ContactOffice: No Offense, But The Metaphor Is Tired

I took a look at ContactOffice at Office 2.0:

Yikes. The office metaphor, based on documents, a calendar, and so on. Isn't this tired? Are we so stuck around this set of metaphors -- the physical reality of files? the set of apps in a row? -- that we can't think outside the box?

In particular, I think sticking with the notion of a physical file is inherently limiting and problematic. In a world increasingly based on feeds, flows, streams, posts, and so, we can move past the static world of files and search, into a richer world of flow and filters.

Comments

[Patrick]

No offense taken Stowe.

Maybe it sounds tired, but for the vast majority of users we try to make a solution for (the regular SME's and Soho's) an office metaphor still seems to be the best answer (e.g. what they want and need). At least that's what we learn daily from our users base.

We do include flow and filter aspects such as the generation of feeds for most of the tools and will increase adding these functionalities in our solution. The difficulty being of striking the right balance between state of the art functionality and offering something most users comprehend.

For example we noticed the day we added RSS feed generation in our application that 95% of our users had no idea what this was and how to use. Still today most of our users don't use it.

Btw, the screendump you placed on your post is of our old interface. The new Ajax interface is not with a horizontal row of apps.

You can check it out at http://beta.contactoffice.com