A hat-tip to James Breeze at Objective Digital for recommending the book "Designing for the Social Web" by Joshua Porter.

This book describes a simple prioritization scheme for designing social web applications called the AOF Method. AOF stands for Activities, Objects and Features and the method is made up of three steps:

1. Focus on the primary Activity - What is your audience doing?

2. Identify your social Objects - What are the objects that people interact with while doing that activity?

3. Choose your core Feature set - What are the actions people perform on the objects and which are important enough to support in the web application?

There are some very interesting insights in this book and an approach demonstrated by plenty of real-life examples.

An important starting point is focusing on the primary activity - rather than perhaps the more intuitive "know your users". Porter's point is that paying attention to the people you're designing produces a never ending list. A deep understanding of the specific activity that you are supporting with your design is far more productive.

The social applications that are the most compelling tend to excel at a single activity: sharing photos (Flickr), shopping (Amazon), managing a project (Basecamp), sharing videos (YouTube).

Another important lesson is that "personal value precedes network value". In our rush to get to social network value it is very easy to forget that you must first deliver personal value to an individual. As Del.icio.us' founder Joshua Schacter points out, the major value of the site was "memory first, discovery second".

With this in mind, Porter then talks about "identifying your social objects" (eg. photos, videos, events, products, jobs, news stories, auction items, bookmarks) and "finding your verbs" (eg for video: play, stop, edit store, share, comment on, embed) in order to define your core feature set.

And then, of course, all wrapped up in some advice that I'm sure most of us are guilty of not following: just say NO in the face of too many features. Accept only the most important features and keep the others on the back burner until they are truly necessary!