At CollabSystem, we have never met a fence of which we aren’t proud to stand on both sides. As uncomfortable as that may be as a metaphor, it is even more uncomfortable for our product teams. The collaboration technology industry is very focused on the user cost of context switching in work. Avoiding context switching is driving the adoption of many of our competitor’s chat platforms and their proliferation of features. We are very proud today to announce the two perfect solutions for context switching in the workplace.
Our Context Philosophy
Context is everything. We disagree with our competitors that managing context is just one part of the collaboration solution. Context is the whole point of a collaboration solution. Humans can’t understand each other without some shared context. Ever tried explaining your passion for bagels with lox to someone in Sub-saharan Africa. Point proved.
Context exists at a task and an interaction level, not a system level. At CollabSystem we are committed to impacting task productivity, for good or for bad, not just filling your PC screen with windows. We also recognise that not all human users of CollabSystem products are the same. After extensive ethnographic research, we have divided our user universe into detailed user profiles. We have two – Like Us and Not Like Us (otherwise known as The Other or, colloquially, Them). After extensive diversity training and a large business case development process, our employees no longer hate Them and we are proud to announce a product for each user profile today.
CollabSystem Us: No Context
As technologists, the team at CollabSystem value the power of a complicated and complex solution. There’s no feature that we don’t want to integrate. No use case we can’t build. Faced with the challenge of context shifting, our team immediately realised the challenge was to meet the Us users needs by removing context entirely. No context. No shifting.
CollabSystem Us takes over the device at an operating system level to exclude any potential sources of distracting context. Leveraging technologies developed for our Vault product, the device is isolated from any potential sources of distraction. CollabSystem Us can only be used in VR mode. This eliminates any visual or auditory stimulus that might distract the user.
Having taken over the operating system and user, CollabSystem Us offers a Matrix like simulation of actual work and human interaction designed to optimise human efficiency and simulate the many context shifts that a user might otherwise undertake in one slightly difficult to navigate UI. We recognise that we can’t deliver every feature of every app ever, but we sure have tried.
CollabSystem Them: All Context No Work
As noted above, we hate Them. However, our user research indicates that a good 95% of users may fall into this category of desiring the ability to shift context. We don’t understand why this is the case when CollabSystem Us is such a great product experience. However, we have built CollabSystems Them to meet their needs.
CollabSystem Them provides endless stimulation. Like an ever scrolling feed of interaction, CollabSystem them plugs into the human desire for distraction, emotion, and inspiration. Endless windows, pop-ups and other distraction will keep users from their dull repetitive tasks for an extended period of time. Them users find that switching context, while inefficient at a task level can be highly effective at providing fulfilling human work, interactions and achieving human purposes. CollabSystem Them has also been shown to promote human conversation and interaction outside of the technology system given the richness of its interface. We will never understand the attraction of this.
Putting our frustration with the fallibility of humans to one side, CollabSystem Them has proven to be highly engaging and highly effective with Them users. Unfortunately, it has been so successful that we have had to build a simulation of CollabSystem Them into the CollabSystem Us interface to meet the demands of Us users who don’t understand what they really want.
Whatever your context, CollabSystem has the solution for your needs, even if you are one of Them.
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