Case study: Building a B2B community feature
Goals 🎯
Making a B2B Client Community Feature to increase client engagement and interaction.
Deliverables
- UX Research
- Low Fi Wireframes
- High Fi + Prototype
UX Research 🔭
Objectives
- To learn and understand why is it important to have a Client Community Feature for B2B company.
- To understand the design process of other B2B companies who has client community feature.
Secondary Research
I went through many blogs as well as Case studies of B2B community apps, it helped me lay foundation to my design process.
Key Takeaways 🎁
- Companies use community feature to scale Self Service.
Companies leverage community as a support channel, with self-service companies, reduce/save a lot of financial investment in bots, sales support, customer support. All customers combined probably know a lot more about a product than we think — and what’s more, many of them are willing to share their expertise. So offer your community as the first line of contact. If the answer is not there, and people start asking, get in-house experts involved, and have their answers benefit many users well into the future rather than just the one user who is asking right now.
2. Community feature helps boost Product Adoption.
Successful product adoption is integral to long-term success for B2B software companies.
- Lean on your super users! Those most active and dedicated members of your community are an integral part of your team — use them! They know your product inside out and can take the pressure off your support team by providing answers to other users during product adoption.
- Make announcements. As we know, especially in the product world, users can be afraid of change. Using your community to make ‘pre-announcements’ to your users can go a long way to alleviating users’ fears around product changes. People fear the unknown — enlighten them using your community!
- Direct new user questions to your community and avoid your product or support teams answering queries over and over again. The more questions that are answered in your community, the larger your knowledge base becomes and the easier customers can find resolutions to their problems. Keep building your knowledge base — it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
3. Community feature helps build Product-community Feedback Loop.
- General insights — feedback on new releases and creative use cases.
- Product ideation — tap into the expertise of your users and create a transparent process to help shape your product roadmap.
- Product adoption — use private communities to beta test new features with the help of your customer advocates.
4. Companies use Gamification to drive user engagement in communities
The motivation for community members can be divided into two main categories; intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is driven by interest or enjoyment in a task itself, without any external pressure or desire for reward. For example, a member that comes to the community for intrinsic motivations comes because he enjoys participating in a discussion about specific topics.
In contrast, extrinsic motivations are triggered by external factors, such as a prize or recognition from others. Community experiences trigger intrinsic motivations, which are then followed by extrinsic motivations, resulting in an increase in engagement from community members, as well as influencing their customer behaviors.
Few Gamification tools-
- Likes
- Ranks
- Badges
5. Companies deal with negative feedback via Content moderators.
Managing conflict is never fun, but it is a task that community moderators will have to roll up their sleeves and jump into from time to time. Here is some advice for specific situations you may encounter, which will help find better ways to handle negative users and feedback.
6. Companies measure community success via 3 Metrics.
- Community Growth, it may sound pretty self-explanatory, but first of all, B2B community needs to grow healthily. This means that organization should have plenty of visitors, content, and activity.
- Community Value, the community should be valuable to both your customers and your organization, but it’s surprising how much ‘junk’ can build up over time. This is particularly true in the B2B software space, where regular feature updates mean community information can become out of date quicker than you realize — remember, clean up your community!
- Community ROI, In the end, organization need to be aware of both its community growth and its community value in order to determine what kind of ROI you are getting.
Wireframes 📃
I know my sketching and handwriting skills are bad 🐒
Information Architecture 📈
Visual Design 🦋
I know it looks similar to “Twitter UI”, I made that on purpose because of Jakob’s Law.
Design Thinking around the above screen:
- The search features can help search tags, questions, posts, and people on a community app.
- Prioritizing company’s blogs and support in order to help newbies on how the product works.
- You can post a question or announcement.
Design Thinking around the above screen:
- Users can either ask a question or make an announcement.
- Tags help users to search for the content they are looking for.
Design Thinking around the above screen:
- More the level, higher the rank and better the tick.
- Every IT employee checks his/her mails everyday. App incentivizes user to subscribe and level up. So that email notifications can be activated.
- Leaderboard helps rank the active user’s on top of the list.
Design Thinking around the above screen:
- Ticks could act as social proof, just like it's on Twitter and Instagram but here the context is - more valuable content user’s puts on the community, better ticks he/she gets.
- Ticks range from bronze to diamond.
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