RECORD

The RECORD online Living lab

Motivation: The RECORD online Living Lab is being established to meet the challenges represented in developing online communities, and will serve as a research environment to support the three main areas of RECORD work: (1) Patterns of media use, (2) design, and (3) user-centred evaluation.

End-user engagement in the development of online communities as MySpace indicates that we have a lot to gain from allowing users to participate in the design process. The RECORD Living Lab will tap into the creative powers of users by utilizing online community functionality as means to gather knowledge to improve online community design.

Hopefully, the Living Lab approach will help us mature from a “launch-and-learn” approach to online community development to active end user participation in the development process.

Internet panel: In order to involve a fairly representative set of users – and not just the most interested – the RECORD online Living Lab includes >3000 Internet users meant to be as representative as possible for Norwegian Internet users age 15-40 years. We aim for the Living Lab participants to help us:

1. Provide information on their online community media and services use
2. Engage in design discussions and provide design feedback on prototypes or running services
3. Participate in user-centred evaluation

Online environment: An online environment for user co-creation and feedback will be used to allow:

• User comments and ratings of suggested services and designs
• Users posting design revisions or alternate design suggestions
• User-user and user-developer discussions

Longitudinal study: The Living Lab panel will also be used to carry out a longitudinal investigation of patterns of media use in online communities – where we follow the same users across several years in order to gain knowledge regarding factors affecting online community success – and what effect online community use may have on the users.

The development of the RECORD Living Lab is described in this paper in a special issue on Living Labs 

User-centred evaluation

User-centred evaluation of online communities is one of the three main areas of RECORD.

Motivation: User-centred evaluation of online communities is challenging. Interaction with an online community involves using and sharing content created by the community members themselves, getting engaged in dialogues and discussions, as well as getting to know new people and keeping contact with friends. We know that the most common motivations for using online communities are entertainment and socializing (Brandtzæg and Heim 2007).

This context of use in online communities implies the user interaction to be characterized by fuzzy tasks and goals, something that makes task-oriented evaluation – as typically is used for example in user testing – insufficient. We need evaluation methods that are able to collect valid data on the full possible user experience of online communities. We hope that the research on user-centred evaluation in the RECORD project will bring us closer to having such methods.

Users as evaluators: The most used user-centred evaluation methods is user testing. In this method we identify usability problems through observation of users. In RECORD, instead of observing users we aim to invite the users to engage themselves as evaluators. After all, online communities is all about leaving the discussions to the users – and quite possibly engaging users in discussions and reflections on issues of design, usability and user experience will broaden our insight in users’ needs and wants for online community services.

Evaluation methods: The RECORD evaluation methods that we aim to adapted and develop include:

• Expert evaluations where end-users are used as evaluators
• Community discussions on concepts and prototypes
• Community reflection on evaluation results – engaging the users as analysts, not just data provider

Our current focus is on expert evaluations were end-users are engaged as evaluators. We will keep you posted on the RECORD blogg regarding the progress of evaluation method trial and development. Stay tuned.

Telenor idea workshop

We started off with presentations from Arve Hjelseth and Hans Hognestad. They have both done research on football supporters, and gave us very interesting thoughts on the Norwegian football culture. Petter Bae Brandtzæg (SINTEF) presented some results from his research on online communities. After a delightful lunch we generated lots of ideas and concepts for football services.