Integrating Social Features on Mainstream Websites:
User-Generated Content, Forums, Feedback, and More
- Toronto: Wednesday, August 11
- San Francisco: Tuesday, October 5
- Copenhagen: Wednesday, October 20
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 social features that mainstream organizations can integrate into existing websites to energize, engage and embrace their customer base.
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:
- Share-able content
- Ratings and reviews
- Support forums
- Organization blogs
- Innovation crowdsourcing
- Promoting Twitter and Facebook
- Discussion Forums
- YouTube
- Polls/quizzes/surveys
- Wikis
- User-to-User chat
Course Outline
- Defining “Social”
- Understanding Social Web drivers
- Business benefits of Social features
- Stats and research
- What users say they use and like
- What users really do
- The importance of being genuine
- Participation incentives
- Defining a social strategy
- Participation Inequality (90-9-1 Rule)
- User profiles and reputation management
- Design Guidelines:
- Discussion Forums
- Support Forums
- User blogs
- Share spaces
- Promoting Twitter and Facebook
- Corporate/Organization blogs
- Content sharing
- Ratings/reviews
- Comments
- User-to-User chat
- Collaborative sites/wikis
- Polls and quizzes
- Innovation crowdsourcing
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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