As our communication tool continues to advance with the increasingly available technology, individuals and groups start to adopt more efficient communication tools with all different features to fulfill their needs in different circumstances. Our communication between each other has been dramatically shaped by the tools handy to us—in person, telegraph, line phone, pager, wireless phone, email, BBS community, social media, google doc and so on. One thing has never changed is that all forms of communication we created for ourselves differ in their nature more or less.
Differences in modes of communication are the fundamental idea discussed in No more email by Bill Goodwin. He points out that the corporations are leaning to deploy a new generation of communication called unified communication within their teams. He believes that the earlier generation of asynchronous communication is being eliminated by the era since they can be really expensive at times and require unnecessary efforts. But what is unified communication, why does Goodwin insists that it is better, and how is that relevant to User Experience?
Unified Communication (UC) is the integration of corporations’ different communication mode. It is a platform that integrates presence, email, chat, video, voice, directory service, mobility, and data. In other words, users of such platform will no longer need to switch between platforms (e.g. call on their phones while typing on their laptops for email). UC provides a one solution for all, as long as the equipment supports those modes of communication.
Undeniably, UC can be productive in many cases: when a team has members in all different settings, they can still gather together and make progress; when part of the team is offline, the administrator can immediately save the work progress on cloud so that it can be continued when the other part of the team get online.
For my perspective, however, unified communication, byits very nature, is never a perfect alternative to the traditional communication tool we adopt. When we adopt a unified communication, it means that different modes of communication can happen simultaneously, and that can sometimes lead to chaos. Examples include the video we discussed in the lecture in SI110 when a man was trying to make a conference with his team while they kept being disturbed either by technical issue or by personal problems. Unified Communication not only does not solve this problem but also brings more modes of communication, increasing the amount of potential problems. When the platform attempts to cater all the different circumstances of participants, the system cannot transmit some nuanced detail and emotion that traditional communication is capable of.
As we discussed in SI110 on Oct 6th, asynchronous communication has little to no coordination and makes common ground really hard to establish. When UC integrates all the synchronous communications with asynchronous ones, the workflow gets even more disorganized, not to mention the common ground to establish and the nuance of social activity that people normally participate in traditional communications.
In a nutshell, UC does start a revolution of both synchronous and asynchronous communications. We can foresee a significant reduction of effort in participating in a meeting, making reports, and doing a presentation with the assistance of tools like UC. Nonetheless, it is just as important for us to realize the limit of it when it comes to coordination and common ground establishment, and find a perfect balance between the new and conventional ways of communication.
Works cited: Goodwin, Bill. "No More Email? Why Companies Are Turning to Collaboration Technology." ComputerWeekly. N.p., Mar. 2014. Web. 13 Nov. 2016. Newman, Mark. "Social UX V.2." SI106 Lecture. Ann Arbor. Oct. 06. 2016. Lecture.
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