The social animal
It doesn’t take much to create a community. Set up water cooler, coffee machine or beer keg and they will come.
It’s an emotional need. There’s very little practical benefit in knowing what you neighbour saw on TV last night. But there’s a huge emotional benefit in talking over the garden fence and connecting with the people around you.
Successful communities are ones which accommodate the emotional benefits of social interactions, as well as the practical benefits of the information being exchanged.
Designing for communities
Our experience developing successful online communities has taught us that there are several different types of people that make up any community. Each type has different emotional needs - such as status, security, or a sense of belonging. And those needs determine how you should design and manage your community.
For instance, the online photo-sharing community Flickr recently caused a storm by changing the format of its usernames. Flickr wanted to get rid of the oldest usernames and settle on a standard format for everyone.
But what Flickr thought was a practical, technical change turned out to be a hot button issue for some of its most important members.
These were people who’d been with the community since it began - and their old style user names were a proud badge of loyalty that Flickr was stripping from its influential founding members. Their loud protest tarnished Flickr’s cool image.
Companies that understand community should build in features that confer status on loyal, long-term users.
Dirty Harry
Our model of user behaviour also provides guidance on how to police online communities.
Companies that don’t understand communities try to use tough policing to ensure its members behave well. But no one likes to be treated like a baby or a criminal. We like to watch Dirty Harry on the movie screen. We don’t like to see him shooting people in the street for littering.
Instead, we help our clients build communities that discourage bad behaviour - just as clever architecture reduces crime in some towns and cities.
How we help
The standard user centred approach can break down for communities. How can you run a user test on a prototype, when an online community relies on hundreds or thousands of individuals interacting over a period of hours, days or weeks?
Having a model of user’s behaviour within communities gives us a framework for planning our clients’ communities and user generated content. It shows us what features will be important to users, how they should be presented and how they should be managed.