Synchronous Communication, User Awareness, and the Real-Time Web
This piece looks at how user awareness and synchronous communication have been lagging on the web, and why this might change in 2011+.
Background
A major trend in UX design over the past decade has been to move away from page-load based interaction toward real-time interfaces — from web pages to web apps and the read/write web, if you will. Although real-time interfaces initially appeared in Outlook Web Access in 2000 and first reached the wider public with Gmail in 2004 (pioneering Ajax), they are still far from dominant today. This relatively slow speed of adoption is due to a wide range of factors such as browser incompatibilities (and the need for clean degradation), programming complexity (relative to page-load based websites), security, scalability (increased requests to web servers and other back-end components), usability (bookmarking, broken browser histories) and business concerns (incompatibility with traditional analytics and ad platforms). By 2010, with many of these hurdles having been overcome, a number of large-scale apps made the switch toward dynamic, responsive, real-time interfaces — two prominent examples being the new Twitter and Google Instant Search.
This move toward real-time at the interface level obviously goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of the real-time web more broadly — the idea that the sending and receiving of information should happen immediately without needing to poll publishers periodically. Thus, today, users not only expect their web apps to be faster and more responsive, they expect that publishing, discovery/search, and consumption happen in real-time.
User Awareness and Synchronous Communication
Interestingly, neither user awareness nor synchronous communication are prevalent characteristics of this real-time web movement, despite their being critical parts of interactions in the real world.
User awareness refers to one user knowing what other users are currently doing in a web app — it is the web equivalent of seeing who else is in a room with you. For example, while surfing a product page on Amazon, one could imagine being told that three other users are currently looking at the product, as well as one Amazon representative in case you has any questions. Synchronous communication means that all people communicating need to be available at the same time for successful communication to occur. A phone call is synchronous, emails are asynchronous, and text messages and IM are somewhere in between.
These two concepts characterize only very few web applications, for example:
- Justin.tv: best experienced if you are online at the same time as a host so that you can communicate with him/her, as well as other viewers, during the broadcast.
- the isolated use of Twitter for chatting: a real-time medium that traditionally focuses on asynchronous (and often one-way) communication being used for synchronous, two-way conversations, e.g., DHH v. Dave McClure; Arrington v. Dave Winer.
- Google Wave: one of the highlights of the keynote is seeing a bunch of people intuitively editing a document at the same time.
- Chatroulette
Despite their lack of adoption on the web, user awareness and synchronous communication are prevalent characteristics of non-web Internet application. One need look no further than IRC, IM, online video games (MMORPGs especially) and video game communities (XBox Live). Straddling the web boundary, the 2010 browser startup, Rockmelt, adds, through extra-web mechanisms, user awareness, chat, and real-time sharing to the entire web-experience .
Coming to a Web App Near You in 2011
I’ll posit that this lacuna of user aware apps with real-time communication will start to be filled in 2011, and that the time and technology are ripe for a mainstream app with these characteristics. Why?
- 3D in the browser will lead to avatar-based web apps which by definition include user awareness and, often, synchronous chatting.
- Individuals who use location apps are familiarizing themselves with the idea of broadcasting where they are “now” in the real world via the “check in”. It is only a matter of time until this idea switches to the Internet: broadcast to your friends which page you are on now so that they can join you and experience the content at the same time.
- As increasingly complex games move to the web because of HTML5 and canvas, gamers will ask for the user awareness and synchronous communication they have taken for granted.
- Experiencing something live with a friend or with a crowd is almost always » sharing and enjoying the same thing at different points in time; it’s the way we are wired. Time for the web to catch up.
