Quick & Dirty Notes... expand as needed!
We listed many ways to bring new users online. The three common areas were identified as compelling content, ego plays ("I want to belong to...") and small, directed tasks. It boiled down to giving something to new users that is imaginable, simple and has clear value.
Users may be users and even power users of one type of communityware, but not familiar with others. Amy Lenzo confessed that she wasn't familiar with the formatting syntax of the SocialText wiki and was surprised that it felt so alien considering that she's a power user in other areas. She was frustrated by the interface, but motivated to put in the time to figure it out because she saw everyone else editing the wiki and adding their names to the attendee list. People can be turned off by unfamiliar interfaces. It can make them feel incompetent, elicit fear of technology, or make it hard for them to imagine how they would get any value out of the technology.
Almost everyone had a story about people who exhibited such extreme avoidance of contact with the community tool that they refused to post anything themselves and attempted to use an admin as a mouthpiece or relay point for their message. Sheldon Chang had an anecdote from his efforts with his neighborhood association of someone who would type up comments to post on her computer, print them out, and send them to him via snail mail.
Brian Butler brought up that use of social network technology tends to be most popular in two groups at opposite ends of the age spectrum. Young people experience constant disruptions in their social network, especially as they leave home for college or to seek opportunity. The senior generation also experience disruptions in their social network due to the death of their friends. For all the age ranges in between, there's elevated competition for people's time and attention. People in the middle range of ages tend to be married, already have a regular group of friends, and are consumed by work or family. They simply may not have time to engage online.
Scott Moore attributes some of this to the overuse of the word community. It's such a loaded word that he asks people at Schwab Learning to never use it in marketing because it tends to confuse people more than it clarifies what they do. Find some other way of explaining what you offer.
Sheldon Chang mentioned that when he's starting a new online community project for a client, the first thing he does after picking the software platform, is trash the default skin. Most of the default and publicly available skins and themes that you can get for your piece of communityware are not very well designed. They are often so overly flashy that they're difficult to navigate. Sometimes they can be not visually appealing enough and it becomes difficult the purpose of one text link from another. If you're dealing with a population that doesn't get online communities, make the interface only as complex as it needs to be. If you don't absolutely need a feature, hide it from view. Don't overwhelm them with eye candy and options that they most likely will never use.
Younger people tend to get a free pass as people who are just simply natural with technology. This is not necessarily true. A few people testified that either they themselves or one of their friends got their introduction to MySpace through a teen and was a more sophisticated user of the site only a month later. Sheldon Chang has a blog post referencing a Nielsen study on the abilities of teens vs parents in navigating complex websites.
Page Last Updated: Jun 8 4:53pm by sheldon