User Centered

I apologize for the delay in this posting... While this fulfills an internal drive at bettering the world it doesn't quite pay for my rent. Job hunting bites.

In Part 1, I discussed what Opera Unite wants to be. In Part 2, I reviewed the current offerings and my personal use cases. In Part 3, I'd like to discuss why I feel the underlying architecture seems flawed from a usability perspective and how that demonstrated itself in Part 2.

As a reader pointed out to me. Opera Unite is not the Apps it runs, Opera Unite is the platform that runs it. However, I contend that is semantics, you cannot separate them. Without the Apps, Unite is nothing that can be used. You cannot use one without the other. In this symbiotic relationship my review is Opera Unite's usability as it appears is for the end-user, it is simply "Opera Unite" (which is how Opera's own marketing targets Unite to the public). Only the developers will be truly interacting directly with Unite in a way that has elements of usability. Besides, the default apps, which are the only ones I'm reviewing, are also by Opera.

The analogy that jumps out: Unite would be the iPhone OS. The Apps would be just like the Apps for the iPhone. You need both (and indeed, the iPhone is evaluated as a whole, with non-Apple apps receiving their own reviews but Apple's apps are just part of the package).

That out of the way. Let's dive in!

Why are things the way they are?

When Dr. Eng speaks of the "The Internet’s unfulfilled promise" I can't help but applaud -- it is a worthy vision. We are so willingly surrender our rights when we press "I Accept" on click-thru-contracts. However, you cannot neglect what we get in exchange. In terms of usability I get access to services that help me do things. What sort of things? I can send pictures of my ugly mug to my friends, they can send songs to me that they love, I can update my good friend in Armenia that he got mail from the DMV recently (he can send back a forwarding address). All of these are forms of communication.

That is a fundamental of the Internet. As human beings we are constantly looking for efficient and effective means of communication (everywhere). We are naturally selecting the method which takes the least amount of work and is still effective. How many of us bother speaking when a wink will suffice?

The uncontested king of the Internet? Email.

That simple service changed the world forever (well... for as long as we get to rent the world). The question "Have you heard of E-Mail?" has been replaced with, "Do you have an Email address?" and in turn, "What's your email?"

Email is a very basic form of asynchronous communication that is relatively easy to use with a minimal amount of training. If you can send postal mail, you can master e-mail.

Postal mail is asynchronous communication. I drop a letter in any postal box and eventually it lands in a mailbox for the recipient to read at their leisure (or shred, depending on what they think I'm asking for).

The architecture of email is the same. I can send off a message and eventually my friend gets it. However, in his village in Armenia there is no Internet. He checks it when visiting a neighboring town every week. The beauty of email is that he connects to his mail server and it takes care of getting the message to me. Likewise, my email response will be held by his mail server until he can login and view it.

Now, you could run your own mail server but mail servers expect other mail servers to be "always on." If my friend and I ran our own mail servers we'd both have to be online at the same time in order to send and receive email from each other.

For most of us email works brilliantly.

Synchronous Communication

Unite is synchronous communication. You can only share when both "people" are online. It's more like a phone call to my friend than a letter. I consider phone calls way more fun than emails (usually) but they take more work to coordinate (not to mention, they can be pretty inefficient).

Unite takes more coordination, too. Every user who expects the level of functionality granted by email, by Facebook, My Space, Flickr, Dropbox or any number of the thousands of server-based-services that help us meet communicate, will find Unite lacking. Unite is competing against these solutions in the desires of common users.

But what's in a server?

Then there is the last-mile. My bandwidth could barely handle those 40 pictures. If I had conferenced called my friends (or even just sent out the link to everyone at the same time) what would the result have been? Very slow going for all of them as I reached my upload connection limit (512 kbps, I have found out).

These problems won't exist for everyone. Anyone who has a fast, dedicated Internet Connection with a computer they always leave on has an ideal candidate for Opera Unite. In other words, they have a server.

The reason we call computers servers as opposed to just computers is mostly semantic. We mentally categorize them as more capable of content distribution on the Internet. They have faster processors, usually some redundancy, faster connections to the Internet and they are "always-on". Unite says, "Any computer can be a server!" -- Yes, this is true! ... Well, when it's on. We humans depend on "Yes, almost always," for the solutions we'll continue to use.

That's at the heart of usability. When I give someone an email address the expectation is they will, at their leisure, be able to email me. Likewise, when I wanted someone to view my pictures, I need a service that allows them to do so at their leisure.

For the users who try out Opera Unite with the standard apps the picture Opera paints is very unclear. Read the introductory statements to Opera Unite (http://unite.opera.com), as one of many examples "Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files." But missing in bold at the beginning of that statement is all the "Ifs".

The Ifs

If they don't always have Opera on, it doesn't work. If they aren't always connected to the Internet, it doesn't work. If they have a very slow upload connection, it doesn't work.

A supporting story: The friend who introduced me to Opera Unite (encouraging me to try it) also introduced another chap who quickly ran into problems. This chap had been trying to figure out why his friends couldn't access his files. We began trying to troubleshoot when he realized, "Oh, no one told me Opera had to be open."

Another, "duh"? -- It would seem so but it depends on where you stand. Are you a computer engineer or a computer user? Usability must remember your target audience, the whole experience and that they won't be using your product in a controlled environment. Look at fire alarms, it's always shocked me how easily, in some instances, one can pull a fire alarm and disrupt thousands of people. Yet... the trade off is usability, any attempt to circumvent pranksters would result in a very bad side-effect: People panicked by fire might not be able to figure out how to set off the alarm (or worse, not bother trying).

Other services are so easy to use and so powerful because of that basic simplicity - it always works. Unite doesn't lay out this restriction to begin with. Unite isn't a solution for asynchronous communication -- it is only usable when you are connected with those you wish to collaborate with. Fair enough, but say so up front because it is a big "if".

It comes down to usability...

Unite's promise is, "giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services." But other services work more (thanks to being inherently asynchronous). Facebook is the living proof that users are willing to sacrifice a great deal of privacy for effectiveness. Not that Facebook's power doesn't disturb me but let's face it, Fb is now bigger than many nations on the planet. Part 2 showed me conclusively it was more work to try and synchronize schedules, leave my computer always on, get a faster upload speed. But that design issues are not addressed at all by Unite.

And to date, my research has revealed no way of solving that problem. Sadly for the future of Unite, other server-services don't even have to contend with that problem. Those "big servers" leverage an economy of scale that we don't have access to on an individual basis.

The general usability of Opera Unite is severely undermined by the dependence on synchronous communication and further by a general expectation among those on the Internet about how file-sharing works (which Opera doesn't correct in it's "sell"). For chat, it's nearly perfect -- as chat is synchronous communication that doesn't take much bandwidth.

There very well may be creative workarounds to these problems but Unite's first impression is going to count the most for many people. When I need a quick way to make a temporary share of fresh data, I can see Unite as the solution. Perhaps developers will come up a killer app that really shines in the niche that Opera is taking.

That's where I see Unite ultimately landing, a niche. There are those who spend their days with their computer on, the browser open and have very fast connections (Universities?). This is fine and good but I fear it won't be the revolution that I'd dream of, it will not unite us all.