How something that isn’t sexy, still can be successfull

This blog is about the results of 6 weeks of thinking and working on a way to improve the image of a public utillity through a user generated community. In broad outlines I’ll sketch how and why the final solution to this problem is, against all odds, very close to the company itself.

Final presentation of concept and prototype
Yesterday I had the final presentation for 1,5 month during schoolassigment for a dutch public utillity; ENECO. It was all well-organized; ENECO had hired some space in a big building which houses several companies, the in Rotterdam well known Groothandelsgebouw. Every projectgroup that entered the assignment got a small table with a diameter of 70 centimeter. That was the place that we had to use to present our concept and prototype. We used the table for two computers to show our prototype: on each computer a movieclip with a scenario that a persona, representative of our target group (people from Rotterdam, (potential) customers of ENECO), passes through. Two posters that we designed for a campagne to support the whole thing, we sticked on the desk.

Unexpected outcome
In the beginning I did’t feel like coming to this masspresentation (there were like 35 other project-groups, all presenting their concept for ENECO). Allthough my groupmembers and me thought we had a sober, but smart and well-founded solution to the problem of ENECO (ENECO wants a closer connection to their customers), in an earlier presentation on monday for schoolteachers we got a disappointing grade because it wasn’t innovative enough. Allthough my IVID teacher Jim Boekbinder (who wasn’t at that presentation on monday, and did’t have anything to do with this grade), who knew our concept very well (and helped us a lot with it) and was quite enthousiastic about it, told us that this “rejection” is a common thing when suggesting a good, but not sexy solution to a company in need, I still felt a little bit like a looser. We were very certain about this idea, and still it was rejected!

A public utillity with their own, Youtube-like, community
So, you are probably wondering what our “brilliant” idea was about (or maybe not, but I’ll still write about it). Well, first a short description of the problem: ENECO, a public utillity with a stuffy image, wants a closer connection with their customers. Because they saw the success of user generated communities like Youtube they thought it would be a good idea to organize such a thing especially for their customers. Maybe you already see a slight problem: A public utillity with a user generated community; what kind of content should the users upload, and what should they talk about with each other? ENECO found that the theme of the community should be: “This gives me energy”, Through this “energyplatform” the users had to see energy as a concrete thing and associate energy with ENECO.

Eneco Recharge: our solution to ENECO’s problem
Our solution to the problem of ENECO was a little different then all then the other project groups, who’s thought up communities were all outside the main website of ENECO, with a very different style from ENECO. Our community itself was not really special: It was about people telling about what in their own neighbourhood environment “recharges” them, users can show on a map of their hometown where their “Recharge Spot” is.
The special thing about it, in comparison to the other solutions is that thís community is integrated in the main ENECO website and keeps the house style of ENECO. That is where customers take care of their energy-administration, like passing on their meter-readings, or new adress data in case of moving. That is also the place where non-customers, when using ENECO Recharge, will notice the other services of ENECO, and can get interested in being a customer. Because the current communication on the ENECO website is very business-like, we also had some suggestions for ENECO on how to create more balance between the business-like communication of Eneco.nl and the much more personal communication of our Eneco Recharge. Otherwise the communication by integrading Eneco Recharge in Eneco.nl would be very conflicting.

Summary: Eneco Recharge means integrating an opportunity for users to communicate with each other about their neighbourhood in ENECO’s main website, improve it’s Information Architechture to personalize information that the target group wants to see and approach them in a more personal way.

A community can be usefull in a personal way
An example of how our community can be of personal use for the ENECO customer is when someone moves passes on his new adress data. That person mostly doesn’t know much about his new neighbourhood, so Eneco Recharge can anticipate on this by offering him a service which let him meet with an inhabitant from his new neighbourhood. That person has recently ago uploaded a photo with a message on the map of the Eneco Recharge Community to tell other people about his favorite spot in his neighbourhood: his Recharge Spot. Through coupling the exsisting services customers already use with such a community there can be anticipated on being usefull on a personal for customers, who will feel as if they have more in common with their energy supplier ENECO.

Positive confirmation
Eventually it was a good thing that I went to this meeting. There were a lot of people form ENECO, the people that were really in charge of the final decision about which kind of concept (community) ENECO would like to host to improve their image. They gave Eneco Recharge really positive feedback, for me enough confirmation about the usefullness of our sober, but really potentialfull concept. We’ll see in the near future if and what ENECO will do with our suggestions.

Wikipedia: quality articles or quality vandalism precautions

Reliability and Vandalism
Wikipedia is a popular place to get some brief information about almost every subject you can imagine.
The wiki-based, user-generated content-sharing site, is governed by the Wikimedia Foundation. More projects of the foundation, supporter of the free culture and software movement, are: wikiversity, wiktionary, wikibooks and worldwikia. One of the main issues, concerning the user and owner goals and expectations, in a site where users themselves can take an active role, is the discouraging of vandalism (by users) in the content and, very important for the success of Wikipedia, prevent the display of unreliable articles.

“If enough users agree with them it becomes true” [Jimmy Wales, 2006.]

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, held the opening speech at the Wikimania (August) 2006. He had a lot of interesting things to say, also about wikipedia’s main issues. Concerning the reliability issue: He knows the articles at Wikipedia are “pretty good”, they are written by passionate people, and Wikipedia users feel more and more the responsibility trustful and readable articles. Even scientific articles are, according to specialists Jimmy spoke with, correct, all tough not always very in-depth and up to date to the latest discoveries.

The right kind of barriers
I think it’s a good thing that despite the risk of vandalism, the barriers of editing (or vandalize) a Wikipedia article are still very low. You usually don’t have to sign in and you don’t have to do an intelligent test before you add your knowledge about a subject. Wikipedia always is in search for good quality editors, so even the slightest barrier, like code in the editor, can deter people and have to be eliminated. Take away the barriers so intelligent people can easily leave good and trustful content, is more important than precautionary measures against vandalism and incorrect articles. In an open system it’s also easier to correct mistakes than to make them.
Therefore Wikipedia uses soft security. Only after damage has been done, measures will be taken. Editors of articles can use several features to easily see recent changes and differences, receive modification warnings and revision history. When a user keeps on deleting content or adding nonsense to articles, eventually he or she will be blocked. That’s not the perfect solution, because people can use someone else’s ip-adress, so also legitimate users can be affected by this measure.

 

Design Patterns
I want to address a few Design Patterns that can be used or are used for Wikipedia. For screening of the content, but also for the mainly concrete goal the broad target group has, visiting Wikipedia.

First thing you need when you want to screen a particular article, is an Article Page Pattern. To, for example, easily see recent changes and check these, you will need the Highlight Pattern that highlights changes in a text field. To navigate back in time, I think the best opportunity to give the editor, is to enable him to go back to every point in time where the article has been changed. To view an articles history, Wikipedia works with the use of a List Browser, where list items are the states of the article, sorted by the date of change. The radiobutton of the displayed article is checked. Maybe even a Container Navigation Pattern can be used. The three panes contain a list of changed articles, per article a list of the states the article has been in (sorted by date or maybe by how big the changes were) and in the third pane the selected article. Of course there is also the place to edit the article or choose the article (-state) to display online.

All the precautions and actions (the use of “featured”, “locked” and “stable” articles, warning systems, etc.) of Wikipedia to eliminate vandalism results that incorrect articles are reverted in five minutes.

One thing about the broad target group of Wikipedia, and why I think the use of the Simple Search Pattern is suitable. People mostly know what specific thing they are looking for, and even if they don’t know the correct spelling, Wikipedia still returns some relevant search results. If people don’t exactly know what they are looking for, but do know a less relevant keyword, they can always go to the category-page, which one click further away then the search possibility.

User-Generated Content: Interface issues summarized

UGC-sites and their user interface issues summarized
Last week I wrote about User-generated content sites in general, UGC site-types there can be distinguished (user scenario’s), issues those sites come across and a little bit about interaction design patterns there can be used to solve those problems. I was not the only one who had this little investigation, also my co-students did a good job with this kick-off 4^th years minor assignment. Our IVID teacher summarized all of the outcomes we sent him, here’s my summary of that summary:

Examples, site-types and user-scenarios
We came with a lot of UGC examples, which can be divided in the site-types I wrote about earlier: Transacting, (content-)sharing and expressing. Ebay and Marktplaats.nl are examples of auctioneering sites and belong to the transacting category. Content-sharing is done at, for example, Google video, shutterstock.com and other music, video and trailer sites, search engines and price-comparing sites.Blogs, fora and community sites belong to the expressing-category. I think a lot of sites will overlap the two or all categories.Users of UGC sites can have an active and passive role, or both. These roles are also a good part of the description of what UGC sites are about: The making of content is not only allowed for a suitable team, but every viewer can also be a writer/adder.

Interface and user-goals & expectation issues
There are some main user interface issues for these UGC sites. These are the design pattern issues my co-students and me came across:

• Search-mechanisms are insufficiently refined and defined;

• Mechanism for adding content is to complicated;

• Lack of categories;

• Slow and unclear rating systems;

• Visual chaos;

User-goals and -expectation issues: (site-owners and users)

• reliability of the information;

• Degree of user generated content;

• Screening (author-rights and vandalism)

Design patterns
Design patterns which are related to the issues and identified as important:

• Community pattern

• rating system

• comment system

• image resizing

• flag system

• account system

• email confirmation

• extended search system

• external links

• video control pattern

• hotlist

Up next:

Let’s take a closer look at a well known user generated content site: Wikipedia.org. and it’s user interface issues.

“Public utility new style”

Online platform with User-Generated Content

How can an electricity board upgrade its image from a inaccessible and official utility to a “public utility new style”. Eneco energy, one of the three largest energy suppliers in the Netherlands, enlisted the help of the fourth year Communication and Multimedia Design students to find a solution for the image-problem of the company. I happen to be one of those fourth year students and together with four other co-students I’ll try to pass this assignment, but maybe also to make a chance for the travel cheque of 300 euro’s per person Eneco gives for the best idea and presentation. A more concrete description of what Eneco wants: A platform on the Internet, arranged by user generated content, where the local society (Rotterdam) can experience “tangible and positive energy”.

Just a recently denationalised public utility
Like I said, Eneco is one of the three largest energy suppliers of the Netherlands. The other two in that top three are Essent and Nuon. The utility is denationalized, all tough the Dutch government still keeps an eye on her. 4700 people are joining the company as employees and they take care of the production, transport and delivery of electricity, gas, warmth, and accompanying services (measuring, managing, installing and invoicing) for 2 million business and household costumers.

Eneco mostly delivers her products in the west of the Netherlands (Rotterdam and environs), but also in the north (province of Friesland) and in the south (Weert).

Mission of the company:

“Eneco continually takes care of available, save and future-directed energy provision for business and private end users.
We strive for the recognition of our costumers, shareholders, co-workers and the society as a whole, as the best energy company of the Netherlands. Our goal is to make this ambition to come true, through in our acting always to be trustful, enterprising, professional and sympathetic.

Nice details: Eneco sponsors the largest cycle race in the Netherlands and the Dutch Clini Clowns. With the platform they had in mind and what the assignment is about, they also want to give users the chance to get a sponsorship for good initiatives.

Personal experience
I live near Rotterdam and I also get my energy and gas from Eneco and they always deliver so I am a satisfied costumer. What is maybe a bit misleading or at least not so decent is the description on the site of their two sorts of tax-measuring: A costumer can choose always to pay the same price for what they use (single tax reader, the “standard tariff”) or pay less in the evenings (after 23.00) and more (than the standard tariff) in the evening, this is called the “double tax reader”. So when you use a lot of energy durig the night its profitable to choose for the double tax reader On the site it says that with the double tax reader, during the day, you pay the standard tariff (that you also pay when you have the single tax reader), but that’s not true: You pay much more! This probably is not so shocking information and just a little detail but i thought it was remarkable …

 

Up next: Bridging the gap: more about the assignment, who are the costumers of Eneco and what do they want……

Transacting, sharing and expressing: User-Generated Content

Primary questions about user-generated content
Hooray! Today was the kick-off of the last year studying Communication & Multimedia Design in Rotterdam.
First theme for this semester is about User-Generated Content (UGC) on websites and issues you come across while designing a user interface for these kind of sites. Before I take a deeper look at this theme the following eight weeks, I’ll try to answer four primary questions about the phenomenon:

1. What type of sites have user generated content
2. What are examples of User Generates Content Sites
3. What are the most important user interface issues you come across
4. Which Design Patterns are used for these kind of sites

Main Keywords
Content in community-sites are often user generated. Sites where a group of people want to get in contact with each other, share information, help each other or whatever. Then you have sites like eBay, or Marktplaats (Marketplace) which could’t exist without the user input of all the stuff they want to get rid of. And there are of course the weblogs, where people can express their-selves about any subject they are interested in. I think the main keywords that summarise User Generated Content-sites are Transacting, sharing and expressing.

UGC-examples: Quite successful brands
The brands which use these site-types are doing quite well, in comparison to other webbrands, but they also compete with brands in general. Nielsen//NetRatings, Internet media and market research company, examined the growth of the brands (in the U.S., year over year increase) and came to the following that image hosting site ImageShack ranked No. 4 among July’s fastest growing Web brands, increasing 233 percent, from a unique audience of 2.3 million to 7.7 million. “Heavy.com, a video sharing site, took the No. 5 spot, increasing 213 percent, from 965,000 to 3.0 million unique visitors. Photosharing site Flickr followed at No. 6, growing 201 percent from 2.1 million to 6.3 million unique visitors.Other user-generated content sites that made it into the top 10 fastest growing Web brands were MySpace, with a 183 percent year-over-year increase, and Wikipedia, with a 181 percent year-over-year increase.” (Nielsen-Netratings, “User-Generated content drives half of U.S. top 10 fastest growing web brands”, August 10, 2006)
In the top ten of fastest growing (regular) brands on the web you can find Myspace (183%) ranked at No. 1, after Google with 23% growth and eBay with 13% growth. For that matter, eBay is according to this research no site with user generated content.. mmm..?
Many more interesting rankings and growpercentages in this document, which is the result of that “user-generated content sites have seen significant growth over the past year, owing in large part to their reliance on viral marketing,” according to Jon Gibs, director of media analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings. “They also benefit from their cost-effectiveness – the content is practically free.”

Keeping the target group you had in mind: UGC-site issues
With designing a site where users can add text, photo’s, movies etc. their-selves, there are a lot of things you have to think about. Besides the question “What content shall I let my users upload? (or something like that)”, you also have to think about who, when, how and how much the uploaded content has to be controlled and overlooked. If you have a certain target group in mind, let’s say, students who can share information with each other, you don’t want them to find all kinds of spam or untrustful information on your site. How can you design a site where such spammers are discouraged to leave their message? My new IVID teacher, James M. Boekbinder, had a nice example of this: Wikipedia. Their design gives you the idea that you can’t leave a message or add an item unless you’re a real professional on the topic and know what you are writing. This because of for example the objective and clear style and the not so obvious possibility to upload new information.
Other things you have to think about: The way of categorizing/tagging content, how to put the constantly incoming stream of it in a sort of conveniently arranged layout and, but I think this brings me more to the pattern-question: How can your users share, rate, bookmark,search all the things they are or are not be taken with.

Like I said, next eight weeks a more in-depth exploration about the subject. Yep, vacation is really over….