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Community as a Feature in Apps – Design for User Engagement

February 23, 2020  

This is part of a series on design for user engagement (or addictive design) patterns, and good and bad examples of implementation of these patterns.

Today’s is about digital products using “community” as a user engagement strategy. community for user engagement in app design

See Previously:

  • UX “Negging”

“Community”, The Feel Good Sauce ✨👨🏼‍🤝‍👨🏽👩🏻‍🤝‍👨🏽👭🏽

Lately, it feels like the word “community” is the secret, feel good sauce that promises to make every app, digital course, or even co-working space special.

And it’s alluring. If you’re learning a new skill, hobby, or habit – chances are you’ll want people to talk to, buddy up with and ask questions.

Dedicated digital communities can be a product unto themselves, but today I’m looking at apps that include online communities as supplemental to the main offering.

Ones that utilise the dopamine hit we get from upvotes, comments and likes to increase user engagement and retention.

 

Good example of community as as a user retention feature

Shine app

screenshot of shine app, showing a question and comments underneath. This is how the app builds user engagement through community
Solid community plan and content strategy

Shine describes itself as a self care app, with daily tips, mindfulness exercises, mood trackers and courses to help their users “live their best life”. Launched in 2018, they added community as a feature to their app in December last year (2019).

What makes it work

The community feature is

  1. strongly related to the content of the day (‘daily thought’ image & meditation)
  2. The community question is primarily designed to reinforce of the message of the day through self reflection..
  3. ..and to receive community support as a secondary, addictive, benefit.

Shine cleverly ties in our desire for “likes” with an activity that reinforces learning, which means the users are more likely to positively rate the app as being beneficial to them, thus upgrading to a paid plan, or continue subscribing.

The positive wording of the community post encourages people to say on topic in a positive or even vulnerable way.  You’ll also notice there are no negative reaction options to shared community comments, and no ability to follow up with a snarky comment. There are only different positive reaction types, to give a sense of variable reward to those receiving feedback.

In short, Shine have done a great job of planning their content and community strategy and keeping the community aspect healthy.

This is a great implementation that adds value to their product, encourages positive behaviour changes and increases the likelihood of subscribers. 🤓👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

 

The Cons of Adding Community

Because the in-group dynamic is so addictive,  established community users don’t want to hurt the feelings of another established community poster and risk being an outcast, even when the question posted is a huge red flag.  This is the 8chan effect, where identification with the group as a whole becomes a bigger priority than any question or topic that might harm someone offline.

I don’t want to name and shame specific apps, but I’ve seen some terrible implementations of community apps in the last months, particularly those aimed in the mental/physical health and wellness or pregnancy related audiences.

In all the bad cases I’ve seen, the community feature felt like it wasn’t thought out beyond being an inspirational buzzword on a pitch-deck. It seems like there was no resources available for dealing with real-life scenarios, like:

– What happens when people prefer to ask the group questions that should be asked to drs because asking the group feels comforting while drs are scary?

– What happens when the top advice posters on the group prefer to offer platitudes rather than tell someone to go to the ER because their baby hasn’t kicked for 24 hours? Advice which is easily findable on the NHS, or from any hospital, website.

– in the above app for pregnant women to meet others like them locally, what ID or safety checks are available? Let’s take a moment to imagine the kind of user who has so few local contacts that this is their primary way of making friends (as I couldn’t help but wonder while using the app). It’s a vulnerable subset of users. No ID or verification was asked of me. The incidence of catfishing is probably pretty high in a ‘community’ like this.

Community Neglect Hurts Product Uptake.

The communities above felt….trashy. I deleted the apps right away.

Even though the people posting on the community tab and the people available locally to meet are almost certainly quite different demographically (US based for the message board, Madrid based for meet-ups), the kinds of posts I saw made me think I wouldn’t want to meet anyone from the app.

If your online community posters were in a room, would you want to go and hang out there for a few hours every week? If the answer is: no, then it’s not a selling point. It may even degrade from the overall app value.

Secondly, allowing these kinds of conversation to take place isn’t freedom of expression; it puts people’s lives at stake in some cases.

It also lowers your brand.

When google started to include “Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness” as SEO ranking signals, they weren’t just demonstrating some bleeding heart ethics; they understood that the value of their brand was being lowered by people posting quackery and still floating to the top of search results.

The Take-Home

Online communities have been used as a lure to bring users back to commercial websites since the early 2000’s, when they were php message boards on commerce sites or blogs with sponsored content.

They persist as a feature in many apps today because they work. Because people want to feel part of a community and want a gang.

But much like a garden, a community is only attractive when it’s well maintained.

It needs vigilant full time moderators, strong but context sensitive community standards to be enforced, and clear community guidelines. Key words and phrases may need auto replies, like “see a dr”.

You may need to design around people’s negativity and tendency to argue, like shine does.

Complaints procedures needs to be clearly stated and trustworthy. Troll questions and behaviours need to be weeded out.

How to implement community features in apps when your team is small

For many startups, this kind of full time admin isn’t possible, or isn’t scalable as more users join, and that’s where the problems arise.

If that seems like a problem that may face your idea, I’d advise one of two moves:

A. Don’t include a community until you can afford to get enough experienced admins to moderate and monitor it as it grows.

B.  Open the community in small batches at select intervals during the year to onboard and “domesticate” newbies into how things should be done. It’s easier to weed out any problem users in batches this way, as older users tend to be pretty stable in their posting habits.

This approach won’t appeal to apps that are looking for that coveted hokey stick growth pattern, but for bootstrapped or crowdsourced funded ideas, it allows the community to grow at a sustainable pace at the budget you have available.


Thinking about adding an online community to your digital product or app, and would like more specific advice? Book a call with me

UX ‘Negging’

February 8, 2020  

As I was doing my morning writing, I was thinking about UX neggging. Like how the 750 words interface ‘dings’ me when I don’t live up to its assumptions.

It assumes:

  1. there is a certain value in writing everyday and maintaining a “Streak” (which I’m ok with, as I do enjoy daily writing to clear my head), and that
  2. writing has more value at a certain word count.

Failing to write to that word count gets a “ding”. A single line in a box, but not a satisfying X. If that X  were a sound, it would sound like a can of coke being opened. A sound satisfying enough to feature in Coke’s ads.

Design for Addiction

Withholding that reward, that dopamine hit we get from completing a task, is part of the UX design for addiction – like real life negging, it’s intended to makes us crave the withheld reward even more strongly, but it’s actually just demotivating and annoying to continue using this tool for writing, since I feel I’m being unfairly penalised on days I simply have less to write. Conciseness is hardly undesirable in writing.

This is my main problem with all lifestyle apps that aim to make themselves part our daily routine. They are all dinging us for having real lives that don’t always match their developers naive assumptions.

  • That we don’t always have time to fit in a HIIT workout while travelling across the globe.
  • That we won’t log our meals & calories on our wedding day, or even while on that 12 hour flight where we’re frankly not even sure what’s IN our plate to even log it.
  • That sometimes, we only start our meditation at 5 mins to midnight, meaning we end our session the next day, and break our “streak”.
  • That writing can be most powerful when short.
  • That we don’t want to do lists that pester us to keep our lists topped up in perpetuity. Or which pester us to keep “doing” something every single day of the year, including weekends and major holidays. Real life isn’t like that. But software makes it so enjoying Christmas or a long weekend comes at the cost of getting dinged across several lifestyle apps.
The screen from Any.do when all tasks are ticked complete. Slacking off? After I just checked off a bunch of stuff? Just..no.
By comparison, here’s the screen from todoist when you’ve checked off all your tasks. Feel the difference? You can tell from the features inside it – streaks are optional, task reminders can be switched off for scheduled days- that these guys actually use it daily, and have done so for years.

 

The result? Instead of creating routines that are fulfilling, multiple apps that all apply these neggs means we are chaining together an ever more time consuming system for feeling like a failure when life happens.

It’s wild to me that people feel burned out from their own self improvement efforts, but if the very tools we use reinforce an inflexible pass/fail mentality, I can see how it makes sense.

Bad UX = Habit Breaking Design

Poorly executed ‘habit forming’ UX isn’t habit forming; it’s discouraging. I uninstall the app immediately.

  1. There’s always a competitor that will not do this shit.
  2. There’s always a non-digital option which isn’t using my data in some creepy way. If you’re doing to spy on me, at least make me feel special. 👑👸🏽

For almost a year now, I’ve preferred to use paper tracker for logging habits.. It’s non-opinionated, non presumptuous, flexible, and doesn’t need admin to accept when I’m off work/sick/busy.

And as a bonus, it’s great for making into a symptom or meds logger if you need either of those.

As for 750words, I think I’ll go back to using flowstate for my daily writing, set to 5 minutes so it’s always doable. I don’t have the “Write every day” option enabled.

Learning angular: first component

January 17, 2020  

Baby made her first component, declared it in NgModule and called it into the “app component” html file. Did I fully understand wtf I’m doing? Sort of but not enough. I guess I’ll get more used to it as I go.

 

 

 

Mistakes I made:

  • Adding commas after every line or forgetting to add commas.
  • Typing “template” instead of “templateUrl”
  • Forgetting that camel casing is a thing, because javascript.

12 Days of Productivity: Clear the browser clutter fast & save your link collections in one step.

December 17, 2019  

Too many tabs open to focus on your work? Want to organise groups of bookmarks and make them shareable and easy to find later? Today’s tip will help you do all of these things in one step.

(watch out for when I introduce my bird as “my little burden”, lol)

Using this extension is one of the hacks I used to get focused super fast, but I’ll talk about some of the others in the upcoming tips.

It’s good idea to review your link collections periodically.

Sometimes, we keep tabs open as reminders to do something with them. I’ll talk about how to be more effective with that than simply storing them away.

 

Download:

The extension I’m using in this video is http://www.gettoby.com.  Available for Chrome and Firefox Browsers.

12 days of ADHD Productivity | Day 1, Building Self Trust

December 12, 2019  

A lot of people with ADHD have entrenched stories of failure around productivity.

In this voice-cast, I explain why this makes it more exhausting to get started and harder to deliver; some common methods we set ourselves up to fail without realising it; and how to rebuild our relationship with getting thing done where we don’t feel ourselves avoiding from our todo list, or staying stuck in our comfort zones and familiar work routines.

Download the MP4 of the voice note. (best for listening on the go)

What do you think? Do you have compartmentalised beliefs around what you can/ can’t do? Where do they hold you back? Drop me a message on instagram or twitter (I’m @atomicbutterfly on both) or in the comments below.

I’m also on Anchor, where I host The Un-grind, so you can leave me a voice message there.

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