Views, Not Tabs, Please

The world of social business applications seem stuck in the last decade, with an information silo model built front and center in their products.

Here’s an example from Huddle.

This tool offers tasks, whiteboards, files, and so on, all as separate information silos. The approach means that if you want to mess with a particular task or file that has scrolled off the ‘what’s new’ region at the bottom, then you must click on the appropriate tab, and wander off into the file silo or task silo.

Why not just have a single unifed stream, like the ‘what’s new’ area, and support various views over the objects. For example, selecting a view for ‘all tasks’ would display all tasks in place, not in a new page. Likewise, selecting ‘tasks’ with a search term like ‘Carlos’ would show all tasks in which Carlos is mentioned.

We seem to be stuck in a transitional design phase, where developers are adapting to the new streaming metaphor from open networks like Twitter and others, but they are retrofitting that on an older, static, information silo model. And I don’t think the hybrid works: it’s like those old iPod adapters for the car that relied on transmitting an AM signal that could be picked up on the radio. It worked, but what a hack. And the sound was terrible. Now, a few years later, most cars are coming with an audio jack as a standard feature.

I am looking forward to the first vendor of social business apps that simply adopts the stream as the primary (and possibly only) metaphor for information structure, with highly adaptable views that can be used to render the stream in different ways. For example, imagine applying a calendar view to all the posts associated with a certain project. It could be displayed in a calendar or agenda stype view, with posts appearing when they were posted, tasks when they are due, and files when last updated.

So let’s drop the silos, and move deeper into the stream.