Culture Clash #295 - Community Experience Design
Principles to elevate your product and strategic thinking
Professionally, there is nothing like finding the exact resource you need at the exact right time. I recently experienced this feeling in spades with David Spinks’ new book about designing communities, The Business of Belonging. My new passion is learning everything I can about how communities are designed. David’s book is the primer I recommend for any person starting the complex journey of creating an online community.
There are numerous techniques and approaches to designing an online community. It’s easy to get lost. David’s book provides a set of powerful frameworks that I’ve recently adopted in my own work. Whether you’re working on a community or not, being exposed to these principles will do wonders to elevate your product and strategic thinking.
I’d like to share 4 of David’s key concepts from The Business of Belonging:
Shared Social Identity
Defining Identity by Level of Contribution
The Commitment Curve
the 7Ps of Community Experience Design
Shared Social Identity
A big key to building thriving communities is to develop a compelling social identity and bring anyone who shares that identity together consistently over time.
David recommends defining your community’s social identity by focusing on these 3 questions:
People. Who are we?
Purpose. What do we believe?
Participation. What do we do?
The more specific you make the answers to these questions, the more intimacy you are likely to create within your community. Intimacy within your community can serve as a driver to more value being generated for your members. Don’t be afraid to make your community specific. Think of the difference between these two hypothetical communities. A broad community for people who ride bicycles vs a more specific community for people who ride racing bikes, compete in Austin, Texas, and have kids. Which one of these has a better chance at creating a compelling shared social identity?
Defining Identity by Levels of Contribution
Within a community, there are layers of identity often defined by a member’s level of contribution.
The book uses the example of Airbnb. You wouldn’t immediately think of it, but Airbnb has a fairly sophisticated and deep set of levels of social identity within its’ ecosystem:
I’m aware of Airbnb
I’m registered on Airbnb
I’m a guest on Airbnb
I’m a host on Airbnb
I’m a “Superhost” on Airbnb
I work at Airbnb
I co-founded Airbnb
Each of these system “actors” brings a different level of participation and contribution to the community that is Airbnb. There is a strong chance that a person starting in one of these roles will eventually end up moving up the “commitment curve” to take on a more substantial role. One of the best ways to understand what it means to be a host on Airbnb is to be a guest.
The Commitment Curve
The participation stage is all about understanding the journey that a member goes through in your community over time, and facilitating spaces and experiences that move them along that journey. Early in the journey, it’s likely that members will participate in smaller and more passive ways. Over time, as they move through the cycle, they’ll become more committed and participate in great ways, taking larger roles in the community.
This is one of my favorite ideas from the book and an incredibly powerful model for how to think about members joining a community.
This figure from the book shows the journey a member takes from joining the community to being in a leadership role. The activities and roles defined within this commitment curve will be the key elements to designing the user experience of your community.
An active and engaged community will have members moving both up and down this commitment curve. For a community to work, you need members inhabiting the various roles and activities available in your community. It’s not enough to have active members who participate a lot. You need the counterbalance of members that lurk and consume the content created by active participants.
7Ps of Community Experience Design
To think about your community more comprehensively, these 7 questions serve as a great framework to use when designing your community experience:
People: Who are we gathering?
Purpose: Why are we gathering?
Place: Where are we gathering?
Participation: What will participants do?
Policy: What are the rules and guidelines?
Promotion: How will we invite members?
Performance: What will success look and feel like?
The 7Ps framework can be used holistically or to inform specific experiences within your overall community.
Before starting the process of designing your community, you may want to try asking your stakeholders to answer these 7 questions. Don’t provide them with much guidance or context ahead of time. Just see how they respond. You will gain a fresh and comprehensive perspective that will be vital to your community design process.
What fascinates and excites me about designing communities is that much of it has nothing to do with software or features. It’s mainly about psychology and identity. It certainly could only benefit us as software designers to bring a more holistic and psychology-based approach to our product experiences.
5 Links
📱 HazeOver
An excellent $5 Mac utility that dims your mac background and any application windows that are in the background. It doesn’t sound that useful, but trust me, it will help you focus and make your 10+ hours of computer time a day more pleasant.
✍🏻 1800 miles in a Tesla Model 3
Excellent, detailed story by Jason Snell about his hardware and software experience with Tesla. It’s fascinating to read about the Tesla experience from the perspective of an insightful Apple blogger.
The prolific David Smith’s latest app. It’s a fantastic little Apple Watch utility to help his son focus and manage his attention. A tool that could be useful to many kids and adults with attention issues / ADD / ADHD.
Awesome app to help you count things in the real world. A tiny window in the powerful world of computer vision, AI, and AR.
✍🏻 You’re Gonna Miss Zoom When It’s Gone
But I find working in an office, public speaking, going to big parties, and attending important meetings in person enormously stressful. I prefer Zoom for all of these things, and I’m going to miss it when it’s gone. So will many other socially anxious people.
I think many will second the views expressed in this article.