Integrating Social Features on Mainstream Websites:
User-Generated Content, Social Media, Collaboration, and More
- New York: Wednesday, March 24
- Chicago: Thursday, April 22
- London: Thursday, May 20
- San Francisco: Wednesday, June 16
- Toronto: Wednesday, August 11
Jen Cardello
Full-Day Tutorial
This seminar addresses how organizations can effectively design and integrate social features to
benefit both the users and the organization.
Instead of focusing on the social media and Web 2.0 hype, we’ll examine our empirical
research findings on actual user behavior. 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 own online strategy.
We’ll examine several social features that mainstream organizations can successfully apply to
their websites, including:
- product support wikis and forums, which decrease pressure on customer service (and reduce costs) by letting customers resolve issues among themselves;
- content-sharing capabilities, which let users themselves demonstrate product usage; and
- idea-generation features to collect and measure ideas from customers/constituents.
This seminar will:
- Define and illustrate social features
- Help you determine which features can best serve your users and business objectives
- 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 within your site's user experience:
- Company/organization-hosted community:
- Forums (support, idea-generation, education)
- Content sharing
- User/member blogs
- Corporate/organization blog
- Video channel
- Product/service ratings/reviews
- Article and blog commenting
- Rater/reviewer/commenter reputation
- Collaborative site/wiki
- Interactive widgets including polls and quizzes
Course Outline
- Overview and examples
- Usefulness of each type of social feature
- Business case for social features and ROI
- Considerations for contributors and lurkers
- The “sense of community”
- Social features appropriate for different sectors/business models:
- High-tech
- Healthcare
- E-commerce (B2C)
- B2B
- Government
- Media/publications
- Education
- Stats and research
- Hype vs. reality
- What users say they use and like
- What users really do
- Lessons from stand-alone communities and social networks
- Feature usability
- Content sharing
- Ratings/reviews
- Forums and discussion groups
- Blogs
- Comments
- User profiles and reputation management (status ratings such as points or karma)
- Collaborative sites/wikis
- One-to-one communications (chat, messages)
- One-to-many communications (announcements, invitations, ideas, opinions)
- Polls and quizzes
- Encouraging increased user participation; dealing with the typical "90-9-1" distribution of user engagement
- Implementation tips for success
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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