The next user experience interface aims to bring together collaboration and communications capabilities into a single workspace.
After you turn on your computer in the morning, you probably spend most of your time in one or two applications — in Outlook, on Salesforce.com, within a vertical market application for your specific job, or even in social software business tool, for example. If you want to communicate and collaborate with colleagues, then you most likely have to leave the application you’re in and head over to another interface.
If you’re like most users, you probably spend several times a day, if not an hour, moving between one user interface and another. There’s currently no single or seamless user experience (UX) as we navigate among multiple clients and interfaces in order to do our jobs.
Creating the Ideal User Experience
The UX has been gaining attention recently as vendors focus on increasing end user adoption for their unified communications and collaboration solutions. The ideal UX should be a place where workers can collaborate and share information, as well as communicate in real time and non-real time. As my colleague Michael Finneran pointed out in a recent UCStrategies post, new platforms such as Unify’s Circuit and Cisco’s Project Squared “draw on essential ideas from social media and apply them to a business context.” One of these ideas, he went on to say, involves the collaborative workspace “where all of the communications and documentation involved in a particular task are stored and all team members can get access to them.”
