major consideration. That said the Google solution is much cheaper (free). Even if we paid the $50/user for expanded storage it’s still under $500/year for our small business. Microsoft Small business server is around $450 for 5 users. The TCO for the Microsoft solution is higher because of the admin requirements to backup, patch & repair issues. For a small business this is huge. (Hosted excahnge solutions tend to be more expensive as well)
Ok, it’s been four weeks what works, what doesn’t?
- Gmail – The overall Gmail interface is good. Having access to email/calendar from any computer with a web-browser is more powerfull then I expected.
- The core interactions work well and it does a supurb job with spam filtering.
- Some of the core interactions such as keyboard shortcuts, right click just don’t exist or don’t map to what I’m used to in a desktop application.
- Load time is slow for a web-page but reasonable in relation to Outlook.
- Gmail uses tags instead of folders. Tags are similar to what Outlook calls ‘categories’. Overall I don’t think tags are as useful as folders. With folders you store things once. With tags you can store things multiple times. This makes tags heavy weight for basic organization tasks. Tags are certainly more powerful but the coganizational boost is not apparent. Google docs recently added folders to their interface so I suspect a similar addition may be in the works for Gmail.
- Email in a browser is good but not great. You can’t paste an image from the clipboard into a message. You can’t attach a file by dropping it on the message. Outlook does give you more formating flexibility. 90% of the time you don’t care but when you do care, you tend to care a lot.
- Support for multiple email addresses under one account is limited. You can do it but you can’t have multiple email signatures for each account (nor can you switch quickly).
- The calendar application does a poor job at reminding you of events from the browser. It partly makes up for this by having the ability to send reminders to your phone and allowing you to subscribe to your calendar from other tools and applications that fill this gap.
- Searching on gmail is great. It’s relatively fast and it’s built in. Office only added full text search in it’s 2007 version.
- Tasks/ToDo are painfully missing in the Google solution. There are a number of Firefox plug-ins and greasmonkey scripts that do a poor job of fixing this deficiency. I suspect that Task lists will get added in the coming years. Till then I’ve been using TaDaList from 37 Signals.
- The Outlook solution is well coupled and tightly integrated. Switching from email to calendar and back is instant. With the Google solution it’s slow to move from one app to another and back. Google provides some basic shortcuts but overall it’s a sore spot. Applications open in a separate tab/window and it’s not easy to move things back and forth. I’m used to taking an email and dragging it to the calendar to create an appointment on the spot. With the Gmail solution it’s not quite as elegant. One thing that google does well with Calendar is the ability to type a line like “Dinner on Thursday at 7 with Kathy” and it’ll create the event automatically.
- Give me a preview pane. Gmail is missing the preview pane for messages. This forces a navigation and a context switch for each email. The application does some clever AJAX to keep this transition very fast but the context switch forces you to refocus each time you go back and forth. This also makes keyboarding through messages much slower…
- Speaking of keyboards, accessibility with the Google solution seems lacking. Google has done a good job of adding some keyboard shortcuts but I haven’t been able to quickly arrow through messages. With a Windows or Mac applications you can learn the keyboard shortcut by looking at the menu. With Google applications it’s burried in the help documentation.
Overall
Solid B+ Some things are better some things are worse. The transition pain was minimal and overall I do like it. The ease of administration is absolutely wonderful. If you’re a small business (under 25 people) it’s a great move. The spam filtering has saved me hours. If you’re in a larger organization you’ll need to consider those missing features further. If you’re a small business this is the best choice for a hosted email/calendar solution I’ve seen.