User Experience considerations for building a community website
Online communities have become a mainstay of the web, from giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest to smaller niche communities who thrive with conversation day-to-day. Whilst many do foster great discussion and have become a habitual part of their members routines, many others have fallen by the wayside.
So what makes some communities successful whilst others wither away?
Like offline social groups, communities are unique, with their own nuances and rules- there are no hard and fast rules to building a successful community. Whilst each group will react differently to stimuli, there are some best practice guidelines we can follow to increase the chances of success.
It’s not about you or your company
A community lives or dies on the engagement, discussion and content contribution of its members. For a community to grow, the focus must be on creating a place that your target audience will feel a connection to and want to be part of. That will not happen by focusing solely on yourself or your business goals. In a 'real life' situation, no-one likes the guy at the party talking about himself all night, the same principle follows online.
Understand your users' behaviour and motivations
You really cannot understand your community members too well. Making sure your community provides something that your users want or need is crucial to providing that emotional 'hook' to make sure they continue to revisit and engage in. This value exchange can take any number of forms, from crude methods like giving away freebies, to providing a 'hub' of likeminded people, sharing unique information. There are many research methods that can be used to achieve a deep understanding of your members, from interviews to contextual enquiry.
Don’t just focus on what users think they want
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The well known quote that Henry Ford didn’t actually say. However, it does still provide a valuable lesson; users don’t always know what they truly want. Find those magical features that they need but don’t yet know they need and you will be on the road to success. This is the basic principle behind all design and innovation products and equally applicable to building communities online.
Be inspired by your competitors...
...but not too inspired.
If you go up against an established community, offering a similar feature set will provide no incentive for members to leave the comfort of their current community. True success comes from understanding what they are doing well and what could be improved.
Plan before getting started
Ensure you have a very clear understanding of your users, your competitors and your vision before even thinking about features, design or development. You should be clear on:
What are you creating?
Why are you creating it?
Who are you creating it for?
Where are your audience currently fulfilling this need?
How is your product different?
What are you trying to achieve?
Build, test, improve
When you begin development don’t set out with a feature list and aim to develop every single feature before showing anyone the product. Instead take a more agile approach. Build, test (with real users) and iterate rapidly to ensure your budget is going towards adding value to your users.
Build it and they will might not come
Congratulations, you’ve gone through a hard journey but your site is now in a state where it can be released to the world. Unfortunately, putting the site live is not going to provide instant success - this is the start of the journey. You now need to pre-populate content, identify highly networked individuals who will endorse and champion your product, market your community and continue to improve and add value.
A community is much like a person. You can't force someone to be your friend, you can only appeal to common interests, providing someone with a unique,fun and interesting experience with the hope that they return for more! As I said, there is no magic formula for building and nurturing a successful community site but follow the above guidelines and you will be paving the way for success to follow.