I'm fortunate to be working with Pat Coyle and AJ Macht of the Indianapolis Colts on building My Colts Network, which will be a social networking community for Colts fans. I had an interesting discussion with them about administrative interfaces during one of our design meetings. We were discussing what the interface would look like for an individual to be able to edit their profile, blog, pictures, etc. I was explaining a particular topic by using an example and showing them Microsoft SharePoint and places like spaces.live.com where the admin features are built into the normal display. The interesting observation that AJ made was that administrative approach was "all about me". The display, including the administrative display, is all about you and your own content. Granted it is an intuitive UI that is easy to use, but it is still all about the user and their content, which the user should already know all too well.
It became an important design point for us and we decided a good social networking site should help you network and that is what we wanted mycolts.net to do. Rather than giving me a window into myself and my content it should provide a window into your friends and their content when looking at your administrative area. When the content of my friends is being presented to me in an easy to reach format it enables the user to better leverage the software as a networking tool by looking outwards at your friends instead of inward at your own content. Thus, we're going with a dashboard concept within the administrative area where the content featured will be all about the content from those within your network. Sure you'll have access to administrative functionality for producing your own content, but it won't be the dominant focus of the profile dashboard. Reaching out to others will be the focus.
