When a good friend moved to Australia last year, he left me a book they knew I liked, You Can Find Inspiration in Everything. It's a great book, if only because it emphasises something that I truly believe: good design really matters. If you combine good design with inspirational content then you have a significantly better product that you might otherwise have had.
Recently I received a copy of another book that emphasises this: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company from Robert Brunner (who set the groundwork for much of Apple's design) and Stewart Emery. The book shows how firms can get significant competitive advantage from good design, and how a design-driven business can help you to meet your customer's needs more often. It is at times quite practical, showing how to develop design-driven techniques for managing and growing a business. Useful stuff in it's own right, but I've been reflecting on what both of these books can teach us about how to build and manage online communities.
At FreshNetworks, spend a lot of time when we are working on a new online community with clients to understand the very people that the community will be aimed at. It's important to understand these people in quite some detail, including what their interaction with the brand is and how and why they would want to engage online. Part of this process is to explore their habits and behaviours, and the benefit is to make all decisions and base all discussions in the shoes of these people.
With this real understanding of the people the community is aimed at we can develop content and features that will appeal to them and help to achieve our client's objectives. We can also work on the design of the site. The appropriate content and features are important, but it is the design that will make people want to explore the community and find out what is going on. When somebody first lands on the site they need to combination of appropriate and striking content with good design to make them want to engage.
So spending time on design is important in online communities and that's why no two communities we produce look the same. Making changes to the look and feel is an important tool we have when we're planning and building the community. People react and respond to design and we have to get it right. And it's only by understanding who we are trying to attract that we can do this.
Some more reading
- Some Q&A; on virtual private communities
- Social Media Tools Don't Matter
- Meet the designer of Amazon's Kindle [Robert Brunner]
- At Last! PC Industry Gets Serious About Good Design
- Designers Need to Be 3 People at the Same Time!
- Jonathan Ive on Apple's Industrial Design Strategy
Link to original post