Building a Community of Nothing: A guide to building and maintaining an online community

Submitted by Brian Britt on December 1, 2008 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2008, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog

Abstract

A good online community cannot be built from a haphazardly chosen, prepackaged template, but must stem from the needs of the user. Good websites start with a specific topic and audience, address goals before formats, make navigation simple, and foster unique user contributions. The more you examine any online community, the more you realize that continuing to focus on the user could make it even better.

Early online communities like the WELL ruled the web by gathering a bunch of interesting people and letting them talk. In the absence of complex programming tools, browser plugins, and so forth, designers merely had to tap into their only available resources: people and information. Once you established those, where could a user go for a better site? For that matter, why would anyone bother looking given the exorbitant costs of browsing (Rheingold, Virtual Community, p. 25)?

In the last decade, however, when free web hosts such as Angelfire (Lycos, 2008) and Geocities (Yahoo!, 2008b) rose to prominence, and when the U.S. alone hosted over 60,000 BBSes, or bulletin board systems (Rheingold, xxiv), the challenge changed. Working hard to create an interesting website is no longer enough if the site a click away is just as good. How, then, can a modern website capture its visitors’ attention and keep it?

Step 1: Start with a specific topic and audience.

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” –Chinese Proverb

As a web designer, choosing a topic is a crucial step in the pre-design process. This is not as simple as it sounds, though. Your goal should be to make your topic as specific as possible. If you address a broad issue from an angle that no one has taken before, or if you narrow your gaze to a small, precise facet of it, your site will immediately stand out by offering something that can’t be found anywhere else.

Even if your topic is well-defined, you must carefully consider your audience, as not everyone interested in the same content has the same characteristics. First, think about who your audience is. Are you targeting people who are frequent internet users or those who only occasionally access the web? Do you want people who spend most of their online time browsing or those who just check their E-mail? Are your users looking for information and discussion or an entertaining social group (Ridings & Gefen, 2004)?

You should be able to list the characteristics of your “ideal user.” Don’t merely say you’re targeting college students. Instead, say that your ideal user is a caucasian 20-year old male sophomore of marketing living in Tucson, Arizona, who makes a B+ average, spends three hours a day at the computer and two watching TV, and who would enjoy playing massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) if he had the money to spend on monthly subscriptions. To put it simply, you should be able to open a phone book and point to the one person who is your “ideal user.”

With that in mind, your website will inevitably cater to more users than just the one you named. In 2005, Paige Heninger and Gretchen Vogelzang, mothers of four and two children, respectively, started a podcast with their conversations. They only tried to create the sort of show they thought their families would like. By 2006, they had an estimated 300,000 listeners per week. By targeting a very small audience, Heninger and Vogelzang tapped into the far larger niche community of mothers (Gillin, 2007, pp. 139-141).

In most cases, the establishment of a topic and its audience are inextricably linked. Let’s say, for instance, you’re interested in cars. There are countless “car” websites on the internet, so another one would merely be buried in the trash. This topic needs more honing.

You could address the needs of first-time buyers, analyzing common strategies and mistakes for both buyers and dealers. You might instead offer commentary on a specific line of cars, such as the unique features of Ford Mustangs. Or you could do what the administrators of AskPatty.com did, answering questions from female drivers (Gillin, 2007, p. 119). Any one of these approaches simultaneously narrows both the topic of “cars” and the audience of “people” down to a much more specific subset.

Sometimes, the audience of a website must come before the topic. For instance, the podcasts on Truffle Media (2008) focus on the needs of workers in the agricultural industry, while Facebook was designed with the goal of connecting Harvard students (Phillips, 2007). In such instances, once you know who your audience is, you can focus on satisfying their needs.

Either way, it is always important to have a specific audience and topic in mind. You will invariably collect viewers in a broader circle of interest than the metaphorical bullseye at which you’re aiming. But if you don’t start with the bullseye and instead aim at everything at once, you won’t hit anything.

Step 2: Goal first, format second.

“You can’t make a square peg fit into a round hole.” –Unknown

Try this experiment. Go to Forumotion.com and click the “Free forum” link to set up a BBS. The site will let you choose from a selection of color schemes before you fill out a form with your title, category of interest, and so forth. For the sake of using a proven topic and audience, let the idea behind AskPatty inform your choices. Choose “Cars – Bikes” from the drop-down menu, and for your forum description, type “Automotive Advice for Women” (DeVere, 2007). Verify your account, and you’re ready to start the forum version of AskPatty!

Now that you have a free forum at your disposal to answer the questions of your visitors, how are you going to organize your forum?

Sure, you could split the forum into arbitrary subforums for different car topics. What would be the point, though, of having unanswered questions sitting in a forum waiting to be noticed? If you want them to be answered by the administrators and not everyday members, why leave them available for public viewing? Would you restrict visitors from replying to threads, only allowing them to start new ones by posting questions? What would you do about questions that didn’t fall into any particular category, or that would fit into more than one?

This highlights an important point about the design process. When you start from the format and try to make your goal fit into that design, you can ruin an otherwise brilliant idea. AskPatty’s “Advice” feature (DeVere, 2007) works because it quickly answers its visitors’ questions – and because it maintains that image. A BBS would make all the unanswered questions visible, casting doubt on that image of efficiency. Furthermore, it could irritate visitors who see “off-limits” questions that they would like to answer.

When you determine your format based on a clear goal, however, you can select options that fit your ideas rather than trying to cram your ideas into the limitations of your format. AskPatty answers user questions, so its founders could have simply created a simple question-and-answer service. However, “the founders felt the user experience would be too sterile. A blog was more personal and provocative. Voice was important” (Gillin, 2007, p. 119). A blog fit the ideas of AskPatty’s administrators, as it satisfied their desire to answer questions while connecting with visitors at a deeper level.

This only works if, as with your topic and audience, your goal is very specific. “Cars” would have been woefully insufficient, as would “Talking about cars.” Even “Answering questions about cars” is still too vague – who is answering the questions? On the other hand, if your goal is to have “our staff answering questions from women about the automotive industry and how it affects them,” then it’s very clear what your site is going to do. From there, you can determine the format and features that best fit your goal.

Note that a good goal incorporates the topic and audience within it. In the above example, the audience is “women,” and the topic would be “the car industry and how it affects them.” With that information, you only need to add the action of “Our staff answering questions” to build an extremely strong goal that can guide you throughout the design process.

Step 3: Make navigation simple.

“It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.” –Amelia Barr

Simplifying navigation can be surprisingly difficult. As Krug (2005) argues, anything that “[makes] us stop and think unnecessarily” (Krug, 2005, p. 14) is a problem. Good websites allow us to jump to the content we want to see with almost no thought at all. Most users scan webpages; they don’t analyze paragraphs of text to determine the best path, but quickly glance around until they find the first link that seems to make sense (Krug, 2005).

Contrary to what we are often tempted to believe, adding to the number of clicks isn’t always a bad thing. Clicking through links may instead give users a sense of progress. Only clicks that demand thought are troublesome. Similarly, designing a website with a familiar template isn’t a problem if its well-known structure shows users the paths and options that they want. A web designer must, therefore, focus on establishing thoughtless navigation through the site. Standards become standards for good reason; any internet user knows what an underlined blue word means, and a button with a bolded “B” is a basic tool for any text editor.

An excellent example of easy navigation is Google, which has underlined links at the top left that direct users to common search categories as well as its E-mail service. Further features like Google Docs, a document-sharing tool, and Google Mobile, which allows users to access Google via text-messaging, can be found under “more” and “even more” links. The top right of the page featured personalized features like iGoogle, the Google version of My Yahoo!, and an account sign in tool. The most important feature of Google, its search bar, is featured prominently in the center of the page. This simple design belies dozens of features that may be quickly accessed with just a few, mindless mouse clicks.

Contrast this with MapleStory.com. The entry page is a bad start, as there are two sets of apparent links for language selection. Those in the center of the page are mere rollover buttons that reveal what “MapleStory is…” (Nexon, 2005). The ones on the right border actually take you to the website. Furthermore, the selection “North America (global)” is more confusing to the others labeled “Korea,” “Japan,” “China,” etc. A new user would have to scan through the list to see if a better option existed before concluding that “global” was in fact best.

Once users reach the main page of the website, they find that it is packed with all sorts of pictures and moving advertisements. After a few seconds of glancing around they may find the “Login” and “Free Signup” buttons on the left side, both of which take them to pages with a completely different layout. Logging in also does little to explain how they can access the site’s primary feature, or even what that feature is. This brings us to the primary problem: unless users read through the tedious 139-word “MapleStory is…” feature, they still might have no idea that MapleStory is an MMORPG. The whole site simply gets too bogged down with cute graphics and bulky ads to bother explaining itself.

The strengths and weaknesses outlined in the above example are far from conclusive. MapleStory’s BBS is constructed with similar thoughtlessness, as the subforums are not constructed in any clear hierarchy. Simply adding overarching categories like “Game Ideas” and “Advice” would help visitors avoid having to read through every subforum title to find the one they want. A better BBS hierarchy can be found at AnimeNation Anime Forums. Its forum is divided into “Anime & Related Forums,” “Support Forums,” and the catch-all “Off-Topic Forums.” All of the aforementioned sites avoid the critical error of using an image as a background; the World’s Worst Website’s moving background intentionally demonstrates such chaos (World’s Worst Website, 2008).

It’s easy to get trapped in your own knowledge when designing a website. You know how to get from one section to the next, so why should your users have trouble? Remember that they lack familiarity with the site. If navigation isn’t easy for new users who know nothing about your community, they may still know nothing when they leave.

Step 4: Foster unique contributions.

“Think different.” –Apple

For experienced web designers who already have some notion of proper style, this may be the most difficult stage of the process. Once you have your audience’s attention, how do you keep it and build upon it? How do you get casual users to contribute to your online community?

According to Ling et al. (2005), the main factor that increases member contributions is the belief that those contributions will be unique. This encompasses two connected ideas: the differences between members and the recognition of contributions.

The members of every community have something in common. Real-life communities include proximally close individuals. Members of online communities share common interests. However, every good community, including those online, should also have diverse membership. If everyone holds the same beliefs and ideals, what’s the point of conversation?

Rather than try to force all users to behave in exactly the same way, it is better to be thankful for differences. Conflict needs to be controlled to an extent; if the members of your community do nothing but wage war with one another, they probably won’t achieve the goals of your site. Other behaviors may also require modification: a clause in the community rules could prevent dissemination of illegal content, for instance. While you should exert control when necessary, however, it’s usually better to allow anything that isn’t excessively detrimental to the site.

Internet users come online largely for self-expression. If you do too much to inhibit that process, your members may see no point in returning. This naturally lends itself to the second aspect of unique contributions: recognition.

The internet is like a gigantic diary. The only difference between a website like MySpace and a paper journal is that the former is public. Anything and everything that you say in an online community is visible to the masses. As a corollary, if nobody is watching you then there is no point in expressing yourself online. Users have to be reassured that someone does care about what they say.

There are many ways to go about this. Some sites, like Newgrounds, use a rating system for member contributions. The best submissions are featured in sections of the site, while the worst are “blammed,” or removed. Ratings and reviews reward members who submit their Flashes with individual responses, and those respondants also see how their contributions make a difference in separating the good from the blammable.

Many BBSes use a similar “karma” system to reward members for good posts (LowWaterMark, 2003). Members are limited in the number of karma points they can award to other users in any given day, so only the best posts accumulate karma for their authors. Members with particularly high karma are rewarded. In contrast, almost all BBSes use postcounts to automatically recognize frequent contributors. Forums that rely heavily on postcounts to establish dominance sometimes have to combat spam, or stupid, pointless, annoying messages. Still, reining in a few postcount-inflating members is a small price to pay for increasing activity overall.

Other design formats have much different ways of recognizing contributions. The value of a Wiki edit comes from its continued presence in a particular entry, while a good blog entry will receive a link on other blogs and thus collect more readers as well as replies. Some formats have more than one manner of recognizing good contributions; for example, a BBS post might receive interesting replies that make the first poster look smart and feel good. Fostering discussion is its own reward.

In any case, the way in which contributions are recognized depends heavily on your site design. Remember the problem with turning AskPatty into a BBS? AskPatty recognizes questions – its brand of “contributions” – with responses from the administrators. Changing the format changed the recognition pattern, making it clash with the site’s goals. Even this late step of recognition is intrinsically linked to choices at the beginning of the design process. Every decision you make affects every other facet of your website, so design with care.

Step 5: Evaluate activity.

“Happiness is activity.” –Aristotle

This final step is arguably the trickiest, if only because the “activity” that keeps any thriving site alive is hard to define. What is “activity”? Do we seek only a certain number of contributions? Should we look at the number of replies to a given contribution? How do we adjust for spammers who make an inordinate number of posts but don’t really contribute anything? For that matter, how do we factor in the invisible lurkers secretly roaming through the site without saying a word?

There are just as many definitions of “activity” as there are ways of using a site. Fortunately, that makes judging the activity of your website easy if you want to avoid subjective judgments of “quality.” On a BBS, one could cite the number of posts within a given time period. Facebook claims to have over 120 million “active users” (Facebook, 2008). The prominence of a blog depends on how many other blogs link to it, while a question-and-answer site like AskPatty might use the number of questions as its barometer.

If, as the web designer, you want to take your assessment a step further, you can always look at the community to see how members are interacting. Are they engaging in deep, philosophical discussions? Chatting about Sunday’s football game? Asking for computer advice?

If you want to go beyond mere statistics, it is possible to look around your community and see the ways in which people communicate. Only then can you discover what the activity means for your community. What interests are waning? What has sparked users’ curiosity? And, most importantly, what can you do as a web designer to take advantage of it?

When you focus on the user, the web design process continues without end. It may take a little more dedication to build a website based on the users’ needs, but it will be worth the effort to bring their ideal virtual community into reality.

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