Diving into the Social Web, Head First

Exploring requirements and the personalization challenge!

Just got back from meeting with Chris Marston and Steven Shapiro of Exemplar Companies and we began to iron out some of high level requirements for the new Revolve Nation website. In short, some of these requirements involved providing community members with the ability to: RSVP to local events; participate in message boards; create blogs; and, create user profiles and connect with other users. Of course, as lawyers like to put it, this is “Including, but not limited to” your standard set of high level requirements for a social networking website.

While those (requirements) are essential for creating user engagement, there was also discussion around twitter integration, Facebook connect, incenting participation with user points, and other community features that would provide value to their split audience: entrepreneurs and investors.

But first things first, this is a community of entrepreneurs and investors, right? So, doesn’t the information need to be relevant to the entrepreneur’s business and the investor’s portfolio or interests? It most certainly does and therefore adds another layer of complexity that can’t be had by just launching a website – It needs to be personalized.

Getting into personalization with these two audience types is tricky because their needs are broad and they overlap. For example, are they in the Advertising or Travel industry? Are they in Executive management or in the operations functional business unit? Are they in B2C or in B2B? This required a lot of forethought into the structure of the site, the categories and the definitions that would be eventually be used to create a personalization experience that is relevant and easy to find.

Enter information architecture (IA)! While I can shoot out an exact definition of IA, it is probably better if it comes from my mouth since I will be employing the practices of IA from what I’ve read and learned through experience. I believe IA to be the way in which we make complex information simple through some organization techniques.

In the next post, I will talk about the actual steps taken to address the complex information and challenges with how users perceive that information.