Today Leisa Reichelt gave a presentation to IDEA2009 on her experiences running the Drupal 7 user experience project. She shared insights she had learned about how to design in an open way with a highly distributed team, such as using video missives such as the “We Need You” video to communicate with developers.

One of the biggest challenges she said she faced was that the project was designed by developers with other developers in mind, even though there were two key groups of users that were alienated by the product. They could not engage with strategy statements or goal descriptions.
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Today saw the IDEA2009 Social Experience Design Conference kick off in Toronto. Luke Wroblewski, Director of “Product Ideation & Design” at Yahoo, gave the first session, where he presented the results of a number of different pieces of research which showed that the way social interactions and relationships are modeled can have a large effect on the way that people behave online. He also uncovered some interesting facts along the way about which types of social model generate the most active users, and what factors influence user behaviour.

He divided social sites into five types of social model:
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