Designing for community-driven projects
How might we create an online community that inspires meaningful participation and increase the sense of belonging among the users.
In the past, whenever I talk to people who are curious about Viki or Soompi, I will always bring up the fundamental concept behind these two services — the community.
One of the biggest misconceptions about online communities is that these services tend to run by themselves. That’s not true at all. To plan and design a healthy community requires thoughtful planning and executions from all stakeholders.
Likewise, Viki online community does not only consists of bits and bytes. They are real people with the same shared interests — K-dramas and subtitle translations. I was lucky to be able to work on many community driven projects, and here are some of the key lessons that I learned from them.
1. Be real and authentic
Always be ready to receive feedback or criticism. If there’s an issue or something gets messed up, acknowledge it instead of covering it up with excuses. When you’re being honest and authentic about your product/services, your community will pick up on it and cheer you on all the more because of that honest transparency.
When we did a Viki website redesign exercise, we decided to remove a section called Subtitling Team on the Video page. That didn’t sit well with the volunteers and were furious with the decision. Some even voiced out that they would boycott using Viki services, and stop contributing to our content. We reverted back to the previous design to calm the fire. Looking back, it could have been better to share and get input from some of the contributors at the early stages of the project.
Ways to be authentic with your community members
- Be open with your members —Share and get feedback with the users. They will be more forgiving of any hiccups or inconveniences they experience along the way.
- Communicate with intent — Don’t hard sell your brands or features.
- Inspire with genuine meaning– Cheer them for their hard work and effort when necessary.
- Using plain, jargon-free language — No bombastic languages, talk to them like how you would talk to your friend.
2. Be active and collaborative
People join communities for two reasons; first, to connect with like-minded people and secondly, to fuel their passions.
Many Viki contributors told us that apart from being able to subtitle their favourite shows, they want to be able to pick up new languages. That story eventually inspired us to launch the Learn Mode feature.
Continue to engage your community, and continually talk to them. Hear their opinions and get involved.
- Build strong relationships with key members of the community
Get close with seasoned users, because they know the community better than us. - Don’t be afraid to share ideas with them
From my own experience, most of them are happy to give their honest feedback to you. - Rewards their efforts
Rewards motivates positive contributions. Viki contributors love to collect virtual badges, because these badges tend to boost their motivations and also for bragging rights. - Their feedback and opinion matters
Lastly, if they love your proposed design. Chances are that they gonna be great advocates after you launch a new feature. However, don’t be discouraged by the minority negative feedback. Remember, you cannot please everybody!
3. Be respectful and inclusive
Back when we were redesigning the new Viki User Profile page, we asked users to provide us their real name instead of nickname. Most of them were intimated by the design request. During our prototype sharing sessions, they told us that prefer to hide their real name.
They feel more comfortable when they are allowed to use their nicknames, hide their profile photos etc. This feedback totally invalidate our assumption that displaying real name will make a user perceived to be a serious contributor than just another random user.
Respect their privacy!
Identify sensitive information such as names, age, video watch list should be hidden by default. Sharing such information openly may allow advertisers to track them or hackers to take advantage of their online identity.
How did you go about designing your online community? What has success looked like for you? Share with me in the comments below.
Thanks!
