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Пост 121936541

That’s all really high-level, pretty obvious stuff, but here’s something more tangible—I’ve noticed a few best practices in terms of mechanics for enabling user-contributed content:

  1. Got to start somewhere: make the button really easy to find
  2. Bookmarklets + screen-scraping is the easiest way to let users to bring external web assets into the fold
  3. In terms of user input (data, meta-data, etc.) make it clear what’s necessary and what’s optional
  4. Leverage known data (time and place, any screen-scraped data, data derived from stuff the user just entered, data derived from stuff other people have entered for similar items, etc.) to enable “smart defaults”A
  5. Use active assistance (e.g. field auto-completion) if possible
  6. Allow users to preview their contribution
  7. Keep things really simple and straight-forward. Framing things up in self-evident structures (1,2,3; what, where when, etc.) can help
  8. Two options when users are finished: (1) take them back to where they started from or (2) take them to their newly uploaded content. Which alternative is best depends on the context, or you could give them the choice.

Getting users involved, David Gillis, Teehan+Lax (via ideali)