We have mentioned before that our company is interactive, with senior people, experienced people, long term people. Then why do they behave like a dozen third graders faced with eight cupcakes at a party on a hot day?

We have three competing UI designs for our new product around helping people use social networking sites more effectively. It’s kind of a tricky thing to make it all look simple without removing a lot of flexibility. And we all understand the problem space very well.

We have lined up a dozen or so beta testers from both our new potential customer pool and some of our existing customers who want to expand into this area. Everyone has read the beta interview documents and seen the ‘pitch’ documents.

So we’re all on the same page for what we’re solving, who we’re solving for, and what the challenges will be.

As a group I think we concluded today that (a) these designs stink, (b) you stink, and (c) no, you stink.

At times like this I itch to just choose one and steamroller everyone. Unfortunately that tends to produce embarrassing failure, so I don’t intend to do it.

I think tomorrow we may try to vote one of the two designs out so that we have two, combine the teams around differently, and see what we can get by Monday. I guess the good news is that everyone is using *almost* all the same Ajax libraries so if the “Bowling Bozos” (they pick their own team names, don’t blame me) want the cool right-click-picker from the “Stumbleupon Bums” (bad puns-R-us) the that should go fairly well.

Stay tuned.