User Experience

Key Elements

Feature

• Refine the most used features

• Remove, don’t add, features

• Highlight the popular stuff

• Respond to what members do, not what they say

• See what members are using and build a feature for that

  • It is also important to see what members are doing with the tools provided. If they are sharing pictures or stories through the forum, it would make sense to add a specific feature for that in the community.

Notifications

• The notification cycle helps keep members engaged in the community. Newcomers who make their first contribution enter the notification cycle whereby they are continually updated about responses to contributions.

• It’s very difficult to build a successful community that doesn’t have notifications as an opt-out feature. This opt-out feature is important. It means that members are automatically informed about new updates to their contribution unless they decide to turn this feature off.

Homepage

• Some organizations make the mistake of tailoring their homepage to newcomers. Here the page reads like a sales/promotional advertising. It might include a large welcoming graphic, promotional material, a paragraph explaining what the community is about.

• This is a mistake for several reasons. Search engine traffic is not a high source of new members; few newcomers visit the homepage without knowing what the community is about. The homepage is primarily visited by existing members, not newcomers. It should be aimed at existing members. Most members will visit a specific discussion or be referred by a friend or a link elsewhere. These members already know what the community is about and simply need to see a lot of activity they can participate in.

• Some key elements:

  • Latest news: content produced by the organization and community volunteers.

  • Latest contributions made by members on forums and elsewhere.

  • What’s popular?

  • Who’s new?

  • Who’s popular?

  • What’s needed? Have a list on the homepage showing members what they should do right now, whether it’s to add their opinion on a topical debate, submit their questions to an upcoming guest VIP, or otherwise make a contribution to the community.

  • Notifications/replies.

Unanswered Posts

• Have an option to show the latest posts on the community homepage. Encourage and challenge members to answer these especially tough questions.

Remove Threading

• Most online communities revolve primarily around a forum-based discussion platform. If you respond to a post, it appears indented next to the contribution you’re responding to. This makes it easier to follow the exchange on that particular topic.

• Threading is a classic example of a simple, powerful, optimization. However, it also presents a dilemma. Threading makes it more difficult to follow the discussion in its entirety. As a result the number of discussions may shrink as people find it more difficult to follow the discussion. Numerous sub-threads can evolve from a single thread.

• Community managers are faced with several options. The first is to have no threading. Each new response appears in chronological order beneath the discussion above. This is the most traditional approach to threading and is still very popular today

• The second is to have one-deep threading where single discussions relevant to a comment are indented below that comment but don’t allow any deeper discussions than that. This is currently popular as a best of both worlds approach.

• The third and final option is to enable deep threading up to a limit (after too many indents, discussions will be off the page). This usually allows up to five indents.

• So which is best? I don’t know. At present there is no published data to suggest any approach yields any unique benefit. My experience favors no threading as the approach that yields the highest number of interactions. Others adamantly support deep-threading.

Integration

• Improve the integration with social media platforms. Have popular discussions posted to followers on Facebook/Twitter/Google+ with a question and a link to where they can participate. Ensure tweets mentioning the topic appear on the community site.

Automation

• Automatically deactivate inactive member accounts (with a reminder). Welcome new members with a responsive series of e-mails that reflect their action (After your fifth post we recommend you …). Improve the feature to retrieve lost passwords. Congratulate members on milestones achieved. Close old discussions after three months.

Reputation

• A reputation system encourages people to actively share what they know to increase or maintain their reputation within the community.

Member Profiles

• Ask more interesting questions in the profile page Ask questions that other members will be keen to click on the profile to find out the answer. Have a funny default image until members change it.

FAQ

• Add the most common questions in the FAQ, not only the site, or the community’s history, but about the topic in general. Make this an incredibly useful document that people want to read.

Mobile

• Most communities have discovered a rise in visits from mobile devices that correlates closely with the use of these devices. So it’s tempting to develop a mobile version of the community platform for these users.

• A mobile version of the site is only useful when it increases the number of interactions on the platform. If people are accessing the mobile version of the site and participating perfectly fine at the moment, will a mobile-friendly community platform increase the number of contributions?

• The answer to this question depends heavily upon two factors:

• Are mobile users participating less?

  • It’s no use just tracking the number of visits from mobile users against other users. You need to track whether those who participate from mobile device are participating less.

  • If there is little difference between the number of contributions as a percentage of mobile users compared with traditional visitors, a mobile version probably won’t help much.

• Are there habits hampering mobile users that could be resolved by a mobile-friendly version of the platform?

  • Another question to address is whether there are things that the mobile user isn’t doing in the $a = b$ community (which other members do) that have a negative impact upon people overall in the community. Mobile users, for example, may spend less time writing blog posts, reading content, and watching videos, but more time sharing pictures when on the move, responding to single discussions, voting in topical polls, etc.

Increasing Conversion

Increasing clicks on registration page

• Target more interested members.

  • The biggest influence upon the likelihood of a newcomer becoming a regular member is their strength of interest in the topic.

• Tweak the positioning of registration.

  • You don’t want registration to appear in big, flickering, lights at the top of every page.

• Position the latest activity above the fold.

• Use a prompt to register.

  • After members have clicked (x) pages on the community, they are prompted to register.

Increasing completion of the registration form

Keep the amount of data you require at an absolute minimum.

• Let members create their first contribution, then prompt the member to register.

  • Technically more difficult to execute, this approach is more likely to motivate newcomers to complete the registration process to avoid losing the post they already created.

• Reduce the copy required to complete the registration form.

• Change the tone of copy.

  • highlighting existing members, benefits of the community, or activities members can participate in once they have joined.

• Tweak the design of the form.

• Use Facebook/OpenID registration.

Increasing opens of the confirmation e-mail

• Change the ‘from’ address.

  • Try using the community manager’s name to send the e-mail (as opposed to the name of the community).

• Increase the speed the confirmation e-mail is sent. Anything longer than a minute is a failure.

• Change the subject line.

  • “(community name) new member confirmation” isn’t as engaging as “30 minutes until your brand new account self-destructs.”

• Run a spam filter check.

Increasing clicks on confirmation e-mail link

• Reduce the quantity of copy.

• Highlight a specific action to take (or bonus for clicking the link).

  • You should have a regular process for benchmarking, testing interventions, and then adapting to what works best.

Increasing registered members to participants

Here are ways to convert more newly registered members into active participants:

• Change the post-registration page.

  • After clicking the confirmation link, don’t send newcomers to the homepage. Instead send them to a page that highlights something they can participate in straight away. This should be a topical discussion, poll, or registration for an upcoming event/activity. Solicit that first contribution as soon as possible.

• Change the welcome e-mail.

  • Keep this welcome e-mail short and highlight a discussion that you want members to contribute to. You can update with a new discussion every week.

• Create a newcomer area.

• Reminders to participate.

• Personal welcomes (and types of welcome).

Increasing participants to regulars

• Reminders/notifications.

• Guide to self-disclosure discussions/status-jockeying.

• Rituals/graduations.

• Buddy systems.

  • In mature communities, you may have an insider group or base of volunteers with whom you can develop a buddy system—members take responsibility for building relationships with newcomers and keep them active and happy within the community for the first few months.

• Web reputation system.

  • This motivates newcomers to increase their standing and existing members to continue participating to maintain their standing.

• Events/activities.

  • You might develop a series of events for newcomers to participate in—quizzes, beginner-level guides to the topics, or even in-person meetings for newcomers.

• Newcomer threads/forums.

• Cultural education.

  • You can ensure newcomers get quality, positive, responses from their early contributions. Research shows that the initial response to a member’s first post is a major factor in whether the user will make a second response.

Increase long-term members to volunteers

• Add a get more involved area.

• Proactively seek out people who make contributions to get more involved.

• Have volunteers coach additional volunteers.

• Headhunt volunteers.

• Host an application process.

Members had to explain a little about themselves, their motivation and their experience for the position. It also had the effect of gaining better volunteers.