Great Social Information Design Case: Aardvark

Great design is crucial for social information systems. It's arguably even more important than with other information systems as a core requirement is motivating users to participate through the addition of content. Make the design difficult to use and people will be less likely to participate.

There are plenty of examples of great social information design and we're going to be discussing some of those in upcoming posts. If we're lucky, we'll find some principles emerge that anyone designing a social information or collaborative system can learn from.

With that introduction, the first case study is a company I've written about recently called Aardvark. Put simply, Aardvark is a chat based Ask-a service. That description doesn't do it justice, however, as Aardvark takes the Ask-a service to new heights with intelligent mining of your contacts as well as your contacts contacts. They've developed an excellent chat based interface as well as seamless email integration to make the service extremely compelling. Let's take a look at some of the key design features that make Aardvark fly.