Finally, Social Interface Design

Joel Spolsky has put words to something hugely important in software: the social interface. OK, I'm biased probably. I have a Master's degree in Sociology and Bachelor's in Psych. I like stuff like this. But still. Here are some excerpts from this excellent article:

Software in the 1980s, when usability was "invented," was all about computer-human interaction. A lot of software still is. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that's about human-human interaction...

When you're writing software that mediates between people, after you get the usability right, you have to get the social interface right. And the social interface is more important. The best UI in the world won't save software with an awkward social interface...

With social interface engineering, you have to look at sociology and anthropology. In societies, there are freeloaders, scammers, and other miscreants. In social software, there will be people who try to abuse the software for their own profit at the expense of the rest of the society. Unchecked, this leads to something economists call the tragedy of the commons.

Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail...

Software used in teams usually fails to take hold, because it requires everyone on the team to change the way they work simultaneously, something which anthropologists will tell you is vanishingly unlikely.

Joel is aggressively applying these insights to his company's software called FogBugz:

FogBugz has lots of design decisions which make it useful even for a single person on a team, and lots of design features which encourage it to spread to other members of the team gradually until everyone is using it.

The discussion group software in use on his site is also benefiting:

There are dozens of features and non-features and design decisions which collectively lead to a very high level of interesting conversation with the best signal-to-noise ratio of any discussion group I've ever participated in.

Joel's Building Communities with Software written in March of last year is a wonderful companion piece to this one.