Designing for the Wisdom of Crowds
Derek Powazek’s presentation on March 15th at SXSWi was really a great recap of many things that i’ve been thinking about lately, and also full of insight that i hadn’t quite crystalized in my head!
His slides on their own don’t go into all the amazing examples that he gave, but are definitely worth a flip-through.
Design for the Wisdom of Crowds by Derek Powazek at SXSW 2009
View more presentations from Derek Powazek.
The most eye-opening moment was the comment that a blank-comment box is a very daunting task and certainly not a way to build community, there is way too much of a barrier to entry on leaving a comment.
Derek referenced James Surowiecki, who i should google or something, but he wrote a book called “Wisdom of Crowds” that said something about needing “diversity, independence, decentralization and aggregation” for it all to work.
However for the Web, Derek surmised that we actually need:
- Small Simple Tasks
- Large Diverse Groups
- Design for Selfishness
- Result Aggregation
Small Simple Tasks - something like Hot-or-not, or threadless rating, gives a user a very easy way to interact
Large Diverse Groups - you need to encourage members to join-in, by lowering the barrier to join.
Design for Selfishness - large gruops of people do not participate unless they get something out of it, attention and a sense of release. “Is this worth my time to do?”
Result Aggregation - aggregating by “score” creates a game, how do you do something wise, but not create a game (games create methods to game the system)
Popularity does not have to rule! Amazon example, they balance favorable and critical reviews, not just the highest rated reviews, allowing a more FAIR system.
There was a lot more talked about, but another interesting part was about “CURATION” — every crowd needs a ringleader, and sites have to take that into account, if you can’t name the person responsible for the curation of your site - IT IS YOU! If you can name them, make sure you give them tools to do their curation that follow the above rules!
