Good design makes a difference in online communities too
When a good friend moved to Australia last year, he left me a book they knew I liked, You Can Find Inspiration in Everything. It’s a great book, if only because it emphasises something that I truly believe: good design really matters. If you combine good design with inspirational content then you have a significantly better product that you might otherwise have had.
Recently I received a copy of another book that emphasises this: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company from Robert Brunner (who set the groundwork for much of Apple’s design) and Stewart Emery. The book shows how firms can get significant competitive advantage from good design, and how a design-driven business can help you to meet your customer’s needs more often. It is at times quite practical, showing how to develop design-driven techniques for managing and growing a business. Useful stuff in it’s own right, but I’ve been reflecting on what both of these books can teach us about how to build and manage online communities.
At FreshNetworks, spend a lot of time when we are working on a new online community with clients to understand the very people that the community will be aimed at. It’s important to understand these people in quite some detail, including what their interaction with the brand is and how and why they would want to engage online. Part of this process is to explore their habits and behaviours, and the benefit is to make all decisions and base all discussions in the shoes of these people.
With this real understanding of the people the community is aimed at we can develop content and features that will appeal to them and help to achieve our client’s objectives. We can also work on the design of the site. The appropriate content and features are important, but it is the design that will make people want to explore the community and find out what is going on. When somebody first lands on the site they need to combination of appropriate and striking content with good design to make them want to engage.
So spending time on design is important in online communities and that’s why no two communities we produce look the same. Making changes to the look and feel is an important tool we have when we’re planning and building the community. People react and respond to design and we have to get it right. And it’s only by understanding who we are trying to attract that we can do this.
Some more reading
- Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
- Social Media Tools Don’t Matter
- Meet the designer of Amazon’s Kindle [Robert Brunner]
- At Last! PC Industry Gets Serious About Good Design
- Designers Need to Be 3 People at the Same Time!
- Jonathan Ive on Apple’s Industrial Design Strategy
jj:
I’m often frustrated by the expression ‘good design’, because it can be interpreted so many ways. Most graphic designers will think ‘good design’ refers to look and feel. Most developers will think ‘good design’ refers to supporting architecture. Most interaction designers will feel that ‘good design’ refers to usability and goal achievements. And most education designers will think of good design in terms of outcomes and learning. (Probably most lawyers and accountants think that ‘good design’ is something that can be patented and/or charged for.)
Of course the obvious point is to say that a site needs all these things. But the truth of the matter is that ‘good design’ to a graphic designer may be in direct conflict with ‘good design’ as defined by an interaction and/or education designer.
What Apple do is create hardware and software with a high degree of simplicity, very clean lines and strong usability. Most people regard it as ‘good design’… until you start talking about proprietary systems and appropriation of code. Then suddenly it becomes Evil.
I think when it comes to building online communities, ‘good design’ is absolutely dependent on the kind of community you wish to develop. A visual community will appreciate simplicity and visual richness, and an entirely logical community will appreciate access, speed and functionality. I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules with regard to design style. I agree that a well-designed site is one that is more inclined to sustain the interest of a community longer, I just think that assuming everyone should be following the Apple standard is problematic.
6 October 2008, 2:56 pmFreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » Design matters. Understand who you are designing for.:
[...] posted before about how and why good design matters in online communities. We spend a lot of time at FreshNetworks understanding the audience the online community is aimed [...]
23 November 2008, 11:35 pm