We recently completed work on a large site improvement project for one of our clients in Washington, DC. The work focused on improving the way the site's two main user groups accessed and contributed content to the website community. The four-month long project included changing the login system and improving security, changing user profiles and radically modifying the main data structure in addition to creating an entirely new way of searching, organizing and displaying user contributed content.
The result was great. We had successfully reduced barriers to contribution and had given the users, as well as the clients, something new to play with on the site. We were not done however. Early in the planning stages we had come up with an idea for a "cherry" that would capitalize on what we knew about the client and its audience and would motivate users to contribute to the community. Community contribution was soon going to have a little friendly competition (the "cherry").
We developed an "Activity Rating" that would display on the public profiles of website users. I know, nothing new here, but for the audience we thought it would have particular value. Here is how it works:
Each user can contribute content to 5 main areas of the site. The site monitors how frequently users login and contribute site content. Then, the site assigns a value and the value is displayed on a graph, the "Activity Rating" (pictured below).
So, we thought a little friendly competition between users would be nice and launched the system to show it off to the client and test-drive it for a while. We purposely left out any description of how users get their rating and what exactly the ratings mean in the attempt to see how users would react. The result was not surprising and even a little fun.
Needless to say, we have added plenty of explanation and are happy to report a flurry of new activity. Now, we will have to wait and see how the rest of the community reacts and be on the look-out for users contributing content just for the sake of improving their rating. Competition really is fun.
