A note on Collaborative Experience (CX)
Airwave is still in the early stages of development, but the goal is to make organic interactivity a central feature for any application in which two or more people interact, which are many and growing in numbers in the post-pandemic world.
Software has historically drifted away from real-world interactions in favor of what makes sense for a small screen, mouse, and keyboard. And a lot of our interactions online happen asynchronously:
- The Good: Great for structured discussion with a predictable agenda and timeframe.
- The Bad: Wasteful and tiresome for casual, spontaneous conversations. If you've had Zoom fatigue you'd know how draining this can be when your day is filled with meetings that should've been emails. In the real world, most of how we interact is much more casual.
Video Meetings
- The Good: Great for persistent, chronological, and searchable conversations.
- The Bad: Ever pinged someone and got a response hours later just to realize you reached out to the wrong person? What if they're just busy and can't cater to every message immediately? In the office, you can simply look over at their desk and know if they're in a deep focus, or in a meeting, etc. 'Do not disturb' ond online status are the only hints we have as to when we should or shouldn't start a conversation.
Slack, Teams, etc.
These tools certainly have an firm place in our lives. But they fail to enable some essential parts of human-to-human communication like non-verbal queues, reading someone's status or presence in a room, attaching a face to a personality and the things they said, or maybe the mental map of connecting the setting of a time and place to the memory of what happened there.
Check out an interesting look into how memory champions commit raw data to memory, like a list of 500 numbers. The way we absorb information has a lot to do with the experience around when the information was presented. The more visceral the experience, the better we remember it.
By the way, my name is Derek Cook. I'm a software engineer and I created Airwave, among other projects. Find me on Twitter.