Remember the 80-20 rule

In most projects, and particularly ones aiming to work with large groups of people, 80% of the value will probably come from 20% of the functionality. You can spend weeks refining and adding features to your technological offering, but chances are it will be 20% of what you’ve built that actually gets used regularly. If you can identify the core features which your community like and concentrate on making them simple and effective, you can save yourself a lot of time and money. And don’t throw out useful tools because of unimportant details: see if people like them first and then put your energy into the ones that work.

If you aim to spread your appeal to a wide range of users – and also engage the busy power users – you need to make your service as easy to use as possible. Mark Barratt of Text Matters says: “What we have learned from early testing of KnowHowNonProfit.org is that naive users find it very hard to conceptualise wikis, blogs, bulletin boards and so on. Result: confusion. So we’ve simplified and unified. [Users want] an interface that is simple, consistent and avoids jargon. These steps and some subliminal colouring help the new user to learn quickly where they are and what they can do there.”

Beware of specifying costly systems until you are absolutely familiar with the tools and know how your users are going to use them; and beware of adding more and more features to your platform in an attempt to add more value, because you may just be making the most valuable features harder to find and harder to use.