Dan Lewis James

Social network design principles

Social networks really are like Seth Godin believes, the birth of tribes. The tribe created within the network can vary widely in its ethics, values and overall manner. These factors can be encouraged to some degree by the interactions of community managers, but it's the network features that can stimulate greater community cohesion.

I have been a member of hunch from the very beginning, it is such a shining example of social community building I decided to note some of it’s most useful features to act as a resource for other social site designers.

Basic social site feature set rules

Before going into the details of social interaction I have included the basic principles of social network design that I studied whilst working at Kwiqq, and designing social sites every day. These principles are derived from, designing for the social web by Joshua Porter

• Focus on the users primary activity - goals, activities, tasks. Goals are the end conditions people are striving for. Activities are the tasks people do to achieve their goals e.g for netflix the flow would look something like this - entertainment - renting movies - rating, adding to queue, discussing movies. It acts as a clear and consistent method for organising feature-set ideas.
• Identify social objects, these objects mediate social activities. Discover these objects and the interactions around them, they can be real life like Facebook, or the Amazon wish list - or they can be jobs and dates, projects and events. Give the social objects a URL - this makes objects sharable, easier to find & refind, and allows users to link directly, search engines like them.
• Choose core feature set. Joshua Porter calls this finding your verbs. It is the idea of selecting what actions are associated with the noun - eg videos = play, stop, edit, store, upload, share, comment, embed.

These general rules will help to build a useful feature set at a basic level, beyond that the primary objective of the designer is to encourage users to build links and bonds with other users. This is where hunch have really nailed the design feature set.

The genius of hunch

THAY questions

Teach Hunch About You questions are answered by users as they begin to use the site, this essentially allows hunch to build a psychological profile on the user, which sounds terrible, the sheer quantity of data you can give them about you beliefs and preferences can be a little daunting. However this allows you to find users with similar tastes and preferences and then find topics created by them which you are more likely to be interested in. It also makes users feel more comfortable connecting, in a similar way to the neighbours feature in Last.fm

Flecks

Flecks make visible little bits of social grooming, such as when users on the site give other users a pro/con or a thumbs up and also when other users think useful topics, results or questions. Flecks encourage users on the site to interact with others in a positive environment. Flecks are now encouraged as part of a profile completeness, personally I find it impossible not to want to complete a profile fully. Once users have added a fleck or two the hope is they enjoy it and use it more often. It seems to work as hunch users are a particularly open and supportive tribe.

Badges

Badges represent all the different ways you’ve contributed to Hunch. Banjos are one type of badge; they represent a numerical summary of your total contributions. Other badges represent the type of content users have contributed, for example the categories where you have been a very active contributor. Personally I find badges quite desirable, even though I have currently made little effort to really try to collect them, it is of course completely illogical but according to games psychologists allowing users to collect items speaks to very deep human compulsions which most people find addictive.

Encouraging positive interaction

Throughout hunch many of the basic interactions are set in a positive way. When users choose to agree or disagree with pros/cons that have been added the text says 10 out of 10 helpful which is a good way of phrasing and preventing negative responses from dominating whilst allowing people to reasonably disagree with results.

Site personality is also important, this is something created by the community managers but in the example of Hunch, Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon and their team have done a very good job of encouraging the community to develop. This is possibly easier for hunch than other networks as the objective is to add questions topics and answers to share with the community.

Extensive and well written community guidelines. One of those features that is usually left until the last minute and not really thought about but also very good for providing the overall community atmosphere. If guidelines are clear and well thought out they can add further personality to the site that will be picked up by users and encourage them to behave in the way the community requires.

Conclusion

In the field of social site design Hunch excels and in my opinion is top of the class. There is lot of theory and human psychology behind the site and it is obviously the work of seasoned web professionals.

It seems to boil down to personality and creating community cohesion. Which is much more of a human endeavour rather than a design or development one. Hunch displays a very human centered approach to it’s design, utilising well known human behaviour patterns and deploying them throughout the network as interactive features, combined with a genuine set of beliefs and values it’s the current benchmark for successful networks.