Confessions of an Efficiency Nazi: I hate it when people want to try flavors in ice cream, gelati and yoghurt stores before they buy. Especially when there are a lot of people waiting. It’s a $5 purchase people. Wanna take a guess at what banana flavored ice cream tastes like?
My favorite gelato place decided to help this problem by explicitly stating that you could only try 2 flavors. They installed this sign.
Except, anecdotally, I think it backfired. It seemed to have created more tasting. It’s given everyone permission to taste. When people see the sign, what they read is “Please taste 2 flavors before buying”.
The question of forum moderation is an interesting one. For commercial ventures, we probably can’t leave it open slather. Joel Spolsky has done some interesting work on this for this www.joelonsoftware.com forum. It’s very smart. Basically, the poster can always see his/her post, but if it is moderated and removed, no-one else can. The poster think it is always there from the moment they submit. They never know that it isn’t. They don’t get bummed that someone has censored them. But no-one ever sees their dubious posting.
Here’s an interesting article about design factors the mean digg.com is more susceptible to “gaming” – artificially inflating the popularity of an item.
When you think “comments on sites”, the first thought that often comes to mind is: “how to we make it easy for people to comment? – we have to encourage that behaviour”.
But as this article notes:
Derek Powazek in his book Design for Community, makes the point that the harder it is for someone to comment on something, the better the comments are. In other words, people who jump through hoops (or pay attention long enough) to comment are the ones who really care about the subject matter, they’re invested in the story and see value in taking the time to respond.
Yet again Amazon leads the way in presenting user-generate content in ways that work for consumers, even if on the surface it presents its products (and their makers) in a bad light.
As the volume of consumer reviews grows on their site, it was becoming a challenge for people to make sense of it all. To solve this, Amazon now highlights the most useful positive and negative review, allowing you to quickly form your own opinion and judge both sides of the feedback. (see attached screenshot)
They also helpfully show the distribution of star ratings so you can tell if, for example, an average rated product is universally thought to be average, or just strongly polarises opinion.
Bravo to Amazon for grounding their design in what is really going to be helpful, and not just appeasing their product makers and ultimately affecting their own audience share and commercial value.
A big hurdle—and if you can solve this, you’re halfway there to having a well-designed and effective reputation system—is appropriately marrying the incentives that you offer your users to the appropriate set of goals that you have for your community. You want to be sure that you’re rewarding folks for behaving like good citizens, and not just rewarding them for no good reason. (Or for vague and misguided reasons like “to keep them engaged” or “so we can have a leaderboard.”)
