The one percent rule

One more thing. I just heared of the one percent rule of online partiicpation (for me a reason not to force participation right now). For every comment put online and visible, there are 99 views... so you don't need to force people to comment, it's more effective to get more members.

How to motivate people?

A lot of theories about motivating people are out there. A lot.

Let me first start with a vlog (video blog) from YouTube I absolutely love:



If you look at the vlog really carefully, you'll see the content is not really special, nor the camera techniques. Yes, it's funny, but not too much. Why then is this girl from Australia the most subscribed ever?

I think it's got to do everything with the interaction she has with her audience. What she does is actually dropping a topic, discussing it, joking about it, visualizing it and then comes the important part. She asks the audience to discuss it themselves, share their experiences, jokes, visuals. And that's not all. In her next vlog, she gives feedback on the best comments.

Let's go back to motivation theories to place this vlog in a framework. According to Peter Collock there are four overlapping motives for people to participate in a online community. These are:

1. Anticipated reciprocity: People expect something in return for their contribution/participation. This something could be information, a reply or subscribers.
2. Increased recognition: People want their contributions to be recognized. They want to have a reputation/ particular identity. They want people to acknowledge their level of participation.
3. Sense of efficacy. People need to have the sense they do have impact on their environment.
4. Sense of community: The whole interaction needs to feel like a real human community. For example: You put something online, you get a response. Other people rate those responses. Again others are influenced by the ratings and responding.. and so on...

So why does Nataly have almost half a million subscribers? Nataly is a leader (or a so-called YouTube celebrity) that keeps participating without monetary gain. Let's go back to the motives.

1. Expected reciprocity. She's getting a lot of comments/video comments in return. People are suggesting new topics, asking her advice, subscribing and linking things to her.
2. Increased recognition. Nataly is the most subscribed of all in Australia. She's a celebrity in real life already (notice the pictures with fans at the end of the vlog).
3. Sense of efficacy. She definitely has the sense she's having impact on her environment. She's letting others rethink their experience and comment/vlog on her. In a former post she calls upon everybody to be at a certain point in Sidney and a lot of people do.
4. Sense of community. I don't think I even have to explain this one. People are commenting a lot, but she only submits comments in her next vlog that are worth it. So people are participating in a community that she created just to fit in. Later they will also receive responses, get recognized and at last as well feel a sense of efficacy and community. And so the circle goes round.

Putting YouTube aside, it should be noted that the vlog of Nataly has very low barriers. Although she does have a particular crowd, the crowd hasn't been selected by herself, but by the people in the crowd themselves. So if you make a website and you start implementing restrictions, people will browse away. If you do your thing, let the whole community to be open, people interested (the best crowd you can have) will feel the need to participate.

Don't hate if you can't participate

The next few blogs will all have the same subject: participation.

Like I mentioned the last time. We need a sort of participation-rewarding system in order to motivate people to participate.

Now I know from my final paper on YouTube, that the result or reward of participation is being able to share/evaluate/change the prominent norms and values within the community. It's actually the same in the offline counterpart. You can imagine that you can't just change the 'rules of the game' by entering a community: you don't have the right since you don't know the people, you don't understand the rules of conduct and values of the community. Put in other words: You have to be a player, to change the rules of the game. The more you are a player, the more legitimacy you have to do that (though the legitimacy is never NEVER absolute, the greatest thing about web 2.0 ;) ).

That doesn't mean it's hard to become a member and it shouldn't be. As a new member of the community, or newbie, you're absolutely welcome and people within the online community are happy to explain you everything, that is, if you show them you're interested and willing. Everybody had to go through that stage of being new, so they do understand.

A website should always allow for different stages of participation. Lave and Wenger suggest five types of trajectories amongst a community:

Peripheral (or Lurker) – An outside, unstructured participation
Inbound (or Novice) – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation
Insider (or Regular) – Full committed community participant
Boundary (or Leader) – A leader, sustains membership participation and interactions
Outbound (or Elder) – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

The problem in the MM travel website lies that leaders were created without them really participating. The result now is that we have a lot of leaders on the website that didn't create a specific culture online. Real leaders are the ones motivated to contribute to the community by interaction, updating their profile and so on. Our leaders we have to motivate ourselves!

Now we have a lot of leaders and no MM travel culture. So people that are new ( lurkers and novices) they are not obliged to participate, since there IS NO MM travel CULTURE online. They don't feel the urge to interact, since there will be no change in the culture by participating. They assume they are the same as the leaders (which is actually absolutely correct) since they are not participating either. I hope I've made myself clear.

On the other hand: what else could we have done? It's true that most online communities grow slowly at first, due in part to the fact that the strength of motivation for contributing is usually proportional to the size of the community. As the size of the potential audience increases, so does the attraction of writing and contributing. This, coupled with the fact that culture isn't created overnight, means creators can expect slow progress at first with a new virtual community. As more people begin to participate, however, the motivations will increase, creating a virtuous cycle in which more participation leads to more participation.

Still it's frustrating. Especially seeing more people getting involved in the website without ever feeling the urge to interact. They forget they will also feel bored online if nobody interacts with them and recognizes their contribution...

Results!

So, what are the results saying?

People absolutely love the idea of the MM travel website. They react with a lot of enthusiasm.. that is: until they bump into a lot of navigation problems which are very related to each other. I'll set out the main issues we discovered and what we're going to do to fix them.

De flap.

The appearing drop-down menu that I was talking about earlier, doesn't stand out. People don't notice it and don't understand why important functions (like 'be my guide') are put in there. They DO like the box when we make them aware of it. So the easiest solution is: don't make the 'flap' appear anymore, just make it something always visible, make it fixed. This is how the flap looks right now:

Next we're gonna add new functions to the flap, making it like an interaction-information-easy-to-navigate-thingy. New functions people asked for:

-Review guide/testimonials/ rating: at least something that would make the guide credible

-Ask a question: People want to be able to see someone else's questions and make them themselves, without having to go into the private e-mail-area.

-Stories: They want to add their stories, and read others.

-Profile guide: Of course it would be nice to check someone's personal profile before contacting them.

-Share this.

-Flag this.

Mouse over.

The next main issue is the mouse over. You can only distinguish between an image or a guide if you mouse over the images. Still the participants tend to not mouse over anything at all! And if they do, it's too short of a time to really notice a change in the image or functionality. Can you imagine people using laptops mousing over items? No. So we made a guide page more obvious by allowing for the item to have -GUIDE- displayed.

A Map!

People in the guides page looking for a guide in a particular destination, give up after searching and scrolling all the way down. I can't blame them. It's not clear where the guide is from, you have to mouse over the item to discover that. After that you have to search for your particular city by mousing over and reading all the guide-items. No wonder they go back to the cities page and try too find their guide there (which they don't..).

Any solution? Yes, a map with all the guides over the world. In that way you can find your guide(s) in a wink of an eye. Looking for a guide in South-Africa? Or just Buenos Aires: it's all clear and traceable.

Time to wrap up. O, just one last thing. While discussing a minimum number of items a guide should create in order to become guide-worthy, we started thinking about a participation-reward system. So that people will get more involved and motivated in the network. I'll come back on that one the next time. For now we have to make sure the site has a good base. With that I mean: a clear navigation, profile and interaction functions.

Testing, one two three

Tomorrow Saro and I are going to do some research on the MM travel website. We've got the assignment to test the usability of the website and in particular the new 'flap' that we are using now for contacting guides and becoming a fan or a hater.

I want to make sure that you understand that this is a pre-test, a quickie. My big research is coming up in two months. What we're going to do now is letting people browse the website while using an eye-tracking device in order to find out what people are looking at the first time they enter the site. Also we're going to give them things to do in order to find out if they're doing a good job. The main goals of such a test are finding out which functions the site still lacks and to discover faults in design.

So what is usability? When does a site have a high usability ( because that's what you want, right?). Well first of all it should be efficient. The user should accomplish his/her goals quickly. People really don't want to wait or put too much effort in finding out how things work, especially sitting behind the computer.

Second the thing the user wants to do, should be easy to learn and to remember. If a website requires a manual, there's something very wrong. People don't want to do a whole study before getting started. They want to go and get creative, mess with it. They want to make mistakes and learn quickly how to make them undone. That's basically how every (fun) learning process works: by trial and error.

And last but not least, it should give the user some sense of satisfaction. This can include all kinds of things, but I like to think of it as something that has got to do with expectation. If you expect something to happen and it happens just the way you want it, it gives you a satisfying feeling, making you feel in control. If not? It could make you feel frustrating, lacking motivation to go on, insecure about what you're doing and so on. People don't want to feel incompetent. Especially not if they're spending their free time doing it. They really want it to be satisfying, efficient and easy to learn, or else they will leave.

Tomorrow I'll let the results speak for themselves...

Genesis

I probably should have started this blog earlier. Now I feel like I've got to write a lot of history before cutting to the chase. So, how did this all start?

Two weeks ago I started my internship @ Mediamatic Travel. Since then I've been helping change/build and destroy the website. Let me start by saying it's very dynamic and interesting work, very challenging. I'll explain why.

First of all you're dealing with two sides and sometimes even three sides of the Mediamatic foundation. On the one hand we have developers, designers and computergenii. These are the technical staff. They want a nice design and cutting edge technology. On the other hand we have the communication and pr people, they want the website to look cool, appealing and representative. Third, and most important maybe, we have the people, the mass, the buyers. They want everything the first two want without spending a lot of time nor money on it. What they want is efficiency & satisfaction: usability.

Having a balance between these three groups means a lovely website in the future.

Now our website has a few challenges that make this balance hard to establish. I'll cite an ex-co-worker, Michele Champagne, when we were discussing the website. She said:

"We're dealing here with a four-headed beast. The first head consists of the old members, who are used to providing info, not participating on the website. Also we helped them a lot building their site. They have had to deal with the ever-changing concept of the website, because of that lacking faith in the project.

The second head of the beast is the new member. He's to participate and go figure it out himself. We're not building his website, just coaching him through the process. Still this member isn't familiar with the website and lacks motivation to improve it.

The third and fourth head of the beast is the difference between being a participant or a consumer. Some people really want to get involved, being an active member or a guide. Others just want to browse the site. How to make it for both of them an equally interesting website to visit by letting them apply their own level of participation? Do we actually allow that to happen?"

That's a very important thing to think about: Do we allow for 'newbies' to go and make errors, not be motivated and make 'crapsites' and in the meantime have an open network for everybody? Or do we want a small elite of people that have got high involvement and make beautiful sites, but in that way making it a closed network with less people and high barriers for entry?

As you can see there is still a lot to work on