When content overwhelms community

Elyse Sanchez, Monday, January 29, 2007 @ 1:51 pm

In his Alertbox article, Participation Inequality, Jakob Nielsen asserts that "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action." And that's his best-case scenario: he claims that the "more radical" 99--1--0.1 distribution is common in some social websites. Worst of all, the lurker-poster ratio for Wikipedia, by Nielsen's reckoning, tallies in at an even more disproportionate 99.8--0.2--.003.

We recently worked on creating a vision for optimizing the community features of a large, content-rich website.  Aside from some acknowledged usability issues, a major user barrier to community participation was the issue of trust: target users were hesitant to share personal information in a public forum. We felt this reluctance had its roots in the demographics of the site's users, whose average age was in the early forties. Contrast this with the openness of communities such as myspace, which attracts a younger user base willing to provide the most personal information--even to the point of rashness. On our project, we had to take the conservative user preferences as a given, and try to develop ways to entice users into interacting with the site more frequently and easily.

To do this, we had to encourage our client to think beyond the concept of "Community"= Message Boards alone, and give their users more pathways for generating content for the site, which is driven by features, content and experience. We gave a lot of thought to how the participatory elements would be placed, and conceived flow-based design to enhance how people touch them, interact and behave.

I'll discuss some of our specific strategies in Part II.

user experience design

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