Software Artisan

For us power users, the benefits of folksonomies are self evident. The metadata we apply to something , whether it is a picture, an article, a movie, or something else assists us in a variety of ways. It can be used to help us find that thing again, or it can help us understand what went into making that thing, or something that only benefits you. Of course, those tags can help other people as well, but that benefit is by coincidence and not necessarily design. However, for people who are completely new to tagging, the benefit is elusive. There is some user education that needs to go on. If a third party creates a cool thing that consumes a set of tags, that is enough to educate the newbies.

The wide disparity of user experience makes it hard to design systems properly. On one hand, there is a distinct education gap that needs to be there for the uninitiated. The folks who just don’t seem to get it aren’t necessarily Luddites (AKA technophobes). Just like anything, nobody is going to do something unless they get benefit out of it. Tags do help with refindability, notations, and integrating separate sites together via mashups.

The issue that social site designers face is balancing ease of use, education, and supporting all the baggage that seems to come with these sites. After all, there is a certain expectation that power users have of a “web 2.0” social site. They expect to be able to use their information across several sites, pulling data in through loose, but well defined interfaces. It’s also near mandatory to provide some way for users to find and talk to each other. All these functions have to be accessed in some way.

The danger in letting the power user define the user interface, is that they want nearly every feature at their fingertips. It’s just a physical impossibility. A screen has only so much real estate, and only a handful of features are necessary right there. Simplicity and negative space go out the window, and you get a crowded interface that will scare away any new users. You really need something that gives normal users the impression that they can use the site. Negative space is reassuring to people. Having only the right tools available at your fingertips also helps. I think that Flickr has done a good job for doing this for people sharing pictures, but borrowing the design wholesale for something completely unrelated probably won’t work so well.

The danger in designing to the lowest common denominator is that you provide an interface that is too restrictive, and becomes painful to do anything cool. You want to give your users the feeling that they can do cool things with your site. That includes the power users and the newbies as well. Too much negative space, and simplisticness don’t provide enough of a clue for what a user can do. Sure they get over the “I suck” stage pretty quickly, but they never reach the “I rock” stage. Worse, if it is too hard to figure out how to do advanced things your users will sink into the “you suck” stage and leave.

As always, the balance is difficult to work out—but not impossible. But to add to the design challenge is the nature of social interaction. When you design a site for social interaction at any level, you have to address a few issues. First, a community that is too small can’t sustain itself. People need to find other people that they can trust to help them improve in some way. Second, if a community gets too big, it will collapse under its own weight. When there are too many people the individual voice gets drowned out and people lose interest when their voice can’t be heard. Sure you might have a couple shining stars, but breaking the barrier to become a star becomes near impossible unless you started in that position when the community was small. It’s the nature of human interactions. When the only currency that you can trade is ego, we need to create a way for that currency to get you as far as possible. Just creating new groups for discussions isn’t the best. It’s hard to break the small community barrier. There needs to be something bigger than personality to generate interest. There has to be a common goal, which is more difficult to achieve than common interests. Sure you may like to see sunsets, but how much can you really talk about them?

Finally, I apologize for taking so long to post. I’ve been very busy with design meetings with my client. There are things we may not see eye to eye on, but we will eventually get to a happy medium where we can both be happy. That’s the longest part of the design process when the customer has their own opinions. At the end of the day we have the same goals, and we both want the users for the system to be happy. We just have different ideas of how to achieve those goals.