Many organizations have discovered the power of social features such as ratings and reviews, shareable content, and idea crowdsourcing. We will discuss the benefits of such features and what design elements make them successful (or not), as well as techniques for using an organization’s user base to learn, grow, and prosper.

Guided by usability research, we’ll cover the best ways to incorporate relevant and usable social features into your online presence to benefit your organization.

Please note: This course addresses social features on your site. We do not cover social media strategy for using Twitter, Facebook, and similar external services for marketing purposes.

Topics covered

• Defining social
• Framework for selecting social features based on business goals and audience behavior
• Implementation and usability issues that can derail social features
• Detailed user experience recommendations for implementing social features
• Liking and sharing
• Blogging
• User blog network
• Structured publishing
• Social trust, reputation, and rewards
• Ratings and reviews
• Comments
• Crowdsourcing
• Discussion forums
• Question and answers (Q&A)
• Enterprise social networks/collaboration
• Interesting uses for social media

Format

The basis of the course is a lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.

The course also includes:

• Findings from our own usability studies
• Videos from usability testing of people's behavior in response to a design
• Screenshots of designs that work and don’t work, and why
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answers