In Nara, in Japan, there is the largest wooden building in the world. And in that building is one of the largest Buddhas. Every year there is a festival to this Buddha and I was at the festival a couple of weeks ago. Central to the festivities is an afternoon long performance of a traditional Noh play. As I stood in the sun watching the play I realised I had no idea at all what was happening. Not because I don't speak Japanese. I've watched plays in foreign languages before and at least manage to follow the gist of what is happening. With this Noh play I couldn't even do that and so it was just a group of Japanese people in costumes singing and playing musical instruments. Great as this was to see, I did feel I didn't get as much out of the performance as I might have done.
Reflecting on this, it's clear what the problem was. Whilst any play I might see in Europe or indeed anywhere with a Western tradition of theatre would have pretty much the same broad plot. There would be goodies and baddies (the latter would seem to have the upper hand at the start but eventually lose). There would be a nouement and denouement. Some traditional roles would play out. In Noh plays there is a very different tradition and a very different set of habits and customs. Which makes it difficult for me to engage with.
This need for tradition, habits and customs is one that is common to all social interactions, and something that we see playing out online, especially in social media and online communities. If you follow these traditions and habits then you will make it easier for people to engage with your site. And if you introduce a whole new set, then people will find it difficult to engage.
We saw this recently with Facebook when they changed their user interface. A large number of users complained, setting up groups (like the almost 2.5 million people in this group) and posting their dislike of the new format. What they were complaining about wasn't the look and feel, at least not from an aesthetic perspective. They were complaining that the habits and customs they had got used to had gone; they needed to learn new things and do things in different ways. Facebook responded to this by starting to reintroduce some old formats and supporting old habits. Not a complete reversal, but a change in design that reflected the need to respect the traditions and customs people were used to.
We see this in the online communities that we build for customers at FreshNetworks. If people are used to a way of doing things then we need to respect that. If they expect to be able to message their friends in the community then we let them. If they are used to being able to vote and comment on photos then we should let them do this. And if they use one set of language and terminology then we should mirror that.
It's why we spend time when we set-up a community to understand the target audience, and both their relationship with the brand and their use of websites and social media. The more we know about their habits and customs online, the better we can design the site for them and the more likely they will engage with the community.
Traditions and habits matter and identifying and respecting the ones that matter most will help to ease engagement.
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