Too many people are investing too much time in activities that will have little long-term impact on their community.
Over the past fifteen years, we’ve conducted over 1,000 user research interviews for clients, collected more than 200,000 survey results, and watched more tedious CrazyEgg/Hotjar videos than I care to remember.
We’ve systematically tracked the impact of numerous changes over time (both those that did and didn’t work).
I can summarise our findings in a simple statement;
How most organisations think members behave in a community differs significantly from how many members behave.
This leads to repetitive mistakes in community design, misplaced priorities, and communities which aren’t as successful as they should be.
The biggest cause of this problem is community narcissism.
What Is Community Narcissism?
Community narcissism occurs when an organisation overestimates the community’s importance in its members’ lives.
The organisation assumes members care as much about the community as they do when, in reality, they don’t.
This manifests itself in things like:
Believing members open, read, and remember automated messages vs. just quickly clicking through them.
Thinking most members want to become regular, active, members of the community (if they just received the right push) vs. just members just want to achieve their goal and leave.
Creating features requiring members to invest more time in the community vs. helping members accomplish their goals quicker.
Grossly overestimating the impact of gamification vs the low priority, most members assigned to it.
In short, anything that requires members to invest more time and effort than necessary is often a sign of community narcissism.
You can browse any list of communities and find countless examples of community narcissism.
Here’s a simple test to determine if you might be afflicted by community narcissism.
Are you asking your members to do something you’ve never personally done in a hosted community? (Or do you struggle to think of others who have?)
If the answer is yes, you might be afflicted by community narcissism.
How To Prioritise What To Work On
Much of our work with clients is overcoming this outdated thinking and bringing communities into line with how members think and engage with communities.
This is how we can achieve results like this and like this for our client.
We can overcome outdated thinking with three simple steps.
Follow trend data over time. We will always find that many, if not most, of the features, categories, groups, and community areas receive very low visits and engagement from members. Applying a simple 20/80 principle can really help here.
Undertaking proper user research interviews. Far too few people have members share their screens and browse the community. We go through this process with most of our clients. The results are always fascinating. It lets us create a clear list of problems members face. We will usually validate these results with member surveys.
The wide-angle lens. One benefit of working with a community consultancy is that you get the expertise of what’s worked in hundreds of communities rather than just your personal experience. After 15 years, we have a firm idea of which techniques are likely to benefit each community.
By the end of this process, we will usually have a clear list of issues members want to resolve. A good example of this is below:
(Notice how none of these relate to the problems that attract the most discussion/attention in most community resources, including ours).
This kind of research is critical to improving a community (and is why it might help to hire a community consultancy).
The Counter-Intuitive Truths Cheat Sheet
While doing this for clients, we’ve made some discoveries that apply to most communities.
So here’s a cheat sheet of things you might want to consider when developing your community experiences.
The majority of visitors read almost nothing. Most visitors won’t read more than 2 to 3 words on your homepage. They scan to find the ‘thing’ of interest and then jump. You should reduce static homepage text to a minimum.
Members struggle to follow conversations. They want to find the discussions they’ve participated in previously (to check for updates) but often struggle to do so. They forget what category they posted in and can’t find it on the homepage, which is a huge frustration. It should be simple for members to see a list of discussions they’ve participated in.
Members switch to a different site quickly. Rather than spending 5 to 10 seconds trying to get your SSO or two-factor authentication to work, they’re more likely to switch to a different site to find what they need. It’s just too much effort. Sites that log people out often for security reasons (Salesforce) struggle most with this.
Most people make a couple of searches for the answer. Asking a question is usually a last resort. Most people with a question will make a few searches and then publish a question.
Members post questions in multiple places. People care more about the speed of getting an answer than where they get it. Around 50% of people post questions in the community and support simultaneously (aside – this plays havoc with call deflection stats!)
Average visitors browse the homepage for 5 to 10 seconds. They want to feel a sense of progress, so they browse for 5 to 10 seconds and then click on something (anything) to gain momentum. People hate feeling stuck.
We were surprised that only a tiny percentage of regulars scan the latest discussions. Despite the common practice of putting the latest questions at the top of the homepage, very few people scan them. Most consider them irrelevant to their current problems.
Members browse the top-level navigation before searching. Most view what’s in the navigation and click the word that most closely resembles what they’re looking for. The navigation’s appearance and structure are critical. Members must be able to quickly find what they need.
Almost nobody seems to look at the leaderboards, and even the people on them don’t look at them often. This is especially the case for static leaderboards based on cumulative activity since launch, as opposed to monthly leaderboards or the past 30 days.
No one reads the welcome message; what appears in it doesn’t matter unless people are confused about the site’s nature. If they don’t understand the community, they might glance at the welcome message to comprehend it, but these are rare situations.
No one reads the code of conduct. Theoretically, you could put any terms and conditions in there, and people would still agree. Interestingly, they will read “The Five Rules Of [community]” articles. So, maybe give it more of a Fight Club vibe?
Members generally like seeing the list of popular discussions in a community (don’t confuse this with the latest discussions). This list works best on individual discussion pages as much as on the homepage. However, once members have seen the list, they dislike seeing the same discussions again.
Related discussions matter a lot – but only in high-volume communities. At low volume, the related discussions usually aren’t relatable enough. They appear because something has to appear in that section.
Recent activity labels and liveliness stats matter. If the community seems dead, few people ask questions. Recent activity labels are far more critical than any static copy or text on the page. While no one can recall the liveliness statistics, they might help build a more subconscious understanding of how busy the community is.
Members click back to Google to search instead of using the community search. Instead of using the on-site search tool, most visitors return to the Google search engine and type their query again. That’s because they want the best results from throughout the web rather than only those that might appear in the community (which is quite logical, considering Google indexes all the results from the community).
Nobody wants to befriend/connect with people in a hosted community. Almost nobody was connected (friend requests) or exchanged DMs with nearly anyone in any brand community (except the community manager/admins).
Newsletters are massively overrated. Newsletters tend to end up in the promotions folder, which few people will see. Even when they are caught, very few people take the time to read them (digests are a different story, however).
You can summarise a lot of this under:
-> Things which reduce effort and save members time = good.
-> Things which consume more time and increase effort = bad.
Rule Of Thumb – Better To Remove Than Add
Generally, you achieve better results by removing things than by adding them.
This is because removing things usually saves people time.
Reducing the number of messages, notifications, and places people must look to find information is good.
The key to improving navigation (and the entire member experience) in most mature communities is not improving the quality of maps but reducing the number of roads.
It’s harder to get lost when there are fewer places to go.
Once you start using data to understand what members want, you usually remove things to improve the experience vs. adding things.
Good luck!
