What is Member Experience Design?
Note: The UX of Community Rosieland series starts tomorrow!
Member Experience Design: Using UX Practices to Make Great Communities
In my role as a product coach and consultant, I’ve encountered many PMs who don’t actually deliver on a core and required part of the role: getting out of the building and talking to customers. How can you build a great product if you’re not consistently in touch with the people whose problem you’re trying to solve?
I don’t have time, they say. Or, I already know what their problems are. And then when they start to actually have these customer conversations, their minds are totally blown. Suddenly, their brains start whirring and they have a sense of empathy and excitement to make a difference for the people who use the product.
Community builders talk to their members all day, so obviously they don’t have the same blind spots.
Or do they?
Actually, I meet a surprising number of community builders who are interacting with and ‘engaging’ their community but haven’t taken a step back to really interview members, do observational research, run tests, or experiment with other practices that might ensure their members are getting what they came for.
----This was what online communities looked like before the rise of UX.---
In the last couple of decades, we have gone from technology that looked blocky, was confusing to use, and often reflected what engineers thought people wanted to a new world where apps are simple, beautiful, and joyful to use, if not downright addictive.
The key driver of that change has been a flourishing of “User Experience” practitioners in product development, who use techniques adapted from social science to inform how to build apps and software people love to use.
Member Experience (MX)
How can we use these approaches to make better communities?
UX is about centring people in the design process.
Communities are all about people.
So it makes sense that many of the best UX practices are great tools for community builders. And more and more, I’m seeing an overlap in the kind of work community builders and product UX folks do.
What makes UX methods so powerful? We’re learning, listening, and testing to co-create transformation. We’re there for people in exactly the ways that support their goals.
We get to know the journey members take as they learn about the community, join, and become more involved. We focus on what matters to our members and using that information to choose what to spend our energy on. Then we can help our new members to get on the right path, energize our experienced members, and develop a path to progress that makes our community rewarding and sustainable for everyone involved.
Plus, UX practices are fun!
Most of us in community are people-people of one sort or another. Using UX methods makes talking to people easier, even for introverts. We get deeper connection with our most active members and an opportunity to get creative when considering how we can help members achieve their goals within a collective process.
If you’re not in the practice from learning from our members, you’re probably on the road to burnout.
Why? Because you’re spending time and energy creating content, starting conversations, or hosting events that feel like they are going into the void, in the hopes of that one magic thing that gets everyone talking.
Continuous Community
Rosie recently shared a graphic that does an amazing job of capturing UX and product discovery methods for community in action.
“Continuous Communities” brings to mind Teresa Torres’s great book for product people, Continuous Discovery Habits, a key resource I always share with product clients.
In product development, we use discovery techniques to innovate, de-risk, and prove out viability. In community, we can use discovery techniques to test ideas, learn quickly, and invest our time and energy with confidence that what we’re doing matters to members.
When we see our community within this framework, we’re not just looking for a way to make something ourselves, we’re discovering how to create the conditions for members of our community to grow, contribute, lead, and discover creative collaboration among themselves.
Just as in product UX, a Member Experience strategy allows us to stop doing things that aren’t valuable so we can concentrate on the things that actually matter and foster transformation.
Member Experience Design allows community builders to explore and practice many of the concepts in the Rosieland toolkit:
Community Discovery
Minimum Viable Community practices
Design
Strategy
Growth
When you use UX methods for community, we don’t just have a formula or a framework. It’s about designing for your specific situation to ensure the solutions fit your unique and valuable community and its members.
Member Experience starts by identifying your ideal member, learning about their journey and creating a path to be of service to your members’ goals and your own.
There are many UX methods we can use for our Member Experience, starting with interviews, which are always valuable and can be a great jumping off place, then exploring Jobs To Be Done (and Motives To Be Met), member journey mapping, onboarding design, formulating rituals and acknowledgement, and even usability or information architecture testing.
Also, we get to have fun, because community people are the best.
I’m excited to be collaborating with Rosie and sharing this approach with hands-on workshops that will give community builders the skills of UX practitioners in a supportive and collaborative setting. Even if you can’t make it this time, I’d love to hear about your experiences putting UX methods into practice and your Member Experience experiments.