User-Generated Content: Interface issues summarized

UGC-sites and their user interface issues summarized
Last week I wrote about User-generated content sites in general, UGC site-types there can be distinguished (user scenario’s), issues those sites come across and a little bit about interaction design patterns there can be used to solve those problems. I was not the only one who had this little investigation, also my co-students did a good job with this kick-off 4^th years minor assignment. Our IVID teacher summarized all of the outcomes we sent him, here’s my summary of that summary:

Examples, site-types and user-scenarios
We came with a lot of UGC examples, which can be divided in the site-types I wrote about earlier: Transacting, (content-)sharing and expressing. Ebay and Marktplaats.nl are examples of auctioneering sites and belong to the transacting category. Content-sharing is done at, for example, Google video, shutterstock.com and other music, video and trailer sites, search engines and price-comparing sites.Blogs, fora and community sites belong to the expressing-category. I think a lot of sites will overlap the two or all categories.Users of UGC sites can have an active and passive role, or both. These roles are also a good part of the description of what UGC sites are about: The making of content is not only allowed for a suitable team, but every viewer can also be a writer/adder.

Interface and user-goals & expectation issues
There are some main user interface issues for these UGC sites. These are the design pattern issues my co-students and me came across:

• Search-mechanisms are insufficiently refined and defined;

• Mechanism for adding content is to complicated;

• Lack of categories;

• Slow and unclear rating systems;

• Visual chaos;

User-goals and -expectation issues: (site-owners and users)

• reliability of the information;

• Degree of user generated content;

• Screening (author-rights and vandalism)

Design patterns
Design patterns which are related to the issues and identified as important:

• Community pattern

• rating system

• comment system

• image resizing

• flag system

• account system

• email confirmation

• extended search system

• external links

• video control pattern

• hotlist

Up next:

Let’s take a closer look at a well known user generated content site: Wikipedia.org. and it’s user interface issues.