Good points about communicating your idea to your mother-in-law and using pictures to avoid the tl;dr issue.
The advice in here would have been helpful to the Google Wave team I think.
Communicating complex technical ideas is hard. Whenever we have an idea for a project, we see if we can sum the project up in a 5 or 6 word slogan. If we can't, it's too complicated and we ditch it.
People who use technical terms are generally specialists. When you're speaking to specialists in another field, or the general population you just have to use general language.
The advice in here would have been helpful to the Google Wave team I think.
Communicating complex technical ideas is hard. Whenever we have an idea for a project, we see if we can sum the project up in a 5 or 6 word slogan. If we can't, it's too complicated and we ditch it.