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Designing for the Social Web

Joshua Porter

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Very cool stuff on psychology. Lewin's Equation (ahead of it's time) puts forth the idea that behaviour (B) is a function of Personality (P) and Environment (E)—nature AND nurture.

B=f(P,E)

Try to keep your changes relatively small, so that you can accurately tell if thy had an effect. This is similar to setting up a scientific experiment: You only want to test a single variable in each test. On the web, development moves so fast that changing a single variable is often impossible. But it's better to make more, smaller, changes than a couple of big ones. You'll have a better idea of how well they worked.

If you can discover how to motivate people in the right way, then you don't need those stopgaps. If you pay attention to and take care of the people on your site, you will do just fine. The investors, advertisers, and features will come in time. Those will be symptoms of success, not causes of it! The cause of success will be a happy population of people who love your software.

Support is part of the product. To the people who use your software, there is little distinction between the application and the support you provide for it. Web-based software isn't so much a product as it is a service. The service--including the quality of support and other interactions--is the value you deliver, and thus quality customer relations is crucial.

So how do you avoid feature creep when creating and adding features? Start with your objects, your nouns. Observe all the actions people do with/perform on those objects, and those are possible features for your application.

The applications people find most compelling allow them to excel at a single activity.

The long-term benefits of actively engaging—happier people and better software—vastly exceed the short-term pain from negative press.

"social network fade" - don't think you're above it

Features are capabilities of the system, and although they are very important, they don't explain why someone might use them.

Ten Steps to Authenticity

poolie replies...

some things are so obvious, but you still forget them from time to time.

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Reader tags: 2010, 21st century, activity-centered design, adaptive systems, ajax, amazon.com, apologies, attention economy, authentic conversations, awareness hurdle, case studies, collaborative filtering, collective intelligence, communication, community, complex social systems, computers, content relevance, craigslist, customer feedback, customer service, design, digg, discovery, dynamic content, ease, ebay, efficacy, egocentric software, emotional attachment, error messages, ethnography, facebook, feature creep, feature creeptags, feedback, flickr, food for thought, forms, funnel analysis, group behavior, human behavior, human-centered design, ia, identity management, implicit sharing, information overload, interaction, interaction design, interactivity, interface design, joshua porter, landing pages, motivation, non-fiction, non-linear navigation, notifications, online community, online identity, participation, passionate users, preprocessing, primary activity, privacy, profile pages, progressive engagement, psychology, reciprocity, reference, registration forms, reputation, reputation building, research, sharing, sign-up friction, signup forms, site metrics, smart, social, social behavior, social clues, social design, social framework, social influence, social networking, social news, social objects, social software, social web, social web applications, software, tagging, urls, usability, usage lifecycle, user engagement, user experience, user interface, user interface design, visual communication, visual design, web, web 2.0, web advertising, web design, web forms, webdesign, websites

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