We could say that Google+ and email are merely different interfaces to the same core features. Email is an efficient way to get an overview of all of your active or recent conversations, since it hides most of the content. Google+, on the other hand, splays it all out in front of you, which makes access to threads from further in the past more difficult, but makes interacting with recent content much easier.

Flattened-email products, which seem to be on the rise, tend to focus on the now, and less so on the ease of finding a conversation from the past, or storing it for reference. These problems will need to be dealt with quickly, or flattened-email will end up having usability problems that are different than, but equally maddening as, those that email has today.

These affordances not only enable or discourage communication in each area of the site, they also help shape the more “fluffy bits” of writing, from the length of content to its mood – how playfully, introspectively, or authoritatively one speaks.

And these subtle affordances are what takes longer to grok. This explains why it takes a mere five minutes to use every feature of Google Plus, while the great technologists of our day have spent days “playing around” within the network – and we must use a kiddish phrase, because we don’t have the words to describe the type of familiarity we gain from sustained usage of a website, rather than quick perusal.

And so, welcome to the world of interaction design. One wonders why those roles are so hard to describe comprehensively – it’s because their raw materials are, instead of concrete and steel, hints and hooks into the subconscious.

Sure, to many, the only apparent business of the UX professional is in building bridges out of pixels. But their real challenge is building those bridges in such a way that the people driving can’t help but to buckle their seatbelt, or tune in to FM 90.1, or start craving ice cream.

This style is less disruptive to the overall document’s formatting, and makes the wave look much more cohesive and professional. For chat-style exchanges, it’s important to keep what is said closely linked to who’s saying it, but when collaboratively editing, it’s rather unnecessary, and turns out to be more distracting than anything else.

[Continued 10 minutes after realizing this would actually be doable with Stylish]

Here I present to you, the smallest style with the largest impact for Google Wave: Now all of my waves look like this (except they’re not in Russian).

The names of the blip’s contributors are hidden, as well as the time/date (I don’t need either one near enough to justify how much they mess up the formatting of blips). The drop-down menu is made smaller but still displayed. The good part for you is that each part is incredibly easy to hide or show; the CSS is below, and if you want to hide or show the time, names, or menu, just add or delete the appropriate item from the list!

Want it quick? Firefox users,  install it from here as a Stylish style or a Greasemonkey script. I also threw together a simple Chrome extension.

.GTB[dc=contributors] {

    float: right !important;

    margin-right: 0 !important;

    margin-left: 2px !important;

}

[dc=menu] {

    width: 9px !important;

}

.MTB[dc=time], .KTB[dc=names] {

    display: none !important;

}

While the abilities that the Datatel system provides are probably a refreshing change for the administrators of UE, the company seems oblivious to the fact that websites should be designed by people who have, well, at least rudimentary knowledge of user interaction guidelines. And interaction aside, it seems that Datatel never found it necessary to hire a single person able to design an eye-pleasing layout (individual color schemes for WebAdvisors vary from school to school, so at least I can’t fault them entirely for the color).

It’s not just me that’s amazed at this lack of effort in user interaction. I’ve discussed it with several other students and faculty members, all of whom expressed feelings rather far from adoration over the user interface.

Fixing Their Mistakes

Over the past week or so I’ve cobbled together some custom CSS in an attempt to rectify a few of the design faux pas exhibited so prevalently in WebAdvisor. By installing the style using the Firefox plugins Stylish or Greasemonkey, you too can get a slightly more attractive WebAdvisor!

So far, the rudimentary changes have been as follows:

• Navigation bar alterations:
  • Links behave like links (added mouseovers)
  • Took away horrendous small-caps and boldness
• Made the content fixed width (things on the far edges of the page were just too far apart)
• On pages with tables:
  • Made even-odd row highlighting less distracting: lowered contrast
  • Removed cell borders (may add back in less distracting form)
• Reset the bottom-of-page buttons on each page to the default style, rather than the strange beveled and all-caps style
• Made student-menu homepage section headings more readable

The perplexing parts about this are (a) I’ve not spent much time on it, especially with how easy it is to do on-the-fly CSS edits with Firebug, and (b) I’ve had to edit only the CSS to get such an improvement in overall usability (and especially readability). This means that Datatel could hire a freelance webdesigner and fix half of their interface problems right away, for the dozens of universities using the WebAdvisor system! The user interaction failures, however, are another story entirely.

Want to see WebAdvisor prettier than it was before? You can install my stylesheet with either Stylish or Greasemonkey at userstyles.org listed under WebAdvisor: Stop the Epic Fail. WebAdvisor is customized for each university to a certain degree, and this style applies vaguely UE-themed colors to some elements, so please go right now and tweak it for your own system — it should be easy!