A few years back I worked on some very interesting projects for BBCi and Digital Libraries. These were all about user generated content, community, tagging, aggregation and networking in the social-software sense.
These notions are now often packaged up under Web 2.0. To me these are about an approach, an idiom, a paradigm or way of thinking.
Here’s a mixture of reference points from that period and some that have sprung up more recently: Up My Street, Pageflakes, Prosper, flickR, MetaWishList, AllYourWords, DropCash
So, I thought I’d think about how things might be changing for User Experience professionals (or IAs or EAs or 2.0s or whatever we shall evolve into). Firstly, personas could be developed to a deeper level. We’re no longer just thinking about the customer or consumer of information. We want to know why they are contributing. What are their motivations for becoming ‘involved’, why do they create, post and tag content, what do they get out of it? Should we now be thinking about psychological profiles as we add more depth to a socio-demographic or purely customer focussed profile? Ethnographic studies seem more important – deeper context seems appropriate as we delve into a lifestyle pattern that includes motivations to blog or to seek out and value others’ opinions.
How about conceptual information architecture? The grand vision, the bubble diagrams and content maps help us envision these environments and touch points with people and technology.
And I want to talk quickly about one other method – the prototype. We’ve been talking a lot recently about the benefits of early working prototypes - production quality yes, but maybe not complete. Fine, what Web2.0 offering is on the map without the ‘Beta’ logo? Great – this will help us all when we want to show results, and wish to user test early on. Ultimately the challenge is perhaps to conceptually break down the product so that a smaller component is acceptable and offers value in its own right without compromising the vision.