Tried to set up a Hangout for family in different states. For regular users of google plus not an issue. For users who logged in a while ago and set everything up just after the service went public not so much. Here is what I noticed on Christmas AM while trying to help them and watch my daughter open her gifts from Santa.
- Plugins are horrible for ux - that’s why we just had them revert to FaceTime, it never asks you to install anything.
- Being overly helpful distracts the user from what they want to do - google noticed the user had not logged in in a while. Great nice for them. No they don’t want to add circles. No they are not interested in events, no they don’t want to do anything else except go to the hangout they have been told is easy to get to if they could just get to the stream where the link is. More than five minutes later they can now install the plug in, again. Awesome, not.
- While giving up freedoms to join a closed system/walled garden has drawbacks, it also has upsides: when they can use FaceTime there is no tech support needed from me, I just hope Apple extends FaceTime for group chats. And the easy to use video chat just works, as they expect without any extra clicks, distracting questions that help them get more out of the service or tangent issues that have to be solved before they get to e video chat.
Bottom line, today I wish FaceTime had group chat, it would have been easy for all the people I wanted to participate in my daughters Xmas morning. It would not have required any trouble shooting from my end. Hangouts failed today because the interface got in the way. It forced the users to do other things besides video chat - troubleshooting and mindshare to figure out how to get to the video chat. Maybe that’s a difference in the corporate goals for the two services, one company needs to turn the users into advertising dollars and the other needs to turn the users dollars into revenue. Either way, I found myself wishing the two services could be combined so I could focus on Christmas morning instead of technology in order to share Christmas online. I would pay for that if it did not require those who were invited to also have to pay.
