Design for
Community
There are no lasting technical solutions
to social problems

A
About Me
I live in Newburyport, MA, USA with my wife and 2 year old
I’ve been designing web sites for 10 years.
I worked at User Interface Engineering for 5 years.
I started Bokardo Design in August, 2007.
I blog at bokardo.com
http://bokardo.com
http://twitter/bokardo
Currently: http://delicious.com/bokardo
Interface Designer/UX guy, chi.mp
http://chi.mp

Outline for today
1. What is community?
2. Growing your community
3. Designing for reputation
4. Dealing with hiccups
5. Cultivating passion

What is community?
1

Online community is a forced move,
resulting from the inefficient ecology
of the Industrial Revolution
http://www. ickr.com/photos/leecullivan/2144789039/

Consider:
1. We rarely meet the people we do business with face-to-face.
2. We purchase increasingly specialized goods.
3. Our neighbors are less likely to have the same goods.
4. We still need to learn how to use the specialized goods.
5. The way to access information about the product is online.
6. When you can’t talk to someone directly, support is much
more difficult.
7. Software that connects product users and lets them help each
other is the most efficient way out.

The message will get out.
http://www. ickr.com/photos/rocketraccoon/227241974/

Community is:
(n) a group of people living together in one place
(n) a group of people having a particular characteristic in
common (religion, race, profession, interest)

sharing knowledge
gaming
eating
listening to music
knitting
treating disease watching movies
shopping
sharing photos
sharing medical info bid/sell on auctions
creating t-shirts
handmade goods
reading stories
taking care of dogs
twittering (whatever that is)

Thesis
Community is not a feature of software.
When you support an activity, when you make people
better at that activity, by either supporting them
directly or helping them support each other, then you
gain the opportunity for that group of people to call
themselves a community.

3 Types of Conversation
Company / Person
Person / Person Person / Person
within community outside community

Talking points
1. Software doesn’t make communities, people do.
2. You don’t create communities, you cultivate them.
3. You probably have a community whether you know it or not.
4. Communities change over time; they grow and evolve.
5. Communities need to be managed.
6. Communities form around activities, not necessarily software.
7. You can’t own a community.
8. Not everyone gets along in a community.
9. Community is more than support, it’s about getting better

Bene ts - Usage Lifecycle
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/user_community_.html

Bene ts - ROI
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/user_community_.html

Growing your
Community
2

What features to add?
Short answer: Model the interactions that already exist.
Longer answer: Start with the activity you’re supporting.
Watch how people currently do it.
How do they interact with you/each other?
What problems do they have?
How do they currently solve them?
Who do they communicate with?
Ask: How can we model this in software?

The AOF Method
1. Choose an ACTIVITY
(you probably already have one)
2. Find out what OBJECTS people use within that
activity
3. Find out what people do with those objects
(VERBS)
4. Those verbs become features.

Social Features
When the verbs involve more than one person

Product Ratings
Add to Wish/Registry Lists
Share your own Product Images
Tell a friend
People who viewed this...buy this
Submit a Product Manual
Amazon sales rank (social proof )
Customers who bought this also bought...
Help others nd this item
Tag this item
Rate this item
Customer Reviews
Customer Discussions
Offsite Reviews
Listmania
So you’d like to...
AMAZON
Product Page
Social Features

Build Outward
1. Start with people you know (friends or current customers)
2. Get them up to speed
3. Let them bring their friends/family/colleagues into the fold
4. Get those people up to speed
5. Let them bring their friends/family/colleagues into the fold
6. Rinse and repeat

The Community
Manager
What a community manager does
and what they’re responsible for.

“
This isn’t altruism or social activism; it’s just giving people
a break. Pretty much all the world religions tell us one
moral value is to help others if you can. I feel that
customer service, even when you get paid for it, is an
expression of that value, an everyday form of
compassion.
Craig Newmark
Founder, Craigslist

The Community Manager
1. Responsible for the morale of the community.
2. Responsible for greeting new members and getting them up to speed.
3. Responsible for handling incoming complaints, compliments, & 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.

Trend nder
Feedback, comments,
surveys, metrics,
etc.
tells team members
Trends? Support Docs
FAQS
Support Emails
Welcome Letters
Interfaces

Flickr’s 10 keys to community management
1. Engage: Don’t just listen to your community. Engage
2. Enforce: Let the community help set standards and policies for appropriate behavior-
then enforce them
3. Take Responsibility: Fess up immediately when you make mistakes
4. Step Back: Don’t be afraid to step back and let your customers take over
5. Give Freely: Never underestimate the allure of a free T-shirt (or sticker, or button…)
6. Be Patient: Take knee-jerk reactions with a grain of salt
7. Hire Fans: Make sure your employees are as passionate about your product as your
community’s most die-hard fans
8. Stay Calm: Develop a thick skin
9. Focus: Be exible but don’t lose sight of your priorities
10. Be Visible: Stay human
What’s missing?
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/09/0914_ ickr/index_01.htm

Designing for
Reputation
3

Harriet Klausner
#1 Reviewer on Amazon.com

http://bokardo.com/archives/is-harriet-klausner-for-real/

Harriet Klausner
#1 Reviewer on Amazon
Reviewing books since 2000
17,125 reviews as of Sep ‘08
Reads and reviews an average of 5.56 books per day
Gets special treatment:
Talks to hundreds of authors who want her to read their book
Wall Street Journal write-up: http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006483
Time write-up: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570726,00.html

Helpful Votes/
Rank Reviewer Total Reviews Helpful Votes
Review
1 Harriet Klausner 14959 92448 6.18
2 Lawrence Bernabo 6666 94069 14.11
3 Don Mitchell 3235 57539 17.78
4 Gail Cooke 4190 35883 8.56
5 Rebecca Johnson 4062 42531 10.47

Total Reviews Helpful Votes

Total Reviews Helpful Votes

“
Your reputation is equal to the
sum of your past actions within
(a) community.
Bryce Glass, interaction design lead for Yahoo Reputation Platform
I did an interview with Bryce on reputation systems: http://bokardo.com/archives/social-design-patterns-for-reputation-systems-one/

The Pro le must t the domain.

Community-
speci c Identity

Multiple Indicators

“
What you expose in an interface
becomes the entire universe for
the people who use it.

Optimize for value-
added behavior

Quick Study: Consumating
Decided to implement system to reward members
Theory: Reward for action leads to more action
Allowed people to give thumbs up/thumbs down to others
Showed people how they compared with others
People began to ask others for thumbs up
People began to thumbs down others so they couldn’t catch up
What they learned:
You must reward for positive behavior, not just allow judging
People pay incredibly close attention to numbers
Numbers can serve as a deterrent to activity, especially when it’s hard to reach leaders
The reward system was part of the downfall of the site.
http://benbrown.com/says/2007/10/29/i-love-my-chicken-wire-mommy/

Reciprocity

What can’t you do?

Dealing with Hiccups
4

http://www.perfectapology.com/sample-apology-letter.html

Quick Study: Ma.gnolia
Had a huge SPAM problem: 75% of new accounts were SPAM
SPAMmers had several different techniques
Some SPAMmers didn’t know they were SPAMming
Some features (e.g. link importing) exacerbated the problem
Recaptcha, no-follow, and akismet didn’t work.
Technological solutions in general didn’t work.
Some things did work:
An acknowledgement that SPAM isn’t a fully-solvable problem
Designating people “gardeners”
Gardeners have the ability to ag abusive SPAMmers
Give gardeners one invite each, to bring others into the fold.
http://wiki.ma.gnolia.com/Gardeners

Cultivating Passion
5

sharing knowledge
gaming
eating
listening to music
knitting
treating disease watching movies
shopping
sharing photos
sharing medical info bid/sell on auctions
creating t-shirts
handmade goods
reading stories
taking care of dogs
twittering (whatever that is)

People are passionate when
they’re good at some activity.
Our job as designers is to create
software that makes people better at
the activity they’re passionate about.

“
It’s not what you sell, it’s what
you help someone learn that
matters.
Kathy Sierra
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/kicking_ass_is_.html

Quick Study: Dogster
Performed keyword study to nd out what words people used
Found words that people wanted but weren’t on the site
Realized that existing content didn’t ful ll needs of users
Created a new set of content that focused on these users
The new content was mostly about helping people be better dog owners
Homepage design element:
http://startonomics.com/blog/using-quick-sem-to-identify-and-maximize-long-term-seo/

Quick Study: Ravelry
Woman (Jessica) was, like lots of other folks, passionate about
knitting
Jessica kept complaining about not nding good pattern
and yarn information online
Search engines, bulletin boards, Flickr, didn’t help
Jessica knew that knitters had the information she needed
So her and her husband created Ravelry, a knit and crochet
community

Quick Study: PatientsLikeMe
In 1998, Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS
(Lou Gehrig’s Disease)
His family began to take care of him, nding out about a
disease they had little experience with.
They searched around the world, and realized that most
folks with ALS were in the same boat.
In 2004, two of Stephen’s brothers created PatientsLikeMe to
help people treat their disease, to share their experiences
with others, and to support each other.
Stephen used the software until he passed away in 2006.
Now, the PatientsLikeMe community is rede ning medicine
by using the real-life experiences of people treating their
own disease to help pharmaceuticals create better medicine.

Summary
1. What is community? - community is not a feature set, it is a word
bestowed upon a group of people by that group of people
2. Growing your community - you need a community manager (or
managers) to be responsible for nding trends and acting on them
3. Designing for reputation - people need to be given tools to improve their
standing in the community as well as provide feedback
4. Dealing with hiccups - hiccups are inevitable...you need to deal with them
honestly and quickly
5. Cultivating passion - make people better at something they’re already
passionate about, connect them with others, and you’ll have a healthy
community

Further Reading
http://bokardo.com
http://del.icio.us/bokardo
Designing for the Social Web, New Riders, 2008
Contact
http://twitter.com/bokardo
porter@bokardo.com
508-954-1896