So, I experienced an interesting problem/opportunity recently.
I was working on a project to add community to an existing website. The client is in healthcare. If you’ve not worked in healthcare before, it is a highly regulated industry. For example, getting site content approved requires several rounds of review by several reviewers. It sounds tedious, but it isn’t bad.
So, adding forums and user-generated content represented a significant step… it will be a moderated community, but one in which the approval cycle is shortened to minutes and not weeks.
So, all in all, it’s an excellent step.
However, while discussing the interactions and experience during the wireframing process, two points were brought up by the marketers:
- Why can’t people just write what they want without signing in or registering for the community?
- Why should we let people upload an avatar? They might upload something “bad.”
I thought these were very interesting issues… particularly because they seem to counter the idea of community and specifically the community we were creating for our personas.
Issue One: Guests
The site’s personas rely heavily on peer to peer contact for shared wisdom. Personal knowledge of the person or an understanding that the person who is providing the wisdom is or has undergone similar experiences lends a high level of credibility to what they are saying/writing. Our research indicated that this expertise was extraordinarily important to our users.
The goal of this community was to foster online social groups through shared conditions and experiences. It’s hard to foster friendships and alliances with people who are not invested in the community, who are not in the community.
Issue Two: Avatars
Let me just first say that I don’t know that I want to imagine this community without avatars.
An avatar is a simple way of saying, “Hi! I’m a person.” An avatar is quickly recognizable and gives some indication of what kind of person you are. For example, a friend of mine’s avatar is a monkey and a banana smiling, with their arms around each other. The caption says, “BFF.” Goofy, yes… but hey, so is she.
Compare that to the default avatar: the gray silhouette of a woman. What about that says there is a person with a unique identity here? Does that convey credibility?
How It Went
Fortunately, we addressed the issues and were able to re-align as a group and move on. Yes, letting the people take the reigns of the dialogue can be nerve-wracking for brands in highly regulated spaces. But, ultimately, it can also be very rewarding.