It’s been three weeks since we successfully re-launched 24.com Blogs as Letterdash.com, and already we’re starting work on the next phase.
http://20fourlabs.com/2009/07/29/letterdash-is-born/

The main aim of the next phase is to give our users more of the kind of centralised control over their own pages that a platform like Wordpress offers. Currently our settings and functions are spread between pages, and are often highly contextual.

We want to simplify, centralise and abstract these functions into a new admin area affectionately dubbed the “LetterdashBoard”.

Here are a few wireframes of what we’re planning:

My concern with the change is that our current users aren’t accustomed to abstraction of functions. For instance at the moment the way to delete a post is to find the post in your archive and click the delete button in that context.

We’ve found this usability model suits novice users quite well, because contextual changes are so much easier to grasp. But the obvious disadvantage is that global tasks are harder to perform (like deleting or recategorising swathes of posts) – you have to wade through the “public” view of your own pages to edit your content. The contextual editing also has to be worked into the structure of otherwise public pages, which ends up complicating and limiting both sets of functions.

Matt and I have had a number of quite heated discussions about whether our users are ready for this change, and whether this abstraction won’t freak them out. Our users aren’t early adopters – for the majority of them our system is literally their first foray into user generated content.
In the end I had to bow to superior logic – as we add functions to the system, centralisation becomes more and more important. Without it the pages will soon become a tangled mass of overlapping functions and responsibilities.

Getting social

Another change we’re introducing in the next phase is the integration of private messaging into the platform. Our users have taught us that they value interacting with each other as much (or more) than the act of publishing their thoughts.

Comments, for instance, are an incredibly important part of the community interaction – far more so than the independent blogosphere. An average post by an average blogger on Letterdash will receive several dozen comments. Posts, in that context, become conversation starters rather than pure content.
This insight has fundamentally altered our strategy for Letterdash which is already far more than a blogging system. It is a community forum, a dating site, a social network and a support group hub all rolled into one.
We think of Letterdash as a community content and communication platform, and all of our new functionality will be built around this new paradigm. We look forward to unveiling our ideas here. If you have any thoughts on our new strategy, or my pretty pictures, please comment below.