Prateek Dayal

Its very interesting to watch the reaction of people when we tell them that we run an online music community. Most people think that we run a social network and dismiss it right away. A few people get curious and ask us to explain the concept. Very few people we meet already understand the difference. I think thats because online communities are still not very popular in India. There are a few popular forums like TeamBHP that have a strong community element, but only a handful of such sites exist. In this post I would try to explain is the difference between a social network and an online community and why the dynamics are completely different.

Who do you know Already

I think this is one of the key difference between an online community and a social network. More often than not a person joins Orkut or Facebook to connect with people she knows already. They could be old classmates, colleagues or friends from college. The main intent here is to reconnect and stay in touch. A few people go to such sites to find new connections but as far as I know, it does not work very well .. specially on a network like facebook that has strong privacy settings.

Contrast this with an online community. You go there because you are interested in the theme of the community. In case of muziboo, that happens to be Music. Music that you create. Most of our users come to Muziboo to showcase their music to people who care about such home made music. When a user joins an online community, chances are she does not know most people there and is looking to form some connections (mostly online) with people who share the same interest. You are not on an online community to talk about your work, personal life, relationship status, your last trip and ten other things. You are there for just one reason only … your interest. Online communities serve a niche and serve it well.

Mindset towards making new connections

In orkut you would find several profiles (mostly of women) who express that they would not accept friendship requests from people they don’t know. In a social network, your profile is a representation of you in the online world. Your connections, communities your join reflect on you and along with your profile information give people an idea of who your are. So most people prefer not to connect with strangers (again more so in case of facebook) because they would be associated with them in someway.

In an online community, your profile is just a part of your real self. So in case of Muziboo your profile is a representation of your musical self. Your connections there are people you admire musically or who like your music. You are open to adding more friends or contacts because all your care is that they would help you in getting better in your passion. Since you know most people are there for a specific reason, you are more likely to talk to them even if you have not known them before. Its the same reason why I think groups in flickr for a certain city (say bangalore) meetup in real life every now and then and orkut meets hardly ever materialize.

Culture or Spirit of the place

Both social networks and online communities try to stay neutral. They don’t have opinions. They don’t dictate what you should do (there are however guidelines as to what not to do). However an online community does have a culture that you can feel once you have spent sometime there. For example, when I started using flickr, it took me very little time to figure out that I can go and comment on anyone’s picture and then request them for a comment. I could quickly find out that groups are a great way to find people who are interested in some specific kind/aspect of photography
and so on. This culture or spirt is defined by the people in the community but the creators of the place initially play a big roll in shaping it. Which brings me to my last point for today’s post

Nurturing the place v/s letting it be

An online community has to be nurtured. Specially in India or similar place where conventionally we have not looked at online world as a place to learn or pursue something serious. Social networks on the other hand don’t really need nurturing. You don’t need to greet new users and tell them they should comment on other people’s stuff. If a social network is all about the number of users and connections they have, an online community is all about the number of comments they make or the number of group discussions users initiate. To achieve that, community managers have to work very hard till the place carries that vibe all by itself. The concept of a community manager is absent in social networks as I know.
I would be very interested in knowing your thoughts on this article. Have you been  part of an online community before? If yes, please do tell us about it and how your experience was. Do you think social network’s groups can serve as online communities?

Popularity: 12% [?]

I have been working on Muziboo for the last 11 months now. We have done one major design revision and countless small iterations to improve the design (and ofcourse the usability). Things have show a lot of improvement and often even surprised us a lot. Being an engineer by graduation and at heart, its pretty tough for me to do the UI stuff so I thought of writing down my learnings here for other people who are in the same boat. You should (and most likely would) know that i am not a UI or usability expert, so if you wantsome real advice, go hire one. I think they are worth the money.

If you want to learn about usability, Jacob Nielsen’s website and Don’t make me think make an excellent read.

So here is how not do design your UI :)

1. Lets make it look beautiful

This is certainly the worst way to design. Its good to make your pages look nice but that alone should not drive your decision about placing things in your layout. A good way to design is to decide on the purpose of the page and see what makes the most sense. What can make it clear what the page does and help your users in doing it.

2. Lets put more content in this page. Too little right now

This is another mistake that I have personally made too often. For example, putting another tag cloud so that users don’t quit the site on this page and have something to hop on to. Putting stuff thats not related to the theme of the page, dilutes the purpose of the page. Certainly no page should be a dead end but other links on a page should feel like a logical hop rather than some random links thrown in. So while music recommendations for related music is a good idea, a tag cloud probably is not.

3. Giving equal importance to all page elements

If you land on a page and nothing stands out, you will be confused. You would spend some time in figuring out what the pages does. The purpose of your page should be clear. You can use big fonts, graphics etc to make sure you can get the message across before everything grabs user’s attention. A great example of that is Flickr. “Share your photos Watch the world” has big impactful font. Enough to catch your attention before anything else grabs it.

4. Not having a consistent structure across the site

If your pages don’t follow a theme, your users would have to figure out stuff on every page. For example. when you go to orkut or facebook, you generally know where to find the comment box or where to find the apps, where to find fans (in groups/pages) etc. You even know where to find the “Share” link on every page. Once you have learnt a page, you don’t need to spend as much time learning other pages. Define your site’s structure and then follow it.

5. Designing based on user inputs alone

Its great to listen to your users and it really helps, but most likely you will be able to talk to only a few people and that would never give you a clear picture of whats working or not working. I recommend using google analytics or similar software to find out your weak pages. These are pages with highest exit rates or bounce rates. You can also find the entrance sources on the page (keywords that people use to find this page on a search engine). If your entrance keywords are related to the page and the bounce/exit rates are still high, may be people are not getting your message right and its time to redesign the page.

These were some of my personal learnings that I am applying to come out with a new design for Muziboo and I will post the results of my experiments in another blogpost. In the meantime, let me know your feedback.

Popularity: 7% [?]