Usability of community software
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
Usability of Community Software
Session B5
Convener Ted Young (Guidewire)
Attending: Nancy Frishberg (notes), Vinnie Lauria, Joe Boyle, Sabahat Ashraf "iFaqeer," Jay Elkerton, and perhaps a couple of others whose names we didn't get.
Tags
Twitter, Facebook, usability, HootSuite, TweetDeck, NGO-in-a-box, Lefora, forum, Reaper #clswest
Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations
Ted convened this session to discuss how various tools support community interactions: he was thinking largely of Twitter and Facebook to start with.
- Hootsuite
- How Ted uses it
- Catch up on a day's worth of updates
- Research something I haven't had time to look at yet, give me context around a tweet
- Search a column - someone said something about X
- I'm interested in searches that are unsupported: Yahoo Pipes, a stream of stuff that is filtered/fed for two (or more) streams
- triggers: When something appears, I don't want to dedicate a column to it, but I want to be aware of it. E.g., "Agile testing" - hey I want to see that.
- The order of entries:
- in the conversation column ("Mentions") is oldest on top, newer on the bottom, but does not allow you to go back to the earliest if it scrolls too far;
- the order of entries in a #(hashtag)... column, or the Home Feed is the reverse, newest on top and oldest on the bottom.
The inconsistency in this pattern is confusing
Most of the tools for Twitter have no way or poor ways to monitor what you've seen and what you haven't, to hide/show various categories (people, hashtags, particular entries, etc.)
- Tweetdeck
- allows you to mark as "read" but they don't understand Fitts' Law so the affordance is a tiny dot beside the name of the person, hard to find and hard to touch
- you have to know to roll-over the image associated with a Twitter user to find most of the common widgets; not easily discoverable, but sort of usable once found
- How Ted uses Twitter
A conversation can be followed but not from the familiar self-contained clients, web or otherwise. He's so frustrated he's now writing his own client. He's using FEST testing for his SWING based client.
Ted's idea about conversations in Twitter: i.e., multiple people talking about the same topic with Reply to the same hashtag.
- reading L > R implies that a conversation might proceed up/down from any conversation starter. (See photo of blackboard sketch showing boxes with numbers, where numbers mean temporal order of the tweets.)
NancyF: Basecamp as another example of a tool for getting stuff done within a community
iFaqeer: [NGO in a Box] from [Tactical Tech]: distributions of powerful tools (not necessarily solely for non-profits); you'll need a Project Management tool, you'll need a ... They have different "editions" aimed at different functionality (Security Edition; Audio/Video Edition; Open Publishing Edition...).
Ted: Online communities that he participates in
- amateur musician with home studio with thousands of dollars of equipment, so he looks at forums associated with e.g. [[KVRAudio. But are forums the right solution? Or is this the right tool for having people communicate with each other?
Vinnie Lauria (http://www.Lefora.com):
- Works for a company making forum software.
- Originally, had a lot of innovative ideas, and are now back to older style looks, because of feedback from users who were accustomed to older clients. If the owner of the software was passionate and able to promote it, then there might be a chance for it. But it's hard to overcome the existing "standard" or familiar.
- Enabled import of older forums, but some small features might not be implemented. Headache of the community; a couple of loud users would complain to the admin of the forum and that person communicates with Vinnie's org.
iFaqeer:
- social networking and forums are different channels.
Ted:
- Reaper is a commercial product with 2 versions, a fully functional version is $60 and the greater functionality version is $200. Ted looks at his Reaper pages perhaps every couple weeks.
Vinnie: Lefora has now got a weekly newsletter that mostly gets created automatically, and evidence shows that people respond to mention in the newsletter: both "welcome these new member" (with photos/image), and "someone responded to the thread you were tracking". But the newsletter is delivered via EMAIL.
Ted: Twitter and email are open channels. [REAPER] is not open on his desktop all the time, so there's a commitment to go through the conversations.
Ted has turned off desktop notification of anything, because he's concerned about focus and the loss thereof.
Ted wants filter by favorites. Wants "fade over time". E.g. internal wiki needs fade over time also. But now nothing happens, the obsolete stuff is still up and equally relevant, and the edit date is the only way to figure out it might be out-of-date. "How often it's viewed" may be as important as "When was it last updated?" If you think there's something wrong on this page, you want to mark it for review toward "obsolete". Wiki gardner (or curator or information manager) is a real role, along with good wiki design and management for a wiki to be useful and usable.
That's documentation and it's hard to manage. It's not automatic. Structures, categories, tags are all ways to help manage "living" or "stale/obsolete". Agile's focus on working software does not mean there's no value in documentation. Tech writers are still necessary, helpful and should be encouraged to create documents appropriate to the work involved (both for developers and customers).
Ted: usability of Facebook is worse for collaboration. The Live Feed is not in temporal order. The hidden "Hide" button is silly (its affordance - difficult to discover - and the non-granularity of it - do I want to know their status, who they friended, their input to topics we don't share....)
Multiple twitter accounts:
- Vinnie: one for work, one for personal, one for the meetup
- iFaqeer; almost exclusively on the iPhone for multiple identities
- Ted: almost everyday he's complaining about something in HootSuite, which is the least obnoxious of clients he's tried. They're saving bandwidth they think; when he comes back after an hour, they load new stuff without an indication of where he had last left off.
Last item: There was a blog post that says there's no way (in Javascript or whatever) to customize Twitter with (e.g.) plug-ins. FF is powerful because it permits the plugins.
