In the past, whenever I talk to people who are curious about Viki or Soompi, I will always bring up the fundamental concept behind these two services — the community. One of the biggest misconceptions about online communities is that these services tend to run by themselves. That’s not true at all. To plan and design a healthy community requires thoughtful planning and executions from all stakeholders.
Likewise, Viki online community does not only consists of bits and bytes. They are real people with the same shared interests — K-dramas and subtitle translations. I was lucky to be able to work on many community driven projects, and here are some of the key lessons that I learned from them.
Always be ready to receive feedback or criticism. If there’s a issue or something gets messed up, acknowledge it and try not to cover it up with excuses. When you’re being honest and authentic about your product/services, your community will pick up on it and cheer you on all the more because of that honest transparency.
When we did a Viki website redesign exercise, we decided to remove a section called Subtitling Team on the Video page. That didn’t sit well with the volunteers and were furious with the decision. Some even voiced out that they would boycott using Viki services, and stop contributing to our content. We reverted back to the previous design to calm the fire. Looking back, it could have been better to share and get input from some of the contributors at the early stages of the project.
How to do it?
People join communities for two reasons; first, to connect with like-minded people and secondly, to fuel their passions. Many seasoned Viki contributors told us that apart from being able to watch their favourite shows, their second interest is to be able to pick up a new languages. That story eventually inspired us to launch the Learn Mode.
Continue to engage your community, and continually talk to them. Hear their opinions and get involved.
How to do it?
When we were designing the new Viki User Profile page, we asked users to provide us their real name instead of nickname. Most of them were intimated by the design request. During our prototype sharing sessions, they told us that prefer to hide their real name. They feel more comfortable when they are allowed to use their nicknames, hide their profile photos etc. This feedback totally invalidate our assumption that displaying real name will make a user perceived to be a serious contributor than just another random user.
Identify sensitive information such as names, age, video watch list should be hidden by default. Sharing such information openly may allow advertisers to track them or hackers to take advantage of their online identity.
How did you go about designing your online community? How can we create an online community that inspires meaningful participation and increase the sense of belonging among the users?
This article was originally published on my Medium.