Reminds me of the book The Joy of UX
Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
141–150 of 168 posts
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#142My business partner and I have been working remotely with each other for the last 5 years, after a previous 7 years in a shared office. To make it work, we bought dedicated iPads and put them on stands next to our computer monitors on our desks. We start a FaceTime call at the beginning of each day and literally leave it running all day. We mute when not actively talking, so we can listen to music (and not listen to…
That would require a very special, intimate relationship with someone to work. There is no way I could have a random coworker/boss' mug staring at me all day to my left. I wouldn't even want that with my wife/girlfriend.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#143I have worked remotely for 10 years and raised VC funding for an idea very similar to this in the past – we failed to build a sustainable business, although the product did have a couple of hundred teams that swore by the product. In hindsight I believe it's because we were following the startup mythology of "building a solution for the problem that you have" a little too closely. We failed to realize that this is re…
We used Squiggle for a little while and really really wanted it to work for us. But the audio and video quality (and connection reliability) was just not nearly as good as FaceTime, and we were/are a two-man team, so we just switched back to FaceTime. I actually think Squiggle 2.0 but with the reliability and audo/video quality of FaceTime would be a different proposition. Audio feedback, background noise, broken connections, and laggy fuzzy video all make the experience suck. Details matter.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#144Surprised no one's mentioned Relay PTT devices. https://relaypro.com Looks like a lot of businesses are using them to replace radios now.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#145My business partner and I have been working remotely with each other for the last 5 years, after a previous 7 years in a shared office. To make it work, we bought dedicated iPads and put them on stands next to our computer monitors on our desks. We start a FaceTime call at the beginning of each day and literally leave it running all day. We mute when not actively talking, so we can listen to music (and not listen to…
That would require a very special, intimate relationship with someone to work. There is no way I could have a random coworker/boss' mug staring at me all day to my left. I wouldn't even want that with my wife/girlfriend.
Do you have a private office at work? It is like sitting in the same pod as a teammate.
But I agree you wouldn't want it with a wife and girlfriend. Could get awkward with them both there.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would require a very special, intimate relationship with someone to work. There is no way I could have a random coworker/boss' mug staring at me all day to my left. I wouldn't even want that with my wife/girlfriend.
Do you have a private office at work? It is like sitting in the same pod as a teammate. But I agree you wouldn't want it with a wife and girlfriend. Could get awkward with them both there.
It's really not like that at all. People aren't sitting right on top of you a foot away. If they are, I'm sorry.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#147> quick, synchronous audio/video communication between teammates ..."kill it with fire" or other equivalent meme is the proper response to this, no matter how wonderfully it is executed. Really, what everyone needs is more asynchronous communication and less attention draining and less interruptions! This can only help very small teams of extroverts with very-very-similar personalities work, it brings HELL for everyo…
Totally agree - I wrote a rebuttal to the concept of "virtual office" tools for distributed teams a few minutes ago: https://www.friday.app/remote-work-virtual-office
This is a really thoughtful response! FWIW, we believe the future involves both sync and async tools. Friday seems like it could be helpful on the async side.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very common in some industries to have always-on two-way screens connected to workers in another office. A company called Tandberg was the main maker of them. It’s owned by Cisco now but everyone still calls them Tandbergs. Typically you would have one at the end of a row of desks to “extend” that row to another row physically located in another office and vice versa
I love Atlassian's implementation of this[1] where they installed "portals" around their offices, connected to a counterpart in another office - if you want to chat to someone you can walk over to the relevant portal and do so, but because they're always on and in public places they also facilitate the sort of spontaneous conversations you get when you bump into someone in the kitchen while making a cup of coffee. [1…
Genuinely curious: do people actually use these at Atlassian? In college we had a portal to another college that looked very similar, and it was never used.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not an extrovert and I'd like this for people asking me questions. Want to disturb me for 2 minutes and ruin my concentration losing me half an hour? If it's going to save you your afternoon - just do it. If you're probably going to send me a message on slack or call me there anyway I'd find this a lot less annoying. My goal should never be to get through the most work myself it's to move the company forwards. Ha…
> If it's going to save you your afternoon - just do it. That's the thing, will it actually be used like that? This feel so casual that it doesn't feel like it has to be used in urgent matter only. I guess the important thing isn't about the tools but mostly about the training the user got around the tools. It's important to show what each one is used for and in which context. It's so easy to just believe something i…
I completely agree that training and culture are an important piece of this. If someone pings someone every time they have a question, without searching for the answer on their own, it doesn’t matter what the medium is. It’s wasteful.
Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can opt-out of the click to connect type of calls by setting the option in your status.
Opting out isn't free, though. It's a social signal and one that, potentially, brings with it additional stress as you're actively opting out of something your colleagues/superiors believe is good enough an idea that they've implemented it.
This is a good point. If the manager is going to implement Pragli, they need to make it very clear that opting out is very OK and even encouraged... we need to do a better job of making this feel socially OK in the app.