Needpedia is a relatively complicated site. It has numerous sections that could be their own, separate websites. 
So it's extremely important that we develop more ways for people to visualize or otherwise understand the site.
In a sense, each 'subject' post, and all related 'problem' and 'idea' posts, represents a single data tree. So they're not that hard to visualize in principle, but it gets complicated by the fact that so many of these pages will interlink. -So, the moment an 'idea' post gets lots of attention, people are going to want to discuss problems with it, and ideas for those. Which means they'll need to make a 'subject' post. Which means there'll be two versions of the same post. -The original, an 'idea' post, which then got popular enough to also get its own 'subject' post.
As complicated as this sounds it's actually really simple to imagine. If you're looking at problems in your city, and you share an idea people really like, they'll want to work on it, so they'll make a 'subject' post for it to break it down into finer detail. Also the 'idea' and 'subject' posts should contain links to each other.
In the data tree metaphor, you could think of this as a tree dropping seeds and creating forest-wide webs. It's just that making anything with that that can truly help new users navigate the site or understand how to use it, is extremely challenging. But we're always free to create a 'subject' post for it and work on it in greater detail. That's what's so great about Needpedia, there's practically infinite room for people to share ideas for anything. Even if it's an idea for a problem with an idea, for a problem with an idea. You could theoretically use this to work on a fusion reactor, there's virtually unlimited space for complexity.
Tags: #UX, #UX/UI, #Data-Visualization, #Complexity Development Design Programming, #UI
2 Comments
Tony Brasher
Honestly it seems extremely obvious to me that it's a good idea to know what the biggest problems facing humanity are, and what people are doing about them. That also seems like an extremely simple concept so I truly don't see where you're coming from at all. It seems more like a baseless attack than anything I'd consider 'constructive'. -let... Honestly it seems extremely obvious to me that it's a good idea to know what the biggest problems facing humanity are, and what people are doing about them. That also seems like an extremely simple concept so I truly don't see where you're coming from at all. It seems more like a baseless attack than anything I'd consider 'constructive'. -let alone 'helpful'. See more
Kale
I think part of the issue is that Needpedia is an inherently complicated concept without a clear reason for existing. As a new user, the best I can gleam in simple terms is that it is a platform built to promote the equitable generation of quality ideas/solutions. I'm sure I'm grossly oversimplifying, but that's the first impression. My take on... I think part of the issue is that Needpedia is an inherently complicated concept without a clear reason for existing. As a new user, the best I can gleam in simple terms is that it is a platform built to promote the equitable generation of quality ideas/solutions. I'm sure I'm grossly oversimplifying, but that's the first impression. My take on this is that the world doesn't need help iterating on ideas, it needs help drawing up the resources (people, funds, tools...) to accomplish goals because in many situations the solution is obvious. In this sense it seems like Needpedia is trying to solve either a problem that doesn't exist, or more likely, solve too many problems at the same time and I think that is where the complexity comes from. Even if the UI was expertly developed, I still think many new users like myself would be lost because it is unclear what we are supposed to do. The smaller the learning curve is for a new user, the more likely they will be to stick around. In my opinion, the easiest way to reduce this learning curve is to scale back the vision. Instead of doing everything poorly, do one thing really well. I'm not sure what scaling back would look like in your specific vision as the founder, but as an example: I saw one post on here about a proposed public park on the Springwater Corridor, perhaps this site could be focused on promoting engagement on public projects like these. If that was the goal, make the map the front page of the website so it is immediately clear what projects are in someone's area, and condense the social media features to a per-project basis so there is less linking between separate posts, the less navigation the better. The current model of "idea" "problem" "subject" does not make sense. From my time developing consumer products I've found that if you need to convince the end-user that a concept is "simple", then it isn't. It's a sympathetically frustrating dilemma when your creation is a labor of love. Depending on your target audience, not all products need to be simple. But for a website with big dreams such as this one, your biggest obstacle will be drawing in the user-base which creates the content/activity. In order to overcome that obstacle, your website needs to be instantly understandable and advertised to the public as much as possible. See more