Co-design, user experience and community management
All UX projects have a community of some sort associated with them. Whether we’re referring to our communities as users, audiences, stakeholders, or people our techniques are focused on engaging with those communities to ensure that we are designing the most appropriate solutions. It is not surprising then, that it often emerges that a UX or concept design job is as much a community management strategy piece as a UX piece.
For the 18 months (or thereabouts) Digital Eskimo has been working with the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence (NCIE) to develop and nurture the Community of Excellence (CoE). The CoE is a social network for young indigenous people focused on helping them to articulate and reach their goals. It provides a safe, culturally specific online space for young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to support each other in the achievement of these goals, and is at the heart of the NCIE’s Indigenous Digital Excellence Agenda.
The CoE was co-designed with the community who are now using it, over 100 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander young people were involved in workshops, interviews and testing at various points in the project’s development.
This presentation will take this project as the primary example to:
- demonstrate why co-design methods lend themselves perfectly to designing social systems
- show why a crucial part our role when creating these systems is to properly set up the management structures and strategy to grow and support them
The co-design parts of the presentation will look at:
- how we explored users’ needs and expectations through the co-design of metaphorical spaces
- how we explored goal setting behaviours through board games, and other uses for board games
- how we learned about levels of comfort with sharing personal information to various audiences
Community management elements will look at:
- why projects briefed as ‘spec, design and build’ often incorporate a significant community management strategy component
- how to recognise and make the most of opportunities like this when they appear
- why UX practitioners need to be able to assist clients with community management strategy if they want to move beyond “if we build it, they will come”
- what kinds of deliverables can help clients in managing their communities after you have handed the project over
