Designing Usable Social Features
- Edinburgh: Tuesday, March 20
- Washington D.C.: Wednesday, May 16
Jen Cardello
Full-Day Training Course
This seminar addresses how organizations can leverage their user-base to learn, grow and prosper.
Many organizations have discovered the power of social features such as ratings and reviews, share-able
content and idea crowdsourcing. In this class, we will discuss the benefits of such features and what
design elements make them successful (or not).
Tapping into Nielsen Norman Group user research and guided by user videos and many examples of
social features — including both successful and poor implementations — we’ll
discuss the best ways to incorporate relevant and usable social features into your online
presence to benefit your organization.
This seminar will:
- Define what it means to be “social”
- Illustrate social features
- Help you choose organization- and user-appropriate social features for your site
- Detail implementation and usability issues that can derail social features
What You’ll Learn
Based on our broad user testing, this session will give you usability and usefulness insights
that can help you decide whether — and how — to include the following features on your site:
- Share-able content
- Ratings and reviews
- Support forums
- Organization blogs
- Idea crowdsourcing
- Discussion Forums
- Q & A systems
- Polls
- Collaboration
- Wikis
Course Outline
- Defining “Social”
- Understanding Social Web drivers
- Framework for selecting social features
- Social planning mistakes
- Matching organization’s needs with appropriate social features
- Matching audience propensities with social features
- Participation Inequality
- How Social features benefit the organization
- Shareable content
- Facebook “Liking”
- User blog network
- Organization/Corporate blog
- Process to define a blog
- Choosing effective social representatives
- Blogging frequency
- Sentiment Measurement
- Ratings and Reviews
- Generating reviews
- Ratings without reviews
- Responding to negative reviews
- Flagging
- Reviewer reputation
- Comments
- Anonymous commenting
- Comment moderation
- Pre-moderation
- Post-moderation
- Reactive moderation
- Crowdsourcing
- Idea-generation
- Avoiding duplication
- Discussion Forums
- Determining what the audience has in common
- Types of reputation schemes
- Encouraging conversation
- Forum search
- Q&A systems
- Why Q&A versus discussion forums
- Quantifying contributor helpfulness
- How to make a forum better serve Q&A needs
- Social Network
- Rewarding contributions/activity
- Internal social network focus
- Share-spaces
- Collaboration
- Wikis
- Approaches to Social Media
- Considering demographics in media selection (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Using Twitter for customer support
- Promoting social media
- LinkedIn Polls
What is NOT Covered
This seminar does not cover the use of social media on other sites than your own
(except for the segment on how to promote social media on your own site). Thus, it does not address social
media strategy for using Twitter, Facebook, and similar external services.
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, video clips from our user studies, and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This seminar is targeted toward “mainstream” websites, such as those related to
traditional business, e-commerce, marketing, news and content, government sites, and non-profit organizations, as
well as corporate intranets. It's for people who want to integrate social features within the broader user
experience on such sites, or to learn whether social features will work to further their business goals.
It’s not for people who want to design the "next Facebook" or build a stand-alone social
networking service, such as LinkedIn.
Instructor
Jen Cardello is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Since 1996, Cardello has
specialized in user-centered and business-focused website strategy, expert reviews, competitive analysis, and
information architecture. She previously led customer experience consulting practices at Gomez Advisors, Watchfire,
and Keynote Systems, advising clients in sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, and lodging.
During this time, she also developed hundreds of user experience criteria for the Keynote Scorecards that benchmark
dozens of financial services websites including banks, brokerages, lenders, and insurance carriers. As principal
of her private practice, Cardello worked with clients in transportation, financial services, publishing, and
education to define user and usage-centered Web strategies and architectures. She has a BFA in architecture
from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
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