It appears as though Propeller.com has fallen victim of a bad practice most early web designers have experienced early in their careers.
When you don’t iterate early and often with the input of your stakeholders you are taking a big risk that a majority of your stakeholders will hate your work.
Gone are the days when you hire someone to create a website for you, then dis-engage for a few months, to return to a finished product… take it or leave it.
I understand that when your stakeholders number in the ten of thousands this type of interaction could be very difficult; however, I propose the following solution.
I propose that a core set of stakeholders (ideally an odd number like three or five) make all final decisions. These stakeholders should have an intimate understanding of the community and ideally should contain a few key members of the community.
Then utilize a Digg-like voting mechanism, like CrowdSound.com to get feedback from the users.
Combine this approach with a Rapid Application Development process to help produce a website that fulfills the needs of the community.
Today, sites like LogoBids.com (I have access to the demo) make this type of collaboration for the graphics design much easier and affordable.
Once there is a majority agreement on the design, wire-frames and layout, its then a matter of execution.
While not perfect, I believe using such a method would have yielded much better results. I think it would be exciting to build the next (or upgraded) social networking community using this strategy.
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