Designing Social Interfaces

Chapter 10. Long-Time Listener, First-Time Caller

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me, and I may be forced to love you.

—William Arthur Ward

Soliciting Feedback

Soliciting feedback from people, no matter the form, is one of the easiest ways to engage your community. After all, everyone has an opinion. Giving feedback is also considered one of the lowest barriers to entry for user engagement and is often the first step on the ladder of user participation.

User ratings are potentially the easiest item to add to a site to gather user opinions and can start a user down the participation road. Additionally, as you build up the engine around ratings, the information can be used to understand your users and create more value for them through recommendations (see Recommendations in Recommendations) and other socially driven features. Amazon has been quite successful at this, using purchasing behavior and ratings to infer which new products might be interesting to the purchaser.

Finally, leaving comments (which is the first step in having a user-to-user conversation about an item), giving feedback, and reviewing an item are all activities that will potentially grab your user for longer-term activity. Each of these encourages registration and repeat visitation. These patterns can be combined with one of the rating styles and tagging to create a robust suite of user opinion ...