Design principles for online communities
First of all we need to think about the user's needs, because he is the most important client for the whole project like this. So it must be very user friendly, which every company usually knows nowadays but not everyone can permute that. In my opinion user friendly means always simple and clear which is very important in web design as I hate web pages that you open and you basically get overfilled with thousands of information so for instance you don't know if you can order the nice feet massage machine from the first page or if the just expect you to donate for this product. Here we are already coming to the next important issue the age of the user what means that the whole design must be orientated on the target group we are searching for. For a fund raising page like Indiegogo.com where we were working with it is more than necessary to think about a design which should nearly appeal to every age as they need as much people as possible to get into the funding community. I just imagine my father read an article about for example 'Kickstarter' - the new way of donating and supporting ideas and he may gets interested by an article about the new feet massage machine which needs some funding. Then he may opens the web page and just want to get more information about this product but in fact he can't find it during a few minutes he will definitely quit and swear the next time he sees me about technology. In conclusion we need a simple overview on the first window where you can choose different categories. I believe that Indiegogo found a nice design for this as you can select between the three main actions 'browse', 'learn' and 'create'. For the last point 'create' I would try to give the community as much freedom as possible so if someone wants to create there a whole blog about his product or project he should be able doing that. Same for the comment function where I would like to give the freedom to the users to comment on everything of the presented projects/products or even the whole page for suggestions. All in all I would design a page based on those issues with the main priority of user-friendliness and the goal of getting a huge community to fund.













