Google Wave is a promising new form of online correspondence, part email, part IM conference. I recently redeemed my invite and started poking around. The product itself works fairly well and is definitely slick, but it has some usability issues that I’ll come back to later in another post.

The help and feedback areas however, are a nightmare. First, the feeback link doesn’t work. It goes to a survey which has closed, not to an area where you can provide feedback on the beta. The only other place I found to provide usability improvements is the seriously unusable “Product Ideas” area. The Ideas site itself is a good, well, idea, and one that more online providers might want to consider. But functionally, I’m wondering if THAT’s the product that’s actually a beta! 250 characters for usability feedback? Um, not likely in any detail that’s going to help. But even getting around that, it’s useless when those 250 characters generate parse errors when they’re submitted. No special characters. I even removed any ‘ or ” to make sure my entry was entirely alphanumeric. I got it to submit three times out of about ten usability issues I was trying to offer… isn’t getting that kind of feedback kind of the point of extending invitations to users, especially to users like me who work with interfaces and end-users constantly?