Guests Welcome (in Talko Calls)
Stopping the Chaos of Group Proliferation
A usability challenge for people using team communications tools is rampant group proliferation. This has been a problem since the dawn of “groupware” several decades ago. It starts when an existing group needs to involve a non-member in a conversation. For example, a product team that needs legal counsel in the middle of a design discussion. The only obvious way to do this in most tools is to create a new group with the core team plus the attorney.
As the tool gets used more and more, a group gets created for every possible combination of people. Many of them support a one-time or few-times interaction. Many have only subtle differences in their membership.
The result is a chaotic mess of groups, many of which rot as they’re never used again. But they continue to pollute the user interface. It’s gross.
We’ve addressed this problem in Talko by enabling the concept of “guests” in any call. It allows a team call to include guest participants for that one-time conversation. Guests have access only to that one call and nothing more from the channel. Doing it is as simple as selecting any combination of people along with a team channel from the new call flow.
We’d love to hear what you think of this feature!
