Three questions to help you design better community pages
How to design to best support your user’s content
Sometimes, you’ll find that your website’s focus isn’t specifically on the product but instead on what users do with it.
This is when you’ll want to design pages that emphasize your community. This tends to take the form of a Featured Content page, an Online Marketplace, or some Community page.
However, getting started with designing these types of pages requires you to answer several questions that you hadn’t considered. First and foremost is a single question that I hadn’t expected: does your default community content suck?
Why are you showing user content?
Let me first preface this by saying that I don’t believe users intentionally create lousy work. However, a lot of community content tends to exist as duplicates or in different states of completion.
For example, suppose you had a piece of community-created content that users finalized (i.e., “Business Personas Final version”). In that case, there might be a ton of copies of this labeled in specific ways:
“Business Personas rough draft”
“Business Personas edits by Dave.”
“Business Personas v2”
etc.
Since these are likely to have the same tags and search terms, this content might clog up your community page if you’re not careful. Many community-focused websites often require users to publish content to cut down on this, but this content can easily sneak through (go to any community page and search for “test” to see some examples of this).
This means that your community page needs to be curated to some degree. However, how you choose to curate your content depends on the overall purpose of the page and what actions you want users to take.
There tend to be three actions that users take after browsing community pages:
Joining the community (by seeing that it’s something worth joining)
Viewing/Searching a specific sub-section (i.e., If I’m interested in X, what exists on the website?)
Clicking on a product (investigating something specific further)
Which action you choose to emphasize often changes your community page's focus and what design elements you will create for them.
For example, Miroverse (by Miro.com) emphasizes the value of joining this community by showing the sheer number of templates available to the user once they join their community.
Canva, on the other hand, emphasizes the number of different categories and sub-sections that the user can click on and shows examples of the type of content that exists in each section.
Lastly, Etsy emphasizes high-quality images intended to get users to click on a specific product to learn more.
These actions are not mutually exclusive: these websites often support multiple or all of these potential user actions. However, considering which actions you want the user to take also influences how individual content appears.
What information is necessary on an individual card?
Most community pages tend to use a similar design element, the card, to give a preview of an individual item that users can click on for more information.
Certain elements are almost always included on the card:
Name of template or product
Creator of template or product
A (usually cropped) picture of the template or product
However, there may be other things that can be crucial to include with the card, depending on the focus of your content. These may include:
Price of product
Being able to see a preview of the product
How many times it’s been viewed
How many times it’s been downloaded
The institution/organization associated with the creation
etc.
There’s often no room to put everything in one place, so most of these cards often come with a hover state.
Hover states also have the benefit of being useful for wayfinding. In a sea of similar-looking index cards, seeing where you are (amidst other products) is crucial for having the confidence that you’re clicking on the individual content you want.
However, one of the last and most important questions regarding user content is about the content itself.
What content do we have that considered valuable?
One of the last but most important questions is to consider the content you have, which will influence the design.
One typical example is the granularity of your filters. There’s no point in having a specific filter if clicking on it would filter out all your existing content.
Likewise, there’s no point showing how many people downloaded a particular element if the answer is 0.
What is presented on the community content page should show the most valuable content you currently have and allow your users to feel comfortable about the community upon browsing.
Few people want to join a dead community, and almost nobody wants to sign up for content that might be untrustworthy. So spending time considering what users might find valuable about your current content will help you design a community page that supports it.
Thinking about community
If you’re building a page that celebrates what your user community offers, it’s essential to consider what aspects of the community you want to highlight.
Users don’t just want to see a massive list of everything, showing that it can be harmful. Likewise, you want to make it seem like your community is active, with rich and valuable content to encourage additional users to join or engage.
Your user community can often offer unique solutions to other users' problems: they’re often the most knowledgeable about what might frustrate other users. First, however, consider these three questions when designing a community page to make sure that your users see value in contributing.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer, Design Writer, and author of the Data and Design newsletter. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.