Yesterday I asked on Linked in (and on Facebook, more on that later)

What do you consider the greatest challenges in designing for social media/software/networks?

When you are designing social media you are not building and designing a product in the typical sense of that word. You are really designing an infrastructure upon which social interaction, and eventually a community, can build. The affordances needed to "direct" and "control" the development of a community are very different from and much more subtle than typical single-user systems that we (as designers, developers) know. I usually compare it metaphorically to a soap bubble: you can gently try to push it in a certain direction, but if if you push too hard, it'll burst. User-centered design takes on a whole new meaning when you are building social media and communities......

-- Klaus Kaasgaard

The greatest challenge is marketing, because marketing determines who your audience will be more than the quality of your product design.

Design-wise, the answer is similar: understanding who your audience will be, as chosen (hopefully) in close collaboration with marketing. If the marketing people don't exist or aren't powerful, then the features and the site design will alone be relied on to determine the audience -- and this will result in a fractured, aimless audience with no sustainability and no strategy except a hope to get lucky with some sort of coincidental generation of audience cohesiveness and thus community.

Clarification: I'm not trying to discount the importance of features or product design. I just happen to think that, especially among Christina's group of friends and contacts, we're more likely to fail to understand the importance of marketing than we are likely to fail to deliver powerful user experiences. Other answer-ers here are thinking along the same lines when they stress the importance of brand, voice, and acquiring users: all of these qualities are the things that marketing experts can really help with in a profound way.

To whatever extent that a UI designer can do this, that UI designer is performing a marketing function.

-- Christopher Fahey

Two things:

1. Not doing one. I find the biggest issue these days is that companies continue to shy away from social networks as something someone else does. The loss of top down marketing control and the perceived liability of open-ended conversations still keeps many companies well away

2. Not looking at what networks already are working and carving out a space in them for yourself. I think a big mistake for a lot of companies is the idea they have to start complex processes like this by always building their own first. I think it would be better to start with a thread or user group or sanctioned community employee team to participate on other well-participated meta-forums first. If the desire is strong enough to create a unique social network that is more targeted to the select group, then the idea will have some momentum from the target community itself to move along.

-- Tod Rathbone

Releasing control to your community. On the two social sites I've worked on, both aimed at narrow audiences (one tech-oriented, the other party-oriented -- assuming those are separate audiences), the site owners in both cases wanted to avoid "The MySpace Syndrome" wherein nearly every page becomes a messy conflagration of plug-ins, run-on sentences, endless scrolling and possible lawsuits. Facebook has been somewhat successful in manhandling its audience into a single interface they can't easily manipulate. But growth seems to depend on freedom of expression, and when you have thousands or millions of users, control goes out the window. Finding the balance between "My Vision" as a client and "Your Vision" as a user is painful, but unavoidable.

-- Lance Arthur

I think the biggest challenge is having a really good reason to build one in the first place. back when streaming media was new, everyone and their brother was saying 'we need streaming media on our site!' More recently it's been "Ajax! Web 2.0! We need some of that!" No you flippin' don't. That's like saying 'we need more concrete to make this new building excellent!' Social networking applications are becoming part of the infrastructure of the web and technology. They are a commodity, a tool. And they are being applied indiscriminately, which is making them worthless. Unless there is a really good reason for supporting some kind of 'community,' then social networks and community applications just increase noise and diminish the interestingness and goodness of 'real' social networks. So the biggest challenge? Doing the really good thinking up front, before you decide you need one, to figure out who you are trying to help, why, what they need, the experience you want to support, and the best ways to support this experience. Designing social media or networks should only be undertaken AFTER you've done all that hard work. and I think it's the biggest challenge because i think so few people are doing it.

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