Don’t just design your product, design your community too

Design is in.

Consumer startups no longer need to argue about product quality – it’s a prerequisite to even an initial launch. This is a good thing, but this post isn’t about that.

For social apps, what you design directly is only half the user experience. The people are just as important! So if you build a really great linksharing site that’s extremely polished and full-featured, but the community consists of Nazis, it won’t work for people.

I’m often reminded of this fact when trying XBox Live, which consists of prepubescents killing you repeated on Halo while calling you gay. The Halo content is amazing, of course, but the community around it is… um… different than me.

Dribbble as an example
Similarly, you could build a product that was an exact replica of uber-design site Dribbble, yet still fail if you didn’t have their users. Half the work is the functionality, but the other half is “designing” the right users. If you haven’t seen the rules, a lot of things have to happen before you’re allowed to actually post content there:

Why are players drafted? http://dribbble.com/site/faq#faq-why-drafted
“Undrafted prospects” http://dribbble.com/designers/prospects

Basically, they have a long line of “prospects” which have to be nominated by the community in order to be able to post content. They limit membership like this so that all the content on the site will only be the very best.

Eventually, opening up is key
Perhaps naturally you eventually open up and evolve beyond this, but I think at the beginning you still need a lot of authenticity.

I think the reason why this whole concept feels unfamiliar to me is that for most consumer products, the problem is getting more people, not rejecting them :) Yet at the same time, I’ve learned through a lot of first-hand experience that if you don’t curate the initial community and scale your traffic as a function of this group, you can easily fall into the trap of “designed product, but undesigned community.” That’s no good either.

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http://giffconstable.com giffc

I’ve recently been working on a data product and curating the seed data and initial users is exactly the same.
http://twitter.com/AndrewKorf Andrew Korf

Solid post. A lot more thinking around this top would be great. I think all app or online social product designers need to think more about service design and how their product fits into users lives and what role the community plays for them (what need does it fill?) in the context of theirs lives and activities online and offline.
http://twitter.com/EricJorgenson Eric Jorgenson

I love this post and this sentiment. Its actually a big part of my role at work as well.

It seems to me that too many companies think of their “product” merely as the pixels and code. In many consumer web cases, the most beautiful software without other users is like a beautifully constructed store with nothing on the shelves, and no one at the counter to check you out.

I’m hard at work on this problem right now – and I’d love to hear more thoughts about it! Keep them coming :)
http://twitter.com/sauliuz Saul Zukauskas

Like this post. Any web or mobile consumer product should be designed with community in mind. They are your best evangelists and best marketers. As all things social are growing rapidly to design product without first researching / engaging potential community is a great mistake.

@andrewchen