Joshua Porter, the long-tail, and social design

Joshua Porter recently wrote on the Long Tail and social design. It’s a good reminder of how consumers benefit more from access to increased product variety than their benefit from access to lower prices online [1].

Joshua suggests that because of the way the Long Tail works, catering to minority tastes, the marketplace is forced into a design that enables “users help each other” (either implicitly or explicitly) to locate goods that wouldn’t be commercially viable to produce and sell under “real-world” economic models. Obviously, this design needs to be based on an understanding of social interaction, and, having just recently delivered a talk on user-centred design, his suggestion of “social design” immediately drew me in.

Much of what IAs do is bound in user-centred design — a methodology that ensures people’s wants and needs are taken into consideration when designing systems like websites. These needs include both the ‘what’ in terms of requirements, as well as ‘how’ they want to interact with the system. For IAs, this means we need to understand an individual’s interaction preferences and behaviour so we can create, amongst a number of things, navigation models and information classification schemes that work for them.

As social computing tools become more widely adopted in systems, something that we’re going to need to do better is understand models of social interaction, organisational culture and group dynamics, so we can architect systems that facilitate aspects of group behaviour in online environments.

For organisations embarking on the enterprise 2.0 journey, while user-centred design is important for your system’s project methodology, social design is vital to knowing your clients’ consumer-to-consumer interactions as well as their user-to-business interactions, to ensure you’re going to meet all their long-tail needs.

IAs … it’s time to add social design to your tool set.

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[1]. Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith (2006) From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail