Web 2.0 Expo NY: Joshua Porter’s “Designing for Community”

Here is the first of many round-ups from this week’s Web 2.0 Expo NY. Tuesday afternoon featured in-depth half-day sessions. I was only able to attend in the afternoon and I caught Josh Porter’s “Designing for Community.”

My Twitter stream from the session:

• @bokardo is currently doing UX design for Chi.mp. Mentioned party tonight @shakeshack
• Agenda: What is community? Growing your community. Designing for reputations. Dealing with hiccups. Cultivating passion.
• “Online community is a forced move, resulting from the inefficient ecology of the Industrial Revolution”
• Online community is the trend that’s getting us back in touch with the people who provide the things that we consume
• Whatever message you have as a company will get out whether you try to curb it or not. Ppl will find a way to communicate about it
• Community is a group of people with a common characteristic, often an activity that they do
• “One of the biggest challenges in designing a community is figuring out what kind of activity you’re supporting”
• http://Ravelry.com community for knitters
• Thesis: Community is not a feature of software. It’s “when you make people better at that activity by supporting them or helping them support each other
• 3 types of conversation: company->person, person->person within community, person->person outside community
• You don’t create communities, you cultivate them. You have comm whether you know it or not. They grow & evolve. Need to be managed
• You can’t own a community. Not everyone gets along in a community. Community is more than support, it’s about getting better.
• Benefits of community, usage lifecycle: unaware, interested, first-time use, regular use, passionate use
• Regular use: ppl who use your software regularly feel they’re getting value. Promote this sense of efficacy to gain their passion
• As your community becomes more mature, expenditure for user support goes down. Users will give you ideas, mktg, 3rd party add-ons
• Sitting next to @tikkers, community-manager extraordinaire :)
• What features to add? Model interactions that already exist. Watch how ppl currently interact w/ each other and w/ you
• What problems do they already have and how are they currently solving them? Then ask: How can we model this in software?
• Breaking down what’s on a YouTube video page. Objects: 1) video, 2) meta user info, 3) other vids, 4) promoted vids, 5) responses
• Still, video object takes almost 50% of screen. Everything is centered around that. Entire page is objects of *verbs*
• YouTube, Netflix (“one of the most straightforward sites out there”), Yelp (reviews, friends, compliments). Simple objects on page
• Amazon product page is freaking long (try it on http://superscreenshot.com), but almost all social objects on the page
• People outside of your company can’t tell you what your social features need to be. You need to do your own research.
• How to do this research: Build outward: start w ppl you know, get them up to speed, invite their friends, get them up to speed, etc.
• Chi.mp has given out several hundred beta invites and constantly talking to them about their experiences
• Community Manager has become one of the most important roles at a company now. Liason between company and users
• Best example of Community Manager is Craig Newmark of craigslist. “Isn’t altruism or social activism. Just giving ppl a break.”
• “All world religions tell us moral value to help others. Customer service is expression of that value, everyday form of compassion”
• Community Manager is responsible for morale, greeting new members, handling feedback, advocating for users, identifying trends
• Community Manager is responsible enforcing rules for participation, evangelizing software & community, growing support documentation
• Trendfinder takes in feedback and communicates to team members and rest of community through documentation
• Harriet Klausner is the 1 reviewer on Amazon.com. Joined in 2000 and if you do the math has read 5.56 books/per since then ;) …and she’s given them all 4 starts or better.
• Is Harriet Klausner a good thing for Amazon? She’s written 17,125 reviews as of 2 weeks ago. Is “Top Reviewer” good for their comm?
• Other people in the Amazon community are really upset by Harriet Klausner because she’s seen as fake
• Lawrence Bernabo has fewer than 1/2 of Harriet’s total reviews, but he leads on helpful votes. 14.11% to her 6.18% Quite interesting
• “Your reputation is equal to the sum of your past actions within a community”- @soldierant, IxD Lead for Yahoo! Reputation Platform
• @mediajunkie just got a mention. Hi Christian!
• Yahoo! Pattern Library’s reputation patterns
• @bokardo currently going through competitive spectrum, named levels, identifying labels, etc on the Yahoo! Reputation Patterns
• @bokardo still going through the Yahoo! Pattern Library reputation patterns. It’s a great resource and very thorough
• Profile has to be context specific, “community-specific identity.” Political/religious views on Facebook but not LinkedIn
• @bokardo mentioning how Twitter’s spam cleaning had accidentally made people lose followers. Twitterers care about their s
• “What you expose in an interface becomes the entire universe for the people who use it.” — Director of UX at eBay. Dead right
• When you add a reputation feature make sure you really want to keep it because your users will go apeshit when you take it away
• Optimize for value: added behavior. Example: Consumating dating site. Thumbs up/down to other members. Caused too much judging
• “The reward system was part of the downfall of the site.” You have to reward people for positive behavior, not just any behavior
• Ben Brown, founder of Consumating, admitted that negative reputation on their site led to their downfall, led to less participation
• Okay, it’s break time at @bokardo’s “Design for Community” talk. See you in a bit
• @bokardo is back on, now talking about reciprocity.
• Mentioned @cwodtke at LinkedIn who noted that almost everyone who gets a recommendation from someone writes one back
• Not always best to reuse all objects on all pages. Think about where it’s appropriate and where not. Do you want to encourage it?
• Dealing with hiccups: Dreamhost blog made light of their massive error in overcharging customers. Customers got angry at attitude
• @bokardo talking about @jetblue’s email to customers after runway disaster. He’s calling it a great example of dealing w/ backlash
• Top Diggers on Digg cause stories to get greater prominence on the homepage. List shows names and several metrics about them
• Over time, ppl on top of the list wanted to stay on top. Then Diggers started colluding w each other, digging each other’s posts
• To prevent this they removed link to Digg their friends’ stuff from the profile page. You can still do it from the story page.
• Also can’t Digg stories from someone’s profile page. Closing the system just slightly had a major positive impact
• @bokardo showing his Facebook page live. He has 22 friend requests. Will have many more after this talk. (2 good karma requests)
• Talking about FB’s news feed backlash on release day. Ppl feared all their info in one place, even though it was all there already
• Currently 1 million ppl have joined the FB group on hating the new redesign
• Ppl want control over their info. News feed privacy settings were released, but very few ppl actually use them. Just feel better now
• On social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia, real problem w spam b/c ppl just wanna spread links. Designated best users “Gardeners” to flag
• Cultivating passion. It’s not about passion for your software, it’s passion for learning
• @kathysierra getting quoted again
• Dogster helps people learn about and get better at taking care of their dogs. Passion for the content, become better at activity
• Support what people are searching for
• Ravelry, knitting social network, was started by a woman who couldn’t find good patterns online (truthfully, it’s really hard)
• 3 sections: organize, share, discover. Organize (make better at knitting on their own), Share (social)
• @bokardo’s favorite community site is PatientsLikeMe. Helps ppl w disease find others w same symptoms. Started w ALS, theres no cure
• let’s user track symptoms/treatments, great visualizations. Started as support network but data viz allow users track what’s working
• @bokardo: “PatientsLikeMe is Facebook with value”
• You can’t just look at Yahoo! Pattern Library and say “we need this, this and this.” Must be tailored to your specific users
• Presentation is over. Now @bokardo is taking questions
• How do you find out what users need? Interviews, surveys. Open-ended questions. Ground in actual activity. Dig into “always”&”never”
• @bokardo just said “contextual inquiry” at a tech conference. I wonder how many ppl’s eyes just rolled back in their head ;)
• @chrissieb asking about PatientsLikeMe and sensitivity around the online identity associated with a disease. @bokardo: public opt-in

Related Posts:

• IA Summit 2008: “Presence, identity and attention in social web architecture” April 17, 2008 | 0 comments
• IxDA Interaction 08: Day 1 February 10, 2008 | 2 comments
• IA Summit 2008: LukeW’s “Content Page Design Best Practices” April 17, 2008 | 3 comments
• IxDA Interaction 08: Day 2 February 15, 2008 | 1 comments
• IDEA 2009: Social and Experience Design – Day 2 September 17, 2009 | 1 comments