Designing Online Communities: Community-Centered Development for Intensively Focused User Groups Emmanouil Kalaitzakis Computation Dpt UMIST Manchester, UK
Georgios A. Dafoulas Computation Dpt UMIST Manchester, UK
Linda A. Macaulay Computation Dpt UMIST Manchester, UK
e.kalaitzakis@postgraduate. umist.ac.uk
[email protected]
[email protected]
Abstract In the wake of the 21st century the Internet plays a crucial role in the lives of millions of people. Common use of the Internet includes information retrieval, entertainment and commercial transactions. A significant number of organisations base their existence solely on this relatively new medium for communicating and doing business. In addition, millions of individuals live in a virtual world (cyberspace) where they form relationships and interact with each other by using the Internet. During the past few years, this interaction took the form of online communities, places on the Internet where individuals can communicate with each other using facilities such as e-mail, message boards and real-time chat. This paper describes and models alterations in the development process for online communities and examines how such changes, in a content centered community can increase website traffic and introduction of new members.
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Introduction
Every day numerous online communities are created, attracting individuals with common interests and same ideas, who want to share their experiences or knowledge with others. Total strangers seem keen enough in exchanging ideas, answering each other’s questions or even getting involved in “virtual relationships”. A major factor that affects the creation and popularity of Online Communities could be significant events or tragedies. A typical example is the 30 million Americans turned to Online Communities after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Preece, 2002). Hence online communities map out the way people behave and interact in an actual societal context. However, “aspects such as individual needs of the members forming the community and their content-complex activities have been overlooked in the study of online communities” (Bogdan, and Cerratto Pargman, 2002). The following sections discuss how the development process was altered to accommodate the specific characteristics and satisfy the special requirements of an online community development project supported by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Chemical Nutritional Products (CNP) Ltd.
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Understanding Online Communities
Quite frequently, Internet users tend to believe that by adding a message board in a website, the site is magically transformed into an online community. Also several web developers wrongly believe that when the supporting software is in place and the community is ready to go online, their work is finished and the community can be self-supported. Both views could lead to failure (e.g. limited visitors, short life span). It does not matter how sophisticated the software is when there is no one to use it. “Commercial, non-profit and grassroots organisations have
opportunistically viewed these online communities as inexpensive mechanisms for developing customer and donor relationships, with the ultimate goal of increasing revenues” (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997), (Andrews, 2002). However due to lack of trust these online communities do not always achieve their purpose. It is suggested that two steps should be taken after starting an online community in order to tackle this problem (Andrews, 2002): “encouraging early online interaction and moving to a self-sustaining interactive environment.” According to Kelly online communities developers must overcome three major obstacles (Kelly, 2002): (i) how to get users to behave well, (ii) how to get users to contribute quality content and (iii) how to get users to return and contribute on an on-going basis. Most of the above concepts were considered during the early stages of this project. The following section provides a detailed description of an online community for bodybuilders that are aware of a specific product range and show special interest to certain athletes and competitions. The online community was created as an extension of an existing “static” website in a primitive state that provided limited information for visitors.
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Online Communities for Intensively Focused Groups – The CNP Ltd Case Study
In 1998 Kerry Kayes, an English Bodybuilding champion, and the six times Mr Olympia, Dorian Yates founded Chemical Nutritional Products (CNP) Ltd. CNP manufactures and sells nutrition and weight loss products for professional athletes as well as consumers participating in recreational exercise and fitness activities. CNP are a major player in their field. CNP activities include hosting the largest bodybuilding event outside the US, collaborating with key figures in the industry and providing support to many famous athletes. Since January 2002 CNP is involved in a Teaching Company Scheme project (TCS) with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) under the coordination and financial support of the British Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). This project is concerned with creating an Online Community Portal for CNP and further enhancing its e-business solution. Building a commercially based (Andrews, 2001) online community generated several conflicts regarding the requirements of community users (i.e. what CNPLTD.com visitors want) and the project constraints (i.e. what CNP need). An initial investigation was conducted to understand the main CNP operations and clarify its structure and the underlying business model. Early findings showed rigid distribution network that included several gymnasiums and health centers on the UK and a single distributor for each European country. Some of the resulting constraints included that online sales should not affect sales of existing distributors and that online sales should be avoided outside Europe and especially to the US market which is targeted by CNP’s sister company (Dorian Yates Approved). From a user perspective, early findings underlined the imperative need for rich, graphical content, constantly updated news and technical support for training and fitness. This was emphasised by an initial observation of the British Bodybuilding Grand Prix attendants. It is obvious that the specific case study concerns a content centered community for event driven users. Our hypothesis is that in such communities, highly specialised content can increase website traffic and attract more visitors into becoming active community members. To prove this hypothesis a detailed community development process is essential.
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Community-Centered Development (CCD)
Community-centered development (CCD) is a process that can be used for developing online communities. According to Jennifer Preece, the CCD process involves repeated develop-and-test cycles that can be summarised in the following stages (Preece, 2000): (i) assessing community
needs and analysing user tasks, (ii) selecting technology and planning sociability, (iii) designing implementing and testing prototypes, (iv) refining and tuning sociability and usability and (v) welcoming and nurturing the community. The aim of CCD is to focus on the community, by approaching the two interconnected concepts of usability and sociability. “Developing online communities by involving community members in participatory, CCD helps to identify issues, characteristics and idiosyncrasies that address sociability and determine usability” (Preece, 2001). According to Jennifer Preece, assessing community needs leads to the identification sociability and usability issues while supporting the evolution of an online community (Preece, 2000). Figure 1 shows a proposed model adapting and extending the above concerns based on the initial observation results of the CNP community. Two new sets of issues are identified that relate to the special requirements and behaviour norms of intensively focused groups and to the specific constraints imposed by the underlying business plan of corporate communities. Currently an attempt is made to prove the proposed distinction of issues with a iterative evaluation and redesign process that takes place in three stages. This is further discussed in the following two sections. Assess community needs
Interaction Registration User representation Archives
Navigation Feedback Messaging Support tools
IFG-related Issues Content requirements Style preferences Member support Informal beliefs/codes
Member location Offline community Rival groups Jargon use
Identify intensively focused groups factors
Sociability Issues Policies: Membership Code of conduct Copyright Free speech
Security Privacy Moderation
BM-related Issues Commercial agenda Affected operations
Business presence Moderation styles
Support evolving community
Usability Issues
Identify business model factors
Figure 1: Supporting Online Community Evolution (Adaptation/extension of Preece, 2000)
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Effects of Introducing an Online Community
A statistical analysis of the community log files in comparison with CNP’s previous website log files reveals a number of significant findings. The obvious changes are on daily visitors and page views with a dramatic 100% increase, showing the immediate “attractiveness” effect of introducing an online community. Interestingly enough the user behaviour also shows a tremendous difference. Figure 2 shows the initial web site having an almost constant number of daily visitors. As shown in figure 3, several peaks followed significant community activities with two main peaks of 400% increase during two major bodybuilding events (i.e. Mr Olympia, British Bodybuilding Grand Prix). This observation reveals early evidence that intensively focused user groups, such as the one forming this community, are highly event-driven and require a contentcentered community in order to satisfy their needs. Additionally there was a 100% increase on page views per visit and a 6% increase on visitors that spend more than 7 minutes in the community. Finally, a 700% increase on the outgoing traffic per date came as a result to the increased availability of content in the form of competition photos and video streams.
Figure 2: CNP web site visitors (23 week period, Oct 2001 - Mar 2002)
Figure 3: Online community visitors (23 week period, Sep 2002 - Feb 2003)
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Initial Evaluation Results
During the first six months of introducing the online community an initial evaluation followed the above encouraging results. The evaluation consisted of four parts: (i) a brief questionnaire filled in by community members attending the British Bodybuilding Grand Prix, (ii) a 90-questions usability survey distributed to participants of an electronic commerce course that have used and studied the community for two weeks, (iii) a cooperative evaluation including 1-hour sessions with five of the most active community members and (iv) a statistical analysis of web server logs revealing navigation patterns, numbers and origin of visitors, content popularity, etc. Due to the space limitations for this paper, figure four represents only the summarised results of the first two evaluation parts. Feedback is classified under the following ten categories: (1) accessibility, (2) communication clarity, (3) navigation, (4) consistency, (5) visual presentation, (6) content, (7) privacy/security policies, (8) services, (9) comfort and (10) stickiness. It is clearly shown that the overall response is significantly positive for the first five categories. It is also noticeable that certain community related issues need attention, such as policies and services. Another interesting finding is that the feelings of comfort and ‘stickiness’ need more development effort. This was mainly due to the high expectations of experienced Internet users that participated to the usability evaluation rather than the core members of the bodybuilding community. Finally, the ‘rude’ introduction of an online community after a period of two years with an old-fashioned but familiar web site produced a significant percentage of early neutral feelings against the new environment, which are expected to decrease in the following months. With respect to the cooperative evaluation, two key points are made. First, the involvement of CNP provides a trustful environment that makes most members disregarding most policy pages and second, the majority of the community members are novice Internet users and require further online support.
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Figure 4: Online community evaluation results
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Conclusion and Further Work
In this paper the authors presented a specific case study of a content centered online community for event driven users and suggested an alternative model for supporting its evolution. According to Jennifer Preece there are several concerns while supporting the evolution of an online community, namely purpose, people, policies, users, tasks and software (Preece, 2000). During the next four months three sets of major redesign will be introduced, focusing on content, interface and functionality. These changes will be followed by three 100-question surveys structured according to the above six concerns. Further evaluation includes interview and observed discussion sessions with ten of the most active community members, based on the four types of issues identified in the proposed model. Acknowledgments: Special thanks to the DTI, TCD and CNP and the Hi-Spec research team (Dr Kathy Keeling and David Tomkinson) for their collaboration during the community evaluation.
References Andrews, D. (2002) Audience-Specific Online Community Design, CACM, Vol. 45, No. 4. Andrews, D. (2001) Considerations in the Development of Commercially Based Online Communities, in Proceedings of the Seventh Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2001), Boston, MA, USA. Bodgan, C and Cerratto Pargman, T. (2002) Reconsidering support for the members of specialized online communities in Nordic Ergonomics Society's 34th Annual, Congress on Humans in a Complex Environment (NES 2002), Norrköping, Sweden. Hagel, J. III and Armstrong, A.G. (1997) net.gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Kelly, S.U., Sung, C., Farnham, S. (2002) Designing for Improved Social Responsibility, User Participation and Content in On-Line Communities in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Preece J. (2001) Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability: Questions Participants Ask about Online Communities in Proceedings of the INTERACT ’01 conference on Human Computer Interaction, Amsterdam, Holland. Preece, J. (2000) Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, John Wiley. Preece, J. (2002) Supporting Community and Building Social Capital, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 4.
