Alarm Clocks And Online Collaboration
Thursday, October 14th, 2010Have you ever bought a piece of equipment that you thought would come in very handy only to leave it lying around for months because you could not figure out how to set it up? Or not set all the functions up, because it would have cost hours to read through the handbook, which looked as if it had been translated by a computer anyway?
Most people have experienced the situation at some time or another. I had an alarm clock once that had dozens of features like waking me up at diverse times on the weekend to during the week and randomly selecting a radio channel every day to wake me up. It also had a feature with which I could train it to understand some voice commands, but I could not be bothered with all that.
I simply wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar items. How many times do you hear of people setting their video recorder to record a film only to get a documentary on another channel? It used to occur a lot, didn’t it?
The point that I am getting at here is that the designers of these instruments have been told to put as many functions as possible into them up to a price in order to be all things to all people. However, in making their equipment so convoluted, a great deal of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the precise opposite of what the manufacturers wanted.
The next time you go out looking for some electronic gadget, you will say to yourself: “Oh, So-And-So, you need a diploma to use one by So-And-So. I’m not buying one of theirs”.
So how can this affect you? Well, if you have to organize anything that you expect others to take part in or be animated about, try not to make it overly complicated. I am not saying ‘dumb-down’, just don’t show off by putting all the bells and whistles on it simply to show that you can do that. People will not thank you for it, they will ignore your undertaking.
This has a great deal of implications for on line projects where individuals can be hundreds of miles apart but still be collaborating on a joint development from home. Open source programming is a good example of this type of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the utmost co-operation.
One technique that you can use to check to see if your venture is being understood is to inquire. It sounds obvious and it should be, but a lot of team leaders will not ask because they think that it makes them look weak and unknowledgeable. Again, in fact, the opposite is the case. A good team leader is not a despot; a good team leader is a good organizer and is thoughtful.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a variety of subjects, but is currently involved with Bose alarm clocks. If you would like to kcurrently more, please visit our web site at Bose Digital Radio.