As I prepare to move back into corporate employment, I’m again reminded of a “simple but not easy” user interface dream I’ve had for some time: a single user interface / user experience for all my outbound communications, regardless of audience.
What I envision is a single application that provides a front-end for the actual sending applications. This “composer” would have check-boxes for “Who can see?”, where the selections would be something like:
- Project team ‘x’
- Company (i.e. intranet)
- Trusted partners and/or clients (i.e. extranet)
- Public (i.e. internet)
Additionally it would bring together Twitter, instant messaging, email(? not sure if I’d really want this), and blogging into closer to a single user interface…allowing the user to somehow select writing length (Twitter = short, blogging = long) and the immediacy of communication (instant messaging = instant, mailing lists = middle ground, blogging = most asynchronous) that then defines where this front-end “composer” application would ultimately feed.
Combine all this with one of the attempts now underway with inbound aggregation…all moving closer to a single “online conversation central” — both inbound and outbound, both behind the firewall and outside the firewall.
- Does Twitter Fill A Communication Void?
- PLE as Retreat versus Productivity Suite (where in the above imaginations I am actually going against the points in this post from a year ago– moving towards a single work/life/learning interface)