Comment by hbn

I'll say it as I always do. One time I threw together a "blurred version of your text is shown as you type, becomes clear when you hit enter" and it was some of the nicest instant-messaging I've ever had with another person. Blur was the trick, to give a sense of the length and activity, but not the message.

I am a person who loves building and testing new interaction models. When you do this as a team, you end up climbing away from the main local maxima and building a new one. However, you get so used to living in that new local maxima and thinking about how great it is, you forget how to onboard people to it.

With a new interaction model, it often matters more to build the path to get people there, not the new local maxima itself (unless you're going to get kids to adopt it first, but Wave was definitely not targeted at them).

The Wave "onboarding" experience definitely should have had more demo videos, had features that turned on or were discoverable slowly, or had sandbox rooms where you could try it out with basic bots. It's a major missed opportunity that Google didn't do this; it feels to me like Google didn't have an internal playtesting or dogfooding culture where they intentionally left some people out so they could be fresh. I wrote about how to build this culture here: https://dustinfreeman.org/blog/playtest-rituals/

It was overcomplicated, but arguably it paved the way for Slack.