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Title:
"Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability"
Review:
Information professionals are beginning to participate in, and even create, fully interactive online communities, learning from each other in online discussion groups, posting questions on bulletin boards, using messaging software to work together on distance education assignments, and creating online book discussion groups for patrons. For all these reasons and more, information professionals will find this book useful in solving the inherent problems of online communities: building community, and ensuring ease of use.
The basic problem in building online communities is that it's hard to build trust and security when people have no physical presence and shared commitment. Preece suggests a variety of strategies to compensate, including using moderators, requiring registration, posting netiquette rules, establishing a privacy policy, using emoticons, and using software that places representations of speakers in a simulated shared environment.
She discusses the virtues and limitations of each form of online communication - bulletin boards, for example, allow you to review and revise your thoughts, but lack immediacy, while chats allow immediate response but don't encourage extended, careful thought.
She provides a digest of research in such fields as social informatics, interpersonal communication, social presence, and network analysis, and shows how this knowledge can be helpful for decision- making when building online communities - for example, do you wish to create a sense of boundedness to build close ties, or loose boundaries to foster a wider range of participants, experience and ideas?
The chapter on community-centered development traces a process that begins with assessing community needs and analyzing what tasks users will want to perform. The next steps are selecting the software and designing the web site, social planning, designing and testing prototypes, and fine-tuning to improve sociability and usability.
Readers who are not technically adept will especially value the explanations of the virtues and limitations of the different kinds of software systems.
The book has a number of valuable comparison charts and other tools for decision-making, including checklists and evaluation instruments for sociability and usability, comparisons of software, sample registration forms, explanations for newbies of the rules and software, and templates for polite bulletin board queries and responses ("What I think you mean is…My own view differs in this way…). It also includes a section on using formal evaluations and surveys to test the system.
We see all of this information brought to bear in real life as the Down Syndrome Online Advocacy Group and creators of a Quiz Bowl Archive build web pages with integral online communities. Both must decide who their constituency is, survey them to find what information needs the service should meet, choose software, develop policies, create introductory screens to explain how the systems work, and add or revise features as the system's weaknesses are discovered.
Preece, a long-time researcher on human-computer interactions and empathic online communities, conveys what she has learned with grace and clarity. Information professionals designing online communities will welcome this readable, useful guide.
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