sarahcpr

In an online community that depends on its users to create and share content, who are the most valuable ones? Is it the 10% who are completely addicted and constantly creating new content? Or is it the other 90% who consume the content and generate revenue? Or is just a chicken and egg problem that can never be solved?

What do I even mean when I say “most valuable”?

Well, I guess what I’m asking is, who should we design for? At Polyvore we have a very active online community. There are a core group of users who create an extraordinary amount of content, and then there are the rest of us who just like to look but don’t create much of our own. We’ve also have found that many of the users who do create a lot become addicted to Polyvore for about a week, creating like crazy, then kind of forget about it, then come back about a month later and repeat the pattern. This could be because we have a lot of younger girls on the site who do tend to get overly excited and obsessed about things, or maybe this is true for a lot of online communities where you might get sucked in for awhile, before you remember your regular life.

For example, I might go crazy writing reviews on Yelp for about a week, before I forget all about it, until my next really good or bad experience at a restaurant, where I’ll get obsessed with Yelp again. However there do seem to be a core group of Yelp users who have folded the site into their normal, everyday lives, and, thanks to the way that Yelp treats these Elite users, they view the Yelp community almost like a second home. But are these the users that keep Yelp going? Are the self-proclaimed Top Digg Users going to cause the ruin of Digg by taking off?

My guess is no.

At the heart of an online community, there are the people who are there for the sake of being there. It’s the members of Flickr who are there for the sake of photos, the members of Wikipedia who are there for the sake of knowledge or whatever, and it’s the members of our community who are there for the sake of art, fashion, or style. These users create a lot because they’re passionate about what they’re creating. From very early on, they become visible members of the community, they form friendships with strangers who share their passion, and they establish norms and create the foundation. And thank God they do - otherwise many Web 2.0 sites would never take off.

At least in the beginning, these users are pretty easy to please. They don’t need no stinkin logo, they just need a fast site that lets them create and share content quickly and easily. But eventually, the feature requests start rolling in.

I sat in on one of the most interesting talks at the Web 2.0 conference last year called, “Lessons from Game Designers,” given by Raph Koster. This guy had more points to make and more slides to show than he’d ever have time for, but the one that stuck out was about feature requests, and how pleasing your hardcore users by dumping more and more features onto your application actually eventually makes it very hard for anyone else to get into it:

Audiences kill genres. Feature creep takes over the product as its development is driven by power users. New users come and have no idea what is going on.

Of course, he also said:

A product of casual users is dead as casual users don’t stick with anything. Instead maintain a spectrum of people who invest a lot of time and some who invest a little. Must design for people with passion. Aim towards what keeps people really engaged.

(And thank god Luke Wroblewski takes and posts good notes cuz I know I never could.)

So are these two quotes in conflict with each other? Maybe a little. My guess is that who you’re designing for changes over time, so perhaps the formula is something like this:

1. Design for your passionate users first
2. Improve the product quickly with their feedback
3. Hit a sweet spot of features that please the passionate ones without overwhelming the new ones
4. And then you have to design for everyone

And by “everyone,” I mean the people who aren’t obsessed with creating, but who become addicted to the use of the application as a tool. So over time, online communities start simple, become more complex and then have to decrease in perceived complexity but increase in actual complexity, as they have to accomodate both hardcore and softcore users. (That’s probably a completely inappropriate use of the word softcore…)

I think Flickr is a perfect example of this. In the beginning, it was an online community dedicated to passionate photographers who were sort of geeky and interested in making online friends. But things changed over time, and eventually it became a place that people who sort of liked photography to keep in touch with people they already know. And now, with the influx of Yahoo! Photos users, the design must once again shift to becoming the ultimate photo sharing and photo storage (and now photo editing) tool, for both great photographers and snapshot junkies. And I think Digg is learning this too - showing also that this isn’t just about interface design, it affects how the backend works as well. And, although I don’t agree with Digg’s lack of transparency, it seems that the changes they’re making are to appeal to a broader audience and shy away from its reputation as a community full of tech-news junkies. (That is it’s reputation right?)

But, there’s something missing here: the social network! It’s also my guess that successful online communities must eventually become successful social networks. I know there’s some debate about the difference between the two. For my part, I believe that online communities form around subjects and social networks form around relationships. You meld the two, and you have a winning combination. Polyvore will become successful when members are using it as a way to create and share ideas for the real world, i.e., personal shoppers are using it with their clients, I’m using it to teach my Dad how to dress, and best friends are using it with all their BFFs.

So when Raph says, “Aim toward what really keeps people engaged,” I think he’s referring to that missing piece, where a site can actually become part of your real life because the people in your real life use it, too.