A positive user experience is an end-user's successful and streamlined completion of a desired task.
The user experience should be:
• Comfortable
• Intuitive
• Consistent
• Trustworthy
The term user experience has been defined and described in many ways, but at Gather we, THE USERS, should define user experience as the overall perception and comprehensive interaction Gather member's have with the Gather Website. A positive user experience is our successful and streamlined completion of a desired task.
When designing a good user experience it's important for Gather management to remember these four principles, which should be a part of any usability or user experience specialist's toolkit. While these are not the only components of a complete experience, these principles form a solid structure upon which to build a foundation of usability, information design and meaningful Gather Experience.
When introducing a new Gather Experience, those four should be taken into account. We, as users, must ask them as well. Is the new Gather with respect to the end-user's successful and streamlined completion of a desired task:
• More Comfortable
• More Intuitive
• Consistent
• Trustworthy
If, for any given set of most common tasks, paths, or searching activities a user engages in, these all must be met - or the change should not happen.
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Comments: 6
Now I have to hunt for my name space, mail, etc - and the functionality limitations (and problems - especially hyperlinking) of publishing remain as before. Ditto with the comments - it's a real pain in the arse having to refresh the screen each time.
But I have a concern you haven't raised. Gather was promoted as a writers' site but it doesn't cater for writers - my articles are still automatically listed according to publication date, not storyline, etc. This is for blogging and not creative writing!
I've already expressed my dismay (on other articles about the new Gather) regarding the 'suggested tags.' Again, these suit blogging but not creative writing. Where are the fiction tags, or those for poetry, short stories, humor ...? Now how do new people find creative writers, be it fiction, poetry, etc. if these are not among the 'suggested tags'?
You're an expert, Will - please tell me how?
Magi
I really think the identity crisis is a core issue. It is very hard to define functionality to fit all needs. To be successful, you must define your social and business objectives well, and the definition must be more specific then "be profitable someday".
I always find it interesting with startup companies to look at who funded them and why. This is not always possible. I had an opportunity to speak in person with some top management at Gather about this. I really like this site and I really like the people I met, so I remain optimistic that they can learn from this build and move forward towards their goal of defining their niche in the social networking space. My biggest fear is they will tune out the well reasoned criticism and focus only on the YES-people who just say "this is great". There is always much to be learned from the negative comments in life.
To Maura, indeed those of us who are here commenting do take our experience here seriously. I am really glad I discovered this site, although the way I discovered it was a somewhat dissappointing personal experience.
An interesting problem many companies that use technology have is letter the technology tail wag the dog. What I mean is "what can be done" drives "what is done" rather then letting "what should be done" drive it. This is a major factor that caused initial .COM companies to burst. Groups, and tags, and member relationships do not seem to support a core business objective so much as demonstrating some clever use of databases and dynamic page generation. The concepts of groups and tags, which should be key, seem to be just flexing database muscle versus providing a specific objective. Maybe this is maturing and changing, indeed most web companies must experience some trial and error no matter how well they plan. So I have not given up hope at all. Clearly this build shows us how much they are willing to invest in the site and maybe they will learn and figure out what they want to be. One worry is that a site of this magnitute costs a lot in terms of money and goodwill with users, staff, investors... I have seen companies burn out their candles before they get the balance they needed. In fact, I have been a co-founder of at least two companies that lost their investor goodwill before achieving their ultimate business goals.
Failure is a necessary part of life and should be embraced. If you are not failing sometimes, you are probably being too conservative. From what I can tell, this build as is today will fail. It will not yield better results under whatever metrics success is defined. But it will yields tons of lessons learned and provide fuel for the next iteration. The web enables iterative development and within the patience of your user base, or your ability to replace users who abandon the site, you can fail and then get up and try again. So let's cross our fingers and hope this great forum for group sharing and discussion of creative blogs (a marriage of creative writing and blogging) prevails!
Magi
Rich - we can discuss your article offline re: the position at Gather. Quickly stated - they were looking to replace a friend of mine who held the position of software architect, but relative to your skills and experience (yes - I went to your page, I read your patents) - my friend would have been a principal software engineer. They were looking for someone with at least 10 years less experience than you who could sit for 10 hours straight and crank out java classes and beans. You probably wouldn't have wanted that. I understand your frustration - they shouldn't have wasted your time, but anyway - enough said in this forum. via gather messaging - drop me a message, and we can talk offline about other stuff. I have some ideas, and people you can meet, talk with, things that might really get you excited. (I hate this - I am much more of a maven than a connector, but hey).