Everyone wants more engagement from their users.
As digital product designers we try to make the best, most engaging products we can. However, having a rock solid product can often only get you so far and we begin to employ other tweaks and features to help bolster usage. We can: integrate game mechanics to entice users to compete against each other; plaster pretty images, flashy GIFs/videos, and fluid animations on our UIs to appeal to their visual sense; use sophisticated machine learning algorithms to surface the right content; and send reminder emails and push notifications when they’re not logged in. This is all done in the hope that people will use our products more. And while I think these tactics do help, there’s one element that truly seems to tip the scales when it comes to engagement: being part of an active community.
When I started at Influitive almost two years ago our platform was focused primarily around a company gathering their best advocates into one place and having these users complete tasks for them. This works well for the most part, and initially people are happy to help out the brands and products they love. We’ve often found though that after the initial excitement wears off it begins to feel more like doing tasks for the benefit of the program and less for the user’s own benefit. A sort of “task fatigue” sets in as users begin to feel that they aren’t getting value out of the program compared to what they’re contributing. On top of that, these programs were fairly solitary spaces, where the main interaction is between the advocate and the program, and maybe some light competition between users that know very little about each other. It began to feel like working all by yourself in a cubicle, but without the pay.
The Shift
Since then we’ve shifted our thinking and have begun to take the steps needed to move from solitary task based programs toward more user-centric communities of advocates.
Here are a few of the ways we’ve started achieving this:
- Profiles – user facing profiles containing deeper info about each advocate and further ways to connect with them
- Forums – a platform for advocates to engage and openly converse with one another in an open platform
- User Avatars – we’ve made the advocate’s picture larger and have started displaying them in more places as well as linking them to the user profiles mentioned above
- Direct Messaging – advocates can now privately message other users in a continuous stream of conversation
- Feed – a community feed displaying other advocates’ activities, opportunities to interact with them, and program tasks
As we roll out these features we’ve already noticed an uptick in engagement between advocates, and as a result they’re spending more time in the programs and completing more activities.
The Concerns
Of course these haven’t been completely seamless implementations, and a few issues have come out of speaking with clients:
- Privacy – due to some circumstances there are some privacy concerns in some of the programs when exposing users and their info to each other. To get around this we’re adding the ability for users to anonymize themselves from other users if they wish.
- Lack of visibility into direct messages – since these messages are kept private there’s the chance that some users could abuse this feature and the program administrators won’t be able to control it. Like many messaging services we’ll be including the ability for users to report and block others if the need arises.
- Stale/spammy content – when the content isn’t fresh for the user there’s less of a chance of them engaging with it, but on the flip side if we’re just sending them everything new that’s happening they’ll get overloaded with too much. To get around this we’re constantly tweaking the way content is being prioritized and continually learning more about the advocate’s activities and interests.
The Future
We have many ideas on how to develop community further within the product. Already we have learned much about the power of community to rally people behind a product or brand. I’m sure as we continue to flesh out these features and ideas we’ll learn even more. I’m also confident that we’re on the right path for making engaging experiences where both programs and their users can see real value in participating.
