Platform Architecture

Feature Areas, Functions & Relationships

Top-Level Information Architecture: Structure & Design Philosophy

This post documents a proposed structure for OSS's top-level feature areas, used to categorize, organize, and scope out the main interactions a user may have on the platform. The five areas, Studio, Library, Discovery, Site Setup, and Settings serve as a set of interconnected design frameworks to help guide the design and implementation of features on the platform.

1-STUDIO

Studio unifies authoring and collaboration into one continuous surface, rather than treating them as separate categories connected by cross-links. The organizing design logic for Studio is this: anything traditionally thought of as a purely authoring feature should have an interactive, multiplayer counterpart baked into its design intent from the start — not added afterward as a separate "collaboration layer."

This logic gives OSS its unique edge, as it treats the making and the sharing as one shared act on the platform, and provides a concrete design framework to apply: for any new authoring capability, ask "what is this feature's multiplayer expression?".

Nested Features Areas

⦁ Visual / Page Editor: includes all the page creation features, such as text edit, formatting, layout and more.

⦁ Presence & Awareness: features dedicated to making other user's presence tangible, including things such as status markers, live cursors and/or viewer indicators.

⦁ Asynchronous Communication: async communication features such as comment sections, annotations, notifications, etc..

⦁ Synchronous Communication: Live calling, direct chat, etc..

⦁ Versioning: Features for versioning and remixing to allow for expanded collaboration while maintaining proper attribution and history.

(will be adding more detail to the following areas)

2-LIBRARY

Library is where an artist's raw material lives — uploaded media, in-progress posts, and text content. It is not purely a private, personal space: because Studio work can be collaborative, Library needs to support content that moves between private, cohort-shared, and published states.

Nested Features Areas

⦁ Media Management

⦁ Visibility

⦁ Posts & Pages

3-DISCOVERY

Discovery is how cross-pollination happens on OSS — the mechanism by which artists find each other's work, cohorts find new members, and posts surface outside their originating context. Structurally, it's powered by an aggregation layer that pulls from cohorts, artists, posts, and media into a set of user-facing feeds and filters.

Nested Features Areas

⦁ Feeds

⦁ Explore

⦁ Search & Filter

4-SITE SETUP

Site Setup covers everything involved in configuring the structural backbone of an artist's site or a cohort's shared space. The unifying insight here is that site structure, member roles/permissions, and taxonomy are all, in effect, different tables of the same underlying system — they define what exists and how it's classified, rather than what the content itself says.

Nested Features Areas

⦁ Taxonomies

⦁ Site IA & Structure

⦁ Roles & Permissions

5-SETTINGS

Settings is currently scoped specifically to the individual user, including account, privacy and accessibility settings.

Nested Features Areas

⦁ Account Settings

⦁ Accessibility Settings

UI/UX Notes

1. The auto-save for categorizing a post and publishing interactions don't give enough tangible feedback to the user. I think that the cateogizing and publish actions should be closer together so that the user actually feels they are posting this to specific locations.