The Vuuch Voice

I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and other social tools lately.  Mostly due to the fact that we used Facebook as a framework or analogy for the new release of Vuuch.  As you all know we decided to make Vuuch public even before we had a working product.  The idea behind this is we truly wanted to elicit feedback from users.  Working with different types of teams and our prior release we discovered a number of user experience issues that we wanted to address in the new release.  You can boil all of this down to two items, user habit and value of a consolidated view of what is going on.  User habit is a tough nut and Outlook seems to be like crack cocaine or cigarettes.  You know you shouldn’t but you just cannot help it…  With respect to a consolidated view our beta users never really realized that when they created a discussion in their SolidWorks file Vuuch created a WEB page that represented this SolidWorks file.  Armed with this data and filled to the brim with the caffeine needed to sit and watch how users worked, the product management team set off to twizzel a new plan. 

We centered in on the idea that we needed to enforce the notion of the WEB page Vuuch creates when you Vuuch enable something.  I must admit that we came to this conclusion working with a buddy that has the best job of all.  He is a marketing VP for the largest domestic beer company in the US.  Unlike us engineering types he spends his day trying to figure out how to make a bottle of beer and a bikini look good next to each other.  Which really isn’t that hard…  It struck us that Facebook was the right analogy.  When you Facebook someone you are focused in on a specific person and anyone who might also care can see what is going on.  In Vuuch rather than representing people we represent what people are working on.

Our next issue was Outlook and that ugly thing we call habit.  Well instead of tilting windmills we jumped on the bandwagon and created an Outlook add-in.  So if you are stuck in Outlook and cannot kick the habit you are safe with Vuuch.  I must say the Buzz has been more than Google.  The users that have tried the Outlook add-in do something very simple.  They smile and say cool. 

If you want to see these two things in action checkout the 60 second video http://www.vuuch.com/media/quick_outlook_demo.wmv.

Let me close by tying back to the title of this post.   Social media or social network applications that are used in our personal lives revolve around the idea that you follow people.  Many companies have taken this idea and built systems that target the enterprise.  Well this is a great example of why linear thinking is easy and wrong.  Following a friend makes perfect sense but following a colleague is going to do nothing but generate tons of noise.  Think about the guy in the next cubical that work very closely with.  Well even though you work together the majority of what they do does not affect you.  If they are working on 100 items do you really care about each of these?  No I think not, even if you are involved with each of them, which is most likely not the case.  In an enterprise setting the value of following a person is much lower than the value of following a deliverable.  Al la Facebook for files.  Follow the files you care about and OH ya guess what when you have nothing going with that file Vuuch no longer pings your inbox.