I try to keep the number of RSS Feeds that I subscribe to a minimum. I have read about people like Robert Scoble that read some insane number of RSS Feeds a day, I just don’t have time. I find that if don’t read the RSS feed in over a month, I dump it. I look it almost like subscribing to someone’s email list. If I haven’t read their email in awhile, I should really unsubscribe… unless it is IMPOSSIBLE to unsubscribe (I’m looking in your direction eHarmony… subscribed for purely research purposes, I swear). A blog I have recently subscribed to their RSS feed and have been extremely happy with is the blog bokardo.com. Written by Joshua Porter/a>, author of Designing For the Social Web, the blog details examples of good and bad design throughout sites that are in the Social Web space (ie Web 2.0 sites). Below is an example of his review of the homepage of Freshbook’s homepage.
I still need to pick up his book which was recommended to me by David at Substance.
This is a space that I continue to look at for inspiration. A lot of the social networks and social sites that have been built out have been built with development in mind, but the experience or UI is secondary. How will people use the cutting edge functionality that your company has invested in if your design and UI was the last thing that you looked at, and didn’t invest really any money or time in… that is a bridge that a lot of people like to cross after they have gone live with their site. I think this is a mistake. In this day in age, there are so many sites out there, first to market IS extremely important, but having your users understand how to use it is equally important. If you turn people off once they get there, you’ll have a hard time with them being a regular user. Then your competitive advantage is wasted because you will have to rehaul your design and relaunch.
This approach is how we are looking at iamatrailblazersfan.com v2.0. We’re bringing in a lot of new features, so our UI and design needed to be really solid to support these features and to make it easy for people. The team at Substance has been amazing and I’m really excited to bring their designs to life over the summer. We will learn a lot once we get live, but if we just went with some generic skins, the Trail Blazers brand wouldn’t sing in the site and fans would become frustrated. We will of course need to change, evolve and learn once we go live, that is inevitable. BUT, because we took the extra time with the UI, I believe (and the focus groups we’ve held believe) that this will a design that will support the community.
Tags: socialnetworks, iamatrailblazersfan.com, substance
