Ready, set…..IDEATE!!!

One of our meeting rooms here at frog is called The Vault. It's not a figurative name; the space we occupy on the first floor used to be a bank, and the room used to be a bank vault. Thick concrete walls. No windows. (Sadly, no money, either.)

After the kick-off, we locked ourselves in The Vault to refine our ideas for this application. Since many of us have attended SXSWi before, or plan to attend in 2008, we decided to approach the problem from the perspective of SXSW attendees. We developed user stories for an active participant (a "power" user — someone who blogs during the conference, comments on panel videos, etc.) and a passive participant (an ordinary attendee — someone who browses and consumes the content, but doesn't generate content of their own).

Since we want this application to have value before, during, and after the conference, we organized each of these stories into those three time segments. Time is important because it determines a user's needs. Before the conference, an attendee might want help with schedule planning; after the conference, she might want help with cataloguing the highlights. The app must adapt as users' needs change.

We also need to avoid a common pitfall of apps that revolve around user-generated content: assuming an unreasonable level of participation from users. An app that is only compelling if all its users are contributors is an app doomed to failure. Ben McConnell's observation of Wikipedia usage patterns led to The 1% Rule: in successful online communities, an active sliver of the user base is responsible for a majority of the contribution. The lesson, then, is to build communities that are both sustainable with very low levels of user contribution and valuable to the vast majority that won't contribute.

Since we include ourselves in the target audience for this app, we had another goal: add to my experience, but don't change my workflow. As someone who works with computers for a living, I've become very fond of The Way I Do Things, because often it's the only thing that keeps me sane. Content contributors — bloggers, photographers, and note-takers, in this case — have a workflow that they're used to and are unlikely to alter. So the "effort threshhold" for participating should be as low as possible. If we make users contribute content manually, they won't do it.

To collect this content, then, we'll have to hook into the metadata that gets added as a part of that workflow. Most weblogs are configured to ping Technorati when a new post is written. Most photographers add tags to their Flickr photos as a quick organization tool (and so that their photos can be found by others). Tools like these will be the pipelines into our app.

Come back in early 2008 for more details on the Mash-Up — including screen shots, personal experiences, and perspectives from the team – and other insights as we design a web experience for our toughest user: ourselves!

Happy holidays,
Andrew