The secret social life of a website

Think of a website today, and you’re as likely to visualise it as a coffee bar or commune as you are to think of it as a newspaper or brochure. Relationships between users give many sites their stickiness, and the success of many of today’s leading websites depends on how people socialise there. For the designers, it means there’s another dimension to consider: they can’t just think about the look and feel and usability. They need to look at the social psychology of the site’s users too and find ways to facilitate useful interactions.

For a start, designers need to understand why members join their community. People have an innate need to join groups resulting from the evolutionary survival advantage groups afforded and they also join groups to accomplish a task that would not be possible individually (such as political action groups or Wikipedia). People also join for social identity or status, or simply to get the chance to interact with the others there. By working out why people join, designers can find out how to engage users in the community and how to ensure their site satisfies the users’ needs.

Designers also need to consider how users influence each other. Social facilitation happens when the physical presence of others encourages people to work harder, or do something better. If that applies on the site, high profile reputation systems that recognise user contributions could encourage the participation of others. Alternatively, there might be social loafing where people work less hard when in a group than individually. The effect of other site members will have implications for how user generated content is incorporated into a site, how users are recognised and rewarded for contributions (either individually or in groups) and how users are rewarded or punished for their behaviour or contributions.

In analysing a community, designers should look at the roles, norms and cohesiveness:

• Roles can be informal or formal (e.g. moderator) and have relevance for how identifiable people should be and whether reputation information should be available on members.
• Norms are formal or informal rules of conduct for users. They raise questions about whether behaviour should be monitored, what group boundaries should exist and what retribution there should be for those who break the rules.
• Cohesiveness is how closely group members are bound together, and therefore how loyal a person will be to the group. Factors affecting cohesiveness are commitment to group tasks, attraction between members, volume and frequency of group interactions, and group identity.

By analysing the social psychology of an online community, designers can define online communities and find ways to support the interactions between members without neglecting the website’s own goals for participants. We still hear occasional mentions of ‘hits’, a meaningless measurement that counted every script and picture, so things won’t change soon. But in the next five years or so, the industry will need to establish metrics that reflect the value their audience brings to advertisers and will need to educate advertisers on what they mean. The challenge will be to create standards that enable metrics to be measured between different sites.