A little over a year ago, our Francesco D’Orazio presented this slideshow at the WARC‘s “Online Research Now and Next” conference. Since then it has been one of our top presentations on Slideshare. Augmented Research is still relevant, which makes this presentation another installment of our Top Posts of the Past Series.
I’ve presented this at WARC‘s “Online Research Now and Next” conference just yesterday… let me know what you think!
A few years ago, I used to do a bit of comedy: I remember we put on a couple of classic French plays based on comedia del arte and one year we even created and presented a whole show based on improvisation (I swear it worked and was a great success!)
The rules of improv and comedia are similar: participants have a frame or a canvas and a few elements, but the canvas is blank and participants have to write the story.
This technique is now largely used in participative design to get the most out of the participants’ creativity.
Now I’m wondering how we can get to the next level of user empowerment.
For instance, could users or participants be involved in an interactive storyline, either in the way a social website is built or maybe, in a more specific context, in the way a research community project is held?
When I was at uni, we had this class called “Complexity”. Apart from lots of boring hours of lectures, we had a very practical exercise in which we analysed a complex situation and interviewed its participants. Within my group, we chose to check out the complex world of playing chess. There are methods and techniques but also a whole bunch of parameters that cannot be foreseen or analysed and mathematically resolved: for example the kind of psychological tricks you find in both chess and poker.
The world is complex: you do not know the answer to the problems we are facing. A bunch of really cool people, the self-proclaimed Bucket Brigade, give a great explanation of this fact and suggest a casual loop model to tackle the complex issues.
As you can see this method involves variables (could be our participants, their background, the stimulus, and the context e.g online community) and cause-consequences (between all the variables mentioned).
Back in the 80s and 90s, geeky kids were already enjoying the earliest examples of interactive storytelling with the glorious “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books.
To cut a long story short, you start reading the book like any other but at the end of each chapter or sequence of the story, you, the reader, are asked to choose between a couple of actions. You are then redirected to the page or chapter that will tell the consequences of your decisions. In these books the reader is the hero and you may die (or lose) before completing the book. This sounds quite a lot like a paper-based video game, doesn’t it?
Everybody’s buzzing about it and game mechanics can encourage participation so I wonder whether we could do the same with online communities.
The bad news is that unless you’ve got a fair amount of disposable cash, it’s going to be hard to build a platform that has as much flexibility in the flow of interfaces and actions as in real life.
Therefore, at Face, we decided to give as much flexibility to the tools participants are using on our online communities as possible, and increase the fluidity of the task flow in order to give them a greater choice. And the good news is that, I believe these things have added a certain degree of complexity to our platforms.
However, to me, the ugly news comes from The Last Psychiatrist (don’t get me wrong, I love this blog!). In this article the author tells the story of a guy who was out with his girlfriend and got beaten up by a 17 year old.
One of the comments reads:
My purpose in using these scenarios is to lead you to realize that “what would you do if…?” is an impossible question because a situation doesn’t happen to you, you are the situation.
Basically if You meets Future You, then either you are (both) locked in the psychiatric ward or you’ve created a space-time warp and the world is going to implode soon (or has imploded already)
In other words, It’s quite impossible to build a Choose Your Own Life in an online community.
I think the point in adding complexity to our online communities and the way we design online tasks is to empower users. They already know what they like and what they want and who they are, our goal is to make sure they can fully express it, not necessarily by creating something new but by simply allowing them to be themselves.
Another great bonus is that giving them maximum flexibility in the storyline they want to follow should give a great leverage to their engagement. As Peter Bergman explains in his blog post, the highest motivation comes only at the right time:
“What’s important is that your moment of choice is when you are in the right state of mind — when you need the least willpower — to make the best decision.”
Following on from yesterdays look at gamification, socialisation and experiential, here is part 2 of our look at The Future of Research Communities:
Co-creation
The essence of co-creation is brands, agencies and consumers working together, at the same time, towards a shared goal. At the moment through tools such as online focus groups and message boards all stakeholders can work together, share information in real time and collaborate.
However again, if co-creation is going to evolve online it needs to break free from web 2.0 and new tools need to be created. Google Wave gave us a hint, albeit very complicated, about how working together online could potentially work.
This technology is obviously still in its infancy and needs a serious clean up if it is going to become mainstream and universally useable. However the thought behind it, a group of people working in a stream of consciousness, editing, sharing and collaborating instantly, is exactly what is needed for co-creation to evolve online.
This kind of approach means that a whole group of people can work together at an arranged time or co-creators can dip in, leave their feedback, build their ideas and then dip out, at a convenient time for them.
Co-creation is going to embed itself in traditional research techniques and the online co-creation tools need to catch up with the fresh, innovative offline approach.
Building
Whether it’s for traditional research, co-creation or crowdsourcing online, respondents are often asked “If you could create your perfect “insert type of product here” what would it be like?”
For those answering this can be a very difficult process. Trying to describe what you are imagining in your head is not easy. This is why tools that allow users to fully release their creative thinking should be developed and implemented. Giving people the chance to fully articulate themselves leads to better ideas being developed and better insights exposed.
As online tools develop, creative outlets will improve, which should be snapped up by research communities instantly. Basic creative functionality such as paint tools is the start to this but when working creatively users shouldn’t be pigeon holed into giving a set type of response.
They should be able to respond however they want to, whether that is creating something within the community, uploading from their own tools, describing ideas in text or a combination of all.
A submitted idea should be like a scrapbook: influences, thoughts, ideas, feedback and final submission. Covering every angle of the creative process getting as much insight, innovation and creativity as possible.
Realism
Online research communities are artificial environments in which we discuss and debate real life. Users are asked to describe their behaviour, attitude, decision-making process and thoughts towards certain subjects. The gap between the environment and reality needs to be closed in order for results to be as real and natural as they possibly can.
For a long time community members have been telling us what they think rather than showing us how they feel. This needs to change. By sending community members out into their worlds and allowing them to report back will bring a much deeper level of insight and understanding.
We should be giving audiences time (and tools) to consider responses in real life before they download their experiences and feelings in to the community. This will allow agencies and brands to get under the skin of a subject rather than just receiving superficial thoughts.
Tasks need to be integrated to increase depth and bring real behaviours, feelings and beliefs to life. This will, in turn, help the industry stop thinking of audiences as ‘consumers’ and start seeing them as people.
Analytics
Online research communities can hold an amazing amount of qualitative data; even the smallest community can generate a massive amount of content. Having access to all this content is great, but often clients would like to just get an overview of what is currently happening in the community and no more. They do not have the time to sift through all the information.
Face’s social media monitoring tool, Pulsar, has pioneering analysis tools that give brands an overview about what is being said about them online. This includes giving clients quick a overview of hot topics, key words, trends, sentiment, volume, who, what and where.
We are now in the process of converting these analysis tools for our client dashboard. This will allow both admin and clients to get a quick and comprehensive summary of what is going on in the community in real-time. Including semantic analysis, network analysis, discourse analysis, statistics and semiotics.
The use of these techniques in research communities will bring instant data visualisations to analysis. This will make digesting all community data easier, bring a bit of science to the platform and add an extra layer of interpretation to help back up assumptions.
As real time social analysis continues to progress so will the output tools for both social media analysis and online community research.
Although much of the above is a long way off in terms of being ready for launch, it does not make it any less exciting. As researchers continue to adapt the latest internet technology for research purposes we should begin to see some really innovative tools entering the arena.
Online research communities are going to be branching out into new and innovative areas and become a much more immersive and interesting environment for users. Which means better ideas, better insights and a better experience for community members, community managers and brand stakeholders alike.
Bring on the future.
We all wait with baited breath to see where the web is going to take us next. The hype surrounding new innovations such as Google Instant or HTML 5 is massive. As users we are not only interested in how the latest departures look and feel, but also how they are going to change our behaviour.
There are those who look at it on a purely personal level – how are these changes going to change my actions? And there are those who look at it from a much wider berth, how are these changes going to influence the web as whole?
As a community manager, when I try out a new user experience my mindset is immediately on whether it can help move online research communities in a new direction. How can a new technology, technique or tool be adapted and used to make a research community more engaging, more intuitive and more interesting for those who use them?
Web 2.0 has been at the core of most research communities from their conception, but as technology and its users move on research communities need to evolve to stay relevant for community members, clients and community managers alike.
So, as we continue to test our reliance on web 2.0 tools and begin to harness technology that allows us to do bigger, brighter and bolder things, where does the future of online research communities lie?
Socialization
When we first started with our online research communities we made the decision that we would not include large social elements. We wanted our communities to focus around co-creation and research, not user interaction and social media. For many reasons this was the right decision, but as the internet has evolved people don’t just want to be sociable, they expect it.
In the early days of Headbox we found that our users who worked on our co-creation projects were finding each other online anyway. Whether it be on Facebook or MySpace users were creating groups, talking about the projects and friend requesting each other, us and our clients!
There was no facilitation on our behalf, the socially proactive nature of young people meant they were going to connect no matter what. So, as our communities have grown so have the social elements, and as social networks evolve, so will research communities user interaction.
This does not mean we are going to be building our own social network. It’s more about allowing people to connect, if they want to. It’s allowing our members to share their information, find the people they are working with and building their own profiles.
As social networking tools and online sociability grow, research communities will continue to incorporate what is suitable, and no more.
Gamification
As Marion explained in her earlier #ResCom101 blog using gaming mechanics is an obvious way to increase engagement and interest. Developing league tables, points systems and badge rewards seem like a no-brainer, they make everything more fun and rewarding for users. However, this isn’t gaming for the sake of gaming, this is gaming for the sake of research.
Rivalries and competition will definitely increase the enjoyment levels for users but there is a strong chance that results may get skewed. If community members start to post responses just to take part in gaming aspects then you are not going to receive the research output you need.
Gaming mechanics will begin to play a big part in research communities but it needs to be a subtle, intelligent approach. Whether it is keeping users rewards/badges private to them or having an intelligent points system, you need to make sure that users aren’t acting unnaturally due to gaming elements.
As well as engaging users, gamification and its rewards can also help when incentivizing users, as Marion points out, sometimes the most basic rewards can be the most fulfilling.
Experiential
In research communities the reception of information is crucial. As well as being engaging, tasks need to be easy to understand or there could be confusion. If users lose interest when receiving the task the results suffer. If there is a lot of block text to read or a lot of repetition, community members are well within their right to get bored.
People prefer to intake information if it is visual, audio or both. It is a lot easier and a lot more entertaining.
Video briefings are brilliant and can cover a lot of information very quickly. Teaming task copy with physically showing users what you would like them to do is always an easy way to make sure there can be no confusion about what is expected. At the moment video briefings seem to be an every now and again thing, this will increase and they should become normal practice for community managers.
Producing engaging, visually orientated Slidecasts that allow community members to intake information as they please is one way of communicating lots information in an interesting way.
HTML 5 will begin to play a big part in this, its ability to create clean, interesting, flexible and interactive applications will help research communities move away from Web 2.0 and allow community developers more creativity when designing task formats.
The evolution of entertaining briefings and tasks revolves around users being able to complete tasks whilst they’re being briefed. Integrating visuals and the ability for users to complete tasks as they go, and at their most engaged, will make it a much more entertaining and seamless experience for users.
This is not something that is going to happen overnight but it is the direction in which online research communities are moving.
Part 2, which will be published on Friday, will be focussing on co-creation, building, realism and analytics.
To check out past posts from the Research Communities 101 click here
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