Red Rover

“I don’t want to look at all of this,” Julie said, echoing the last three testers, “I just want to see the items that I care about.”

Julie was a volunteer giving us her thoughts on our software. She was one of 15 in that round of testing, and was giving us her first reaction to the activity stream – a standard user interface pattern that Red Rover employs to unify streams of information.

Julie was 42. She didn’t like the standard user interface pattern. She didn’t mind it when Facebook did it, that was different. Facebook was a cocktail party with friends, she could happily meander through that, it was a pleasant way to waste time. But here, in our test, with our application, she was at work. That was different. She needed the important things. She needed the useful things. She needed the things she cared about in the context of work and nothing else.

We all feel this way. Too much stuff. Too much work to find the nuggets. It’s not a new problem, but it is the problem of social software in the enterprise. “Social” as an add on, with its comments, shares, edits and likes, is increasing the amount of stuff. Social publishing lets anyone add to the stuff. Read More