I have been discussing the use of the term "group" in the context of collaborative online environments. I firmly believe when designing interactive tools you should not break convention unless:
- There is a clear use case to so, that can be well articulated.
- You know your audience and can prove the change benefits them.
- It has been usability tested and the new convection shows improvement over the old.
That being said I am not convinced that the idea of "group" is pre-established as a convention across platforms. To some degree each environment sets it's own subtle standards. In one, a group may be a workspace for a subset of individuals to complete a goal, for something else it may be a distribution list and for others a subset of people related by some identity marker who interact frequently. I could go on with a shopping list of use cases that have some variance or another, but I won't.
The discussion revolves around these two basic arguments:
- A group is a space where people can do (x) and the membership is managed.
- A group is a collection of managed people that be used for whatever with no pre-determiniation of the groups function.
The first is a common metaphor in social software. Someone can start a "group" in Linked In that allows them to manage membership and provides a space to collaborate. My argument is the group is actually the people and the space is the place they do stuff in, i.e. number 2. Now I agree that a group is useless without a goal and some environment to achieve that goal, but I believe they are still distinct. A system may always generate a workspace when a group is created, but the group itself is not the space but the people. So here is the question I am noodling: Is it intuitive to refer to the group as the membership and the space as a space when creating an interface for people to work with "groups"?
I suppose it becomes less vague with a clear use case, but in my conundrum the use cases vary, from specific workflow goals to more open collaboration around some common "thing". I believe it is important to set a standard for a platform and then continually support that standard to provide orientation for the user base, but I have to consider a broad user base including community managers who have to accomplish some organizational goal to individuals who may have any number of personal/professional goals. The expected outcomes vary and are often unclear.
Right now I don't think I could defend my argument with any more validation than the opposition, which makes me consider the alternative even though my gut tells me it's an incomplete metaphor. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
