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It appears as though Propeller.com has fallen victim of a bad practice most early web designers have experienced early in their careers.
When you don’t iterate early and often with the input of your stakeholders you are taking a big risk that a majority of your stakeholders will hate your work.
Gone are the days when you hire someone to create a website for you, then dis-engage for a few months, to return to a finished product… take it or leave it.
I understand that when your stakeholders number in the ten of thousands this type of interaction could be very difficult; however, I propose the following solution.
I propose that a core set of stakeholders (ideally an odd number like three or five) make all final decisions. These stakeholders should have an intimate understanding of the community and ideally should contain a few key members of the community.
Then utilize a Digg-like voting mechanism, like CrowdSound.com to get feedback from the users.
Combine this approach with a Rapid Application Development process to help produce a website that fulfills the needs of the community.
Today, sites like LogoBids.com (I have access to the demo) make this type of collaboration for the graphics design much easier and affordable.
Once there is a majority agreement on the design, wire-frames and layout, its then a matter of execution.
While not perfect, I believe using such a method would have yielded much better results. I think it would be exciting to build the next (or upgraded) social networking community using this strategy.
July 24 2008
I think they could also use a leader who’s passionate internally and vocal externally.
July 31 2008
Thingking Serious,
Most of the redesign was about knocking the spam rate down by making it harder for users to follow another’s submissions and simply mass vote.
A number of options were removed so that #1: more advertising is loaded due to more page views and #2: users have to actually read the articles, not just prop their friends submissions with a click.
But certainly, the design is rather 1999 clipartish. Design aesthetics mean nothing to me really, I would rather have a site that is coded efficiently and executes blazing fast than any thing else.
As a programmer and in defense of the new design, it does run faster that the old code. Now that we seem to be past the basic Ooooppsss! type error screens, that is.
I have never really seen a new code base rolled out and tested while we (the users) suffered thru a very low functionality period as the errors were found and fixed.
August 5 2008
[...] of my social bookmarking friends posted this about the new propeller design and I definitely agree. Most of the redesign was about knocking the spam rate down by making it [...]