2.5 million years in the making - time to get UC right

Rob Pickering of IPCortex asks: why don't our communication apps match the way that our brains work?

There are thousands of innovative UC tools promising to simplify collaboration and communication, but instead most create complexity and fragmentation - not unification. Generally they're built in a walled garden, operate in silos, involve annoying plug-ins and don't work with the UC tools your partners or customers use.

There's also a fundamental flaw in the way that many UC tools are built: they're not designed in a way that's congruent with how the human brain naturally operates. And that's really important to understand if we're going to be able to make communication tools that are useful, efficient, and intuitive.

We're hardwired to communicate. We developed communications speech over 2.5 million years ago, and becoming sharers of knowledge shaped our evolution and differentiated us from other species. Broadly, our brains have three distinct parts relating to different stages of our evolution: our reptilian brain looks after basic functions like breathing; the limbic brain is our fight or flight reaction, or the bit that gets us into trouble when we see red; and our neo-cortex makes us human and looks after reasoning, decision making, communication, and for the most part keeps our limbic brain in check.

If we do something with an awareness of why we are doing it and when, information is consistent and the neo-cortex is in command; we're happy. If we experience conflict or contradictions, though, our limbic brain kicks in, shuts down the neo-cortex and we go into meltdown. This readily happens when we're forced to context switch and we become worried about inconsistency; we stop absorbing information and our bad day kicks in.

An all too common UC example is when you're getting on with a task and you receive an email with an attachment, a calendar invite and a download to a web conference call to discuss a new contract. You stop what you're doing, open all the items and click on the meeting link to download the software. You wait. Is this malware? Just click OK. The conversation eventually starts, more than five minutes later.

You think you're over the hurdles, but the biggest challenge is actually the mental space you're now in. All of your brain's ideas about how the conversation wanted to run are now firmly in the back seat. It's not just about physical context switch, but much more about what our current methods of communication are doing to brain flow.

Most of what we do is contextual. We fire up parts of our brain to complete a task and then communicate to complete the task. So, why isn't UC there yet?

The best communications always happen within context

Standalone communication tools sitting within walled gardens always demand this kind of context switch - and that drives an unhelpful interrupt. However, a new form of communication - called contextual communication - will deliver simple experiences within the context of what someone is doing. For example, apps that embed a call or chat function within a web page allow efficient and frictionless comms in the context of what that page is all about.

A typical contextual communications experience might be: you are trying to fill in a government form, but can't figure out what's needed. You're frustratedly searching web to find answers. If there'd been a ‘help' link within the same web page, you could click and connect to an expert. You could have a two-way audio and visual conversation in context with that expert in a much more natural way. You get to understand what's going on and the form is co-created, quickly and accurately. All of this would happen from within the web, with no context switch and nothing to install.

The thing that makes this transaction so different is that we use spoken language, visual queues and written language in a consistent way. The neo-cortex stays in charge, and the end result is rich, contextual communication and a much heightened user experience.

Of course, this is nothing new. In different scenarios we've been using brain physiology and psychology to streamline things for years. For example, Hollywood studios make movies psychologically compulsive so they get good box office stats; and online retailers know how to maximise conversion rates by removing any possibility or need for context switch: they understand where dropoffs happen and how they are caused, so that they can fix them. Contextual communications applies the same psychology and knowledge about human biology that we already know about how people communicate to the tools they use.

If Hollywood and retail can do this stuff, why can't the communications and collaboration industry? This is all the more true in our web-enabled world. Comms must eventually become truly unified, where apps and tools integrate and interoperate, and not be balkanised by siloed services. A more natural, friction-free way to communicate with the potential to transform customer engagement and create new efficiencies.

Rob Pickering is founder and CEO at IP Cortex. Previously, he has held a variety of technical roles and fondly remembers the days when he was a proper engineer and wrote a TCP/IP protocol stack from scratch for a microprocessor vendor.