How to Prioritize Features on Social Web Sites

Joshua Porter's Designing for the Social Web

I attended the Information Architecture Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, back in April 2010. The IA Summit is the premier gathering place for information architects and other UX professionals. This was the 11th IA Summit, and it included Dan Roam and Richard Saul Wurman as Keynote speakers. Whitney Hess was the closing plenary speaker. 

This presentation introduced me to the AOF method of prioritizing features for social web applications. Joshua Porter's book, Designing for the Social Web, goes into more detail about the AOF method; however, here are the basics:

1. Define the Activity
2. Identify your Social Objects
3. Choose your Features

Define the Activity

"Goals are the end condition that people are striving for. Activities are the set of tasks people do to achieve their goals."

The table below demonstrates the differences between goals, activities, and tasks:

As designers, we often ask ourselves, "What do people want to accomplish on this site?" Christina offers these questions that help you better define the activities that people will do on your site:

1. What do people have to do to make you [the organization] successful?
2. What are you [the organization] making people better at?
3. What are your users passionate about?

And borrowing from Chip & Dan Heath's Made to Stick, Christina suggested that we consider the commander's intent: 

"If we do nothing else, we must..." or "the single most important thing we must do is..."

By answering these questions you set the stage for developing a successful, focused application. 

Identify Your Social Objects

Interestingly enough, many of our online activities revolve around objects. Christina reminded us that social objects can be ideas, people, or physical objects. She explained that they influence social interaction and can change the way people interact with each other. Here is a list of successful web applications that are built around social objects:

In each of the above examples, all of the social features that connect people are around a type of social object. For example, on YouTube, people are connected by commenting on videos. During the IA Summit workshop, Christina shared this quote from Jyri Engestrom to stress the importance of focusing on the object that connects us together. 

The term "social-networking" makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other rather than just anyone. 

The point in all of this is that people gather around the social object, the content of your site, and through these objects, they interact with each other. A major part in social design is identifying these social objects and planning an environment that will support interactions around them. 

Choosing Your Features

Now that you've defined the activities and social objects, you can start choosing features for your web site. The features you choose to include, or not to include, on your web site ultimately determine what activities your users can perform on the site. The first step in this process is listing out all of the objects (nouns) and then creating a list of actions (verbs) that users can take on those objects. Some of the common social objects that I work with on a typical project include:

In this fictional example, we would probably choose to include the ability to create, share, and comment on the blog post. However, we would not include the ability to annotate the post because it is of little value and it has a high technical complexity. 

Summary