User:Ykzhao91/finalreport

final report

Introduction: Throughout this academic quarter, the course "Building Successful Online Communities" introduced me important concepts, terms, and theories that helped me understand how online communities thrive. We spent time reading a theory-based book from Kraut and Resnick, exploring various kinds of online communities, and .....The course prepared me for roles as online community researcher and designer. For the final project, I have been working as a consultant to build an online community from scratch with my client. In this report, I will be drawing on the design claims from Kraut and Resnick's text and case studies covered in class to make actionable design suggestions for them.

Community Identification

The client I am working with is a software startup which strives to help wedding planners and photographers to showcase their work and marketing on mobile devices. So here is an example of their product that may better illustrate what they are doing. They designed an online software that could polish photos uploaded by wedding planners and photographers into a pre-built template with animations and music. I don’t see this kind of thing a lot in the US, but it is currently very common on the chinese social platform. And it can be later shared on Wechat, which is currently the leading social network platform in China. They are licensing this software on a subscription basis.

Target audience

As many SaaS companies do, my client insists on having a space online to share product information, answer questions and gain an insight of user’s experience. With an online community, preferably to a forum, the user can easily ask a question or report a bug. Once the problem is solved, it will become the resource for the newcomers to identify their problem. It’s relatively important for a start-up company to know their user’s feedback and improve their product or service in a timely manner. The product brings the users, and my client wants to use this online community to engage them and make it a social platform for wedding planners and photographers.

Roadmap to success

After visiting some competitors’ online communities, the company asked me to create a forum similar to the one shown in the left. Which already have a well structure and subgroups. And I said, you can definitely reach this goal when you became a big enterprise as they do. But right now, it should not be where we get started.

So, you don’t launch a community, it’s not like you designed every aspects that you ideally hope the community can do, and launch it, and expecting that everything will come overnight.They  start small and grow organically, eventually turning into a movement. But you'll definitely find ways to scale your community by carving out the right niche, testing and iterating.

Stage1: Start small

So i made the advice to firstly start small. You can use the forum to do the most urgent thing in the first place. So for a software company, you can start your threads with two topics like questions and Bugs. That might be the most helpful thing as feedbacks from the users and leading the change towards your software. Like the etsy case. You can definitely divide the space after you observing the behaviours in the community and define what you want to divide. From the case from the book we also know that, slashdot just started with a single thread of news, after grew popularity, it branched into specialized sections. The second suggestions here is also about to set the scope small. As a startup company, they don’t have many human resources to put in the early stages. It is more wise to start with a narrower scope than its ultimate aspiration. Also, when the community is small, you can save time and labor to pre-populated the forum with some questions and posts by your staff.

Stage 2: Recuite early members

As I mentioned on the previous slide, it is approachable to firstly hire staffs to add some content to the community before others came. So it’s best to add professional content that members could benefit from. The most helpful content for users of a software should be a user’s guide or directions. Let’s see dropbox’ forum page, which has a video to new members, aiming at helping get familiar with the software and directions to use. Also, find other ways to attract early members, like allow free access to templates for early members. Inform potential members that benefits will only be available to early adopters. Like ‘register before Aug, 2017’.

stage 3:

After you successfully recruit some early members and more people are coming to the site. You can think about how to encourage contribution. make Visible and simple requests are we discussed many in our class, List the open questions on the forum thread, which members could track and answer according to their capabilities. Design a section on top of the thread, where shows a simple request: ‘The goal of today’. Like what we have seen of the Wikipedia subgroups. Besides that, they could benefit from Identify champion members and distribute ownership. Suggest to give each contribution rewards points, and member could use these points as status or redeem free templates as association to the product of the company. When identify some champion members who have higher rewards number, talk to them directly to see if they can take on ownership of certain activity.

stage 4:

My client is very much into the subgroup thing, which may help making a image that they actually having a large community. If everything works very well and the community grows bigger, they could consider to divide the community into subgroups, like craigslist and the reddit. And I suppose the community should already share some identity-based connection since they are mainly users of the software and in wedding related industries. So it’s better to increase bonds-based commitment. Like recruiting friends, but still encourage to participate under nicknames due to the potential competence.

Stage 5:

Most organizations have no way of reaching diverse talented people from around the world, let alone a new startup. However, through crowdsourcing, a community will be able to access unique talent, expertise, and experience to help it rapidly solve innovation challenges. Threadless.com, the online t-shirt company, encourages members from the community to submit designs for t-shirts and awards the weekly design winners with certain amount of money.

stage 6:

While healthy participation, contribution, and commitment could help an online community thrive, trolls, spams, or advertisements may harm a healthy community if they are not regulated. Although we don't have too much concern about trolling since only users registered through their main website will be granted the access to this forum. Sites like Wikipedia prevent inappropriate words and unneutral expressions by providing “report as spam” and “report user”buttons and links.

Hunrumi will follow the principle by having “report as spam” and “report as inappropriate content” links on all reviews and comments on the site, but also allowing users to avoid unwanted connections and harassment from other memebers by providing a“block user” link in all messages they receive, so that they may choose not to receive any through advertisements by the appropriate brands, schools, and facilities, comments andreviews mostly for the purpose of advertisement and spamming would also be discouragedthrough the process, allowing proper funding of the site.