Tech Witness

Decided today to finally enable my TR blog.  In fact, finally got round to looking at the whole "My Workspace" thing in general.  I've been reading TR for 4 years or so now and looked at the workspace idea last year but didn't see a lot of initial value in it.  The suggestions, links and projects split didn't really work for me.  Having used personalised Google and MS Live recently though, I'm looking at the web-based information aggregation service in a different light.  So, I'm back here again with the intent of using the service over the next few weeks and seeing if it really does make a difference to how I pull information together.

That's the kicker with techology.  Any solution/service is only beneficial if it supports how the end user works.  It's about taking what the user is already doing and making that easier and quicker then taking it a step forward and delivering value that the user hasn't previously been able to achieve.  The less a solution/service requires a user to change how they work, the more acceptance it receives and the more benefit it brings.

I'm curious to see the benefits that "My Workplace" will bring to what I do.

24 hrs gone and I've decided I hate the My Workspace interface! Specifically managing the lists for Suggestions, Links & History.

Once I'd setup my initial profile the Suggestions section was populated for me with over 50 items. I read 5 of them and discarded the rest. That sounds much easier than it was. Each item had to have Remove selected individually then I had to wait for a page reload to move on to the next one. Why, oh why, can't we have checkboxes here? This would've been much less painless if I could've selected the 5 I wanted to read and clicked Save then selected all the remaining entries and clicked Remove.

This shouldn't be a big issue from now on as I doubt I'll have that many suggestions to deal with at the one time again. There's work to be done here though, this could've been a much better user experience.