What can be done to make this site better?
http://www.artschallenge.ca
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on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 6:30 am and is filed under Social Networking, Interface, Functionality, Think Tank, General Interest, Social Software.
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September 11th, 2007 at 8:53 am
This website “documents” a challenge to visit/perform 50 arts events in a year as I understand it. The Participaction challenge was designed to increase physical activity and improve the average fitness and health level of Canadians. A participant website could have been developed that provided means of documenting activity for peer to peer competition and/or feedback to the participant about how to evolve their activity range and scope for further health advantage. I do not see the outcome or benefit structure for the participants in this website. It could be evolved into a feature as in the example above to work with existing community event calendar systems.
YAC - yet another community … how about turning it into an activity available within a community like FaceBook?
First reaction to the website - “this is a mess”. It did not make me want to investigate further.
September 12th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
It’s core problem is that the user population is to small to generate significant social interaction.
Even 43 things which has “1,242,215 people are doing 1,087,188″ things is at the edge because there is not enough overlap between asperations and people to facilitate social connection.
One way to enhance this would be to make it easier for users see that their activity is like an already existing activity - allowing more people to connect around activities.
That raises the next issues - almost no comments - suggesting people don’t visit the site after listing an activity. They should be invited to provide a review of the event they attended. Again more content and another reason to visit the site. (it
User profiles seems like it’s a text box rather that fields that - that both help people thinking about what to post about themselves - but also allow sorting - so that people in the same city can discover one-another.
Profile should also track how close to the 50 each users is (both in entering activities and in doing them).
When entering an activity users should be encouraged to describe and link to it - both turning listing into an ‘advertisement’ and providing content that can be searched - enabling people who are searching for the event to find the 50/50 site - add their name to that event - and get information from people who may already have done it.
Finally the site seems slow - which can lead to abandonment.
September 12th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Integrating it with Facebook is a great idea! That will definitely help it get more attention.
September 13th, 2007 at 7:07 am
I agree with the first writer, the site is a mess. I went to look at the site and it took me a little while to understand how it worked, I understood what its purpose was.
The 50 arts challenges is a good one, however, my family and I are fairly involved in the arts community, our arts praticipation level is well over 50 a year and porbably closer to 150 per year, I had never heard of it. Places where it should have been posted, it wasn’t. In my mind a social community needs a seed to grow, it can’t just appear and think it will work. This is that early ’90’s mentality of - if I build an internet site I will get business or people will find it. To quote a bad cliche, “there was no buzz”, nothing promoted or indicated to people that the site existed.
The idea, after thinking about it for a little while, I think is a good one, I agree with one of the statements that I read somwhere on the site, that people do not realize how much the arts community touches them and how many arts activities they do in a year. Schools at all levels, art galleries, art supply stores, concert venues, dance companies etc. should have been asked to advertise, support or a challenge with a reward would all have worked to spread the word. In the 60’s or 70’s there were cahllenges where children won badges or medals, this go the parents involved through the children. This site needs two things a makeover and a marketing campaign - not an expensive marketing campaign but a campagnto get the message outside of their community. It seems this has always been an issue with the arts community, the inability to get the message across, some of which is attitude of not wanting to be part of the mainstream.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Personally I think it’s a great concept to come up with 50 arts related things to do.
- Allow English, French or Both: I suggest that it’s ok to have both languages running at the same time. I suppose one needs to choose the language of the skin and then the language of the content. Might be tricky to come up with an easy way to do that that isn’t too confusing because users generally are used to just picking English or French. I can see how the government could have their hand on the language of the skin but I don’t see how the language of the content is their business. Heck why stop at French and English if we’re going to go that far.
-Check list: It was mentioned that people could not only choose their 50 things but could check them off as complete. Not only would that give a sense of satisfaction but it could become an ornament. Like the Traveler IQ Challenge that Luc Levesque has been up to. You post it on your FaceBook profile and it can brand you as a traveler or even a smarty pants.
-If your art check list is part of your own personal profile, then it can be not only an ornament but a part of the discovery process for your friends. I wonder if that’s a good idea to feed the checklist into your FaceBook profile.
-Some mechanism of not only sharing your to-do list but sharing your experiences. For example, personally, I’d enjoy a place to discuss the various pieces of art in the art gallery on Sussex. Perhaps the “tags” could receive comments. I mean that a discussion area could have different sections that are controlled by the tags. If I created a tag called Salsa, then automatically I create a discussion group called Salsa.
-There was some talk about relating tags that are in different languages. I think that it’s a cool idea to link “National Gallery of Canada” to “Musée des beaux-arts du Canada”. That might need human intervention but I think it could be done using some sort of algorithm. What about having a weaker link between Tango and Salsa? This could be done using some algorithms that exploit ties between the tags. The database would have ties between the tags because people link to the tags. The same person linking to the two tags would increase the proximity of the tags. Also, if person A is linked to Salsa and person B is linked to Tango and A is linked to B, then there is also some proximity between the two tags because of that. If you need a hand on how to cook up an algorithm for that and how to architect it, let me know.
Ones Eigenvector Centrality within that network could also be an ornament for the individual profile. Like page rank or art rank. If it isn’t posted to ones profile, it could serve as a way of ordering lists of users (the more active could be at the top).
-There was a bit of talk about having art content being in the system. Poetry is a bit of a no brainer but video and graphis could be expensive. I don’t know if you’d consider that in scope but if it was, perhaps allow embedded www.YouTube.com or www.Flickr.com links. Social bookmarking might be a better way to create any online gallery and the discussion that could surround it.
-Luc Levesque mentioned the fact that he benefited greatly by having more URL’s within one of his sites. (If I’m understanding correctly). I think that you could rewrite the URLs to convert the query strings to URLs.
-Another idea that was floating around was to ask the public what they want. Float it as a proposal to initially do some sort of survey. Then after having input from a variety of stakeholders you could roll out a new design.
-I’m sure lots of stuff will come forward from the Think Tank after people get a chance to reflect and read what others are saying.
Darcy
September 13th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Really good session last night.
It was tough to bring forward a project that we knew needed work and one that that we had much larger plans for that unfortunately couldn’t be executed on in the available time frame, service work is tough sometimes. But let me tell you, the feedback was great and the discussions were positive and supportive. I hope we can do another crit session sometime soon.
Lets keep the discussion going, I’ll also try and bring a summary of the recommendations to the next meeting.
Cheers,
Mark