Web 2.0 Expo 2 - Designing for Community

My second session on the Web 2.0 Expo was a super interesting presentation by Joshua Porter who is working at Bokardo Design and the author of ”Designing for the Social Web” (a book that is on my shelf and which I am planning to write about on this blog).

Porter’s presentation was split in five main parts which I will quickly run through here:

1. What is community?

First of all Porter defined community as: “A forced move resulting form inefficient ecology of the industrial revolution” – which probably needs an explanation…

Basically community in Porters perspective is about getting back in touch with the people who produce things. In the pre-industrial age people would talk directly to the people who produced things (at least most of the time), but in the industrialized age we lost contact with the producers of goods because mass production and industrialization moved producers, products and consumers away from each other.

Online digital communities are all about re-establishing the link between products, producers and consumers. On Amazon.com for example, people are able to interact with other people around the products which are available on Amazon. And sometimes the producers will join the conversation as well.

Porter also defined communities as something which is related to specific activities. When your are on last.fm the activity is all about music, when you are on Linkedin it is all about professional relations and when you are on Dogster it is all about dogs.

When you as a company are trying to build a community strategy for your customers you should always ask yourself the question: “What exactly are we trying to enable people to do?”

Basically – and I couldn’t agree more – community is not a feature of software, it is about supporting an activity – it is about making people better at their specific activity.

Porter then added more detail to this through the following nine statements:

1. Software doesn’t make communities, people do
2. You don’t create community you cultivate them
3. You probably already have a community
4. Communities change over time
5. Communities need to be managed
6. Community form around activities
7. You can’t own a community
8. Not everyone gets along in a community
9. Communities are about always getting better.

2. Growing your community

Making your community grow is basically all about modelling the interactions that already exist between your potential users/customers:

- How do people currently do it
- What problems do they have
- How do they currently solve them
- Who do they communicate with

And these four questions lead to the guiding question for the company/person trying to design a community:

How can we model this in software?

Porter then described how to develop this model using what he called the AOF method:

First you need to choose an Activity (A) for your community. This may sound pretty straight forward, but in many cases it can be difficult for companies to determine exactly which activities are relevant for their users.

When you have decided on an activity you must find out what kinds of Objects (O) people use for this activity. In the case of Youtube these objects are videos and in the case of Netflix the objects are movies.

Then you need to find out what people do with these objects. This is the verbs of your strategy. In the case of Youtube the verbs are features such as play, rate, share, upload, subscribe, embed etc.

Finally the verbs of your community are what ends up being your Features (F).

When you have settled for your activity, your objects and your features it is time to start growing your community. Porter recommends growing the community outward in the following steps:

- Start with people you know (friends or current customers)
- Get them to speed – get them to use your stuff
- Let them invite the next round of people.
- Get those people up to speed
- Let them invite the next round of people.
- Rinse and repeat

An important element of this growth is the community manager which Porter defines the following way:

1. Responsible for the morale of the community
2. Responsible for greeting new members
3. Responsible for handling incoming complaints, compliments and feedback
4. Responsible for advocating for users with the rest of the team
5. Responsible for watching for and identifying trends in use
6. Responsible for keeping the peace
7. Responsible for enforcing the rules for participation
8. Responsible for evangelizing the software and the community
9. Responsible for growing support documentation.

3. Designing for reputation

Creating a reputation system for your community is all about creating the positive and negative incentives which will make people participate in a positive way towards the collective good of the community. Porter mentioned a number of examples where reputation systems had the opposite effect of what was intended.

For example Amazon.com is creating a list of the most active book reviewers, which has resulted in Harriet Klausner, which is an extremely active bookreviewer on Amazon who on average reviews 5,56 books per day, and has done this for the last many years. This is of course very unrealistic and most of her book reviews are indeed not very useful and are in most cases quite superficial.

The problem about the reputation system is that it only rewards activity and not the quality of the activity, and therefore the total result of the reputation system is low quality book reviews which are not beneficial to the community on an overall level.

Porter mentioned a number of other examples, put pointed to the Yahoo Pattern library, which has a very useful section for companies or people working on a community reputation system.

Yahoo Reputation Pattern Library


4. Dealing with hiccups

Most communities of a certain size will experience hiccups, where the interests of the community (or part of the community) collide with the community manager. Porter mentioned the example of Facebook, which in 2006 created the Newsfeed, which resulted in an uproar among users of Facebook, because it suddenly made somewhat private information very public to all of Facebook’s users. Facebook tried to diffuse the crisis by pointing to the fact that this information was already public, and that Facebook had only created a new way of publishing this information. The problem about the argument was that people on Facebook didn’t see it this way. For them the Newsfeed meant that they were loosing control of their personal information.

The solution to the Facebook Newsfeed hiccup was the creation of a privacy control page in Facebook. In this page users can control which pieces of information they wish to publish in the Newsfeed. At the end of the day only a very small fraction of users is using this functionality, but the tiny fact that this functionality was created totally defused the Newsfeed hiccup.

The conclusion was that very small design details can have huge effects on a community. Small changes of interface design can create uproars and even smaller changes can defuse crisis again.

5. Cultivating passion

Cultivating passion is ultimately what community building is all about.

The task is to create software that makes people better at the activity they’re passionate about. It is not what you sell - it is what you help someone learn that matters.

The conclusion of Porter’s presentation was that communities must be more than mere meeting places for people. A community must be a place where people get together around the things they are passionate about and a place which provides tools that make them better at the activity they are passionate about.

As examples Porter mentioned Dogster.com, which helps dog owners become better dog owners and Patientslikeme.com which helps patients of a number of chronic diseases gain control over their disease through information and measurement tools.

Update: I just got a link to Porters presentation on Slideshare:

Design for Community