KonzeptioNerd

Usability and Sociability

Jenny Preece’s Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000) is rather reminiscent of Amy Jo Kim’s Community Building on the Web: a large volume (about 400 pages), generous spacing, amiable line drawings. Preece is a useful complement to Kim: where the latter bases her observations on wide-ranging community experience, the former accesses current research, especially sociology, to explain community phenomena.

Preece is well-researched without being dry, and the “Further Reading” recommendations at the end of each chapter are a treasure trove (although, sadly, they haven’t been updated for the 2006 re-edition and much stems from the mid- rather than the late 1990s).

Online Communities runs into some problems: e.g., like Kim, Preece has little knowledge of modern web development projects and relevant workflows (and how should she), so long stretches read kind of awkward. The checklist style of the text does not match the overall “it all depends” approach that runs though many of the recommendations. And the scope is clearly too large: community building on one hand and usability and analytics on the other is enough for two, if not three books. As it is, Preece tries to offer a comprehensive insight into both her focuses - at the cost of becoming rather superficial.

Looking at the pile of books on web communities I’ve read over the past few weeks, I’m tempted to say that little current community theory goes substantially beyond what three basics written in the 1990s have to offer: Kim’s Community Building on the Web, Preece’s Online Communities and Hagel/Armstrong’s Net Gain. Add Ralf Reichwald’s and Frank Piller’s Interaktive Wertschöpfung (”Interactive Value Creation”, 2006) and you’re quite set.

But here’s my takeaway from Preece, and I’m really glad I invested the day to read it: Preece, like so many others, tends to see online communities as extension and replacement of the town square and the local pub, comparing “virtual” communities with “real life” ones. Preece discusses “strong ties” (like the ones one would find in a traditional neighborhood) and “weak ties” which appear to be characteristic of online communities. And quite on the side, she hints that the many weak ties facilitated by the internet might be as valuable as the few strong ties one makes with people that are more or less physically close.

I wonder what she’d make of Facebook: On Facebook, I “collect” friends, the more the merrier. And for those who like this kind of thing, the little games people send around are a way of keeping in touch, sending signs of life to so many more people than one might otherwise be able to be in constant touch with. In a way, Facebook caters to the personal long tail of interpersonal relations, allowing us to maintain relations that’d probably just “go to sleep” without the internet.

Preece also offers research results that indicate that lurkers (i.e. community members who watch but don’t participate, those 90% of Jacob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 participation inequality rule) are indeed deeply involved with the communities they visit, forming strong ties even if they do not actively contribute (pp. 88-90, quoting Nonnecke, B. and Preece, J. (1999). Shedding light on lurkers in online communities. Paper presented at the Ethnographic Studies in Real and Virtual Environments: Inhabited Information Spaces and Connected Communities, January, 24-26, Edinburgh; and others).

These may be interesting finds for brand managers who worry that only the 1-9% of active users in their community will achieve relevant involvement with their brand (or product). Indeed, Preece claims that online communites can “survive with a transient population - people come and go.” (26) This is quite contrary to the current trend that sees a continuous (and continuously growing) member base as a success-criterion. - A view that the kid’s community Habbo Hotel explicitly not subscribes to. Habbo Hotel quite successfully lives with a demographic that they actively phase out at their 18th birthday - a renewable demographic, however.

Quoting J. Fernback (There is a there there. Notes toward a definition of cyber-community. In S. Jones (Ed.), Doing Internet Research. Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net (pp. 203-230). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999) on p. 26, Preece writes the perhaps most important sentence of her book:

Most definitions treat community only as an entity. In fact, community is a process.

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