What an alarm clock can teach us about online collaboration

What an alarm clock can teach us about online collaboration

About 3 months ago I bought a new clock radio. Last night, I found that I needed to use the alarm for the first time. So I looked at all the buttons, took a wild guess as to how to set the alarm, and managed to change the correct time to the wrong time.

But failed to set the alarm.

So I searched the web and found a copy of the user manual. After following the instructions, I successfully set the alarm so that it would ring at 5:30am on every weekend morning for the rest of my life. But I still couldn’t set the alarm to ring the next day.

The solution? I went to a 24 hour pharmacy, bought an alarm clock for $5.99, plugged it in, and pushed the button labeled “set alarm.” Worked like a charm.

So what does this have to do with using technology to support online collaboration? Too many tools try to do too much. As a result, users simply refuse to even try to learn how to use them.

This creates a big problem if you need everyone to use the technology for the workgroup to work.

The answer is to implement a solution that users can understand. The downside...