What would it take for you to use Sixent every day?
This was a question posed by one of my colleagues several months ago when he was in the early stage of designing Sixent, Ramius' new social networking service. My initial thought was well, that depends on who the 'you' in the question is.
Using personas
One of the tactics we have tried with Sixent is to use personas when conducting interaction and usability testing during its private Alpha. A persona should be a description of someone who would be of an important category of Sixent users. Information about what she cares about, what she wants to do, how she wants to do it would be compiled and assembled into a model end user. Having such model end users would help us to prioritize feature design decisions - making choices most appropriate to ensure that end user has a great experience.
It's a good idea although our Sixent project wasn't necessarily started with such formal user research. That said, our early design decisions have been firmly grounded in Ramius' community-building heritage. Since 1998, we have delivered highly scalable, web-based platforms to help people and business connect, communicate and collaborate online in meaningful ways. We've learned from this.
Having an experience strategy
Our ten years of experience designing, developing and deploying online communities has yielded us guiding principles (aka vision, core philosophies) for the design of our products. My favorite name for this is how I've heard Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path describe it - an experience strategy. Arguably, a successful Web 2.0 application will begin with an experience strategy:
"Experience strategies are clearly articulated touchstones to guide product teams in all the decisions they make about technology and features. An experience strategy defines a product requirement from the perspective of the user, and what they want to accomplish, achieve, do.
. . .
Experience strategies provide them with an explicit statement of purpose that enforces coherence and integrity, where otherwise it could be tempting to go off in many directions."
What is the Sixent experience strategy?
Well, here is our initial attempt at writing it. Think of the below as a story we are trying to tell about why we created Sixent and the value we hope it will bring to people.
More and more, the Web is becoming an integral part of people's lives. Yet our lives are multi-faceted. Our roles at home, at school, at work and at play sometimes intersect, sometimes not. How we express our online identities should reflect this reality. At the same time, we use different web services to share information and communicate with our networks. Each time we use a new service, we need to create a new account, keying in the same personal information and inviting the same contacts again and again. There should be less hassle.
Sixent offers a new way to connect, communicate and collaborate online. It's a social networking site that lets you share your life the way you want to. Our main goals with Sixent:
1) Make it easy for people to share their lives online.
We want to make it easier for you to share your life online the way you want to. To selectively express your identity and share content. To build, track and categorize relationships in a true-to-life way.
With Sixent, you can create public and private profiles with one account. A public profile to ensure search engines like Google will index correct and appropriate information about you. A professional profile for your work and school contacts. A personal profile for your friends and family, and so on. Create as many profiles as you need to represent your multi-faceted life.
2) Enable people to do meaningful and productive things together.
We want you to be able to do real things with your diverse network by offering you tools to create a public website page or a private group, start a discussion, share a file, show a picture and more. As in the real world, we don't think how you connect with these people should have to be done the same way either. Collaborate on work projects with team members. Blog to your family. Share photos with friends. You decide.
3) Get out of people's way.
With Sixent, we don't want to get in your way. We want to make getting something done, like creating a profile or sharing a favorite photo to be intuitive and fun. We'll know we're successful if you don't tell us that we're getting in your way of doing the things you care about. We want our platform to be flexible and customizable enough to allow you to define your own ideal experience.
4) Create a worry-free experience.
It begins with how we want to help you share information and content in a way that is relevant and meaningful to the different groups of people in your life. With Sixent, you control who has access to your personal information, content and contact lists. Organize your contacts into private categories you define. Then disclose profile information and content to the appropriate categories of people in your networks. Family vacation pictures will only be accessible to the people you've categorized as family. Work files are only accessible to your co-workers. We want to provide you with a safe and secure environment.
We take care in handling your data too. We'll never sell your personal information to a third-party. It's why we've built a privacy system that lets you easily set appropriate rights and permissions to let you control access to your data in a way that mirrors how you do so in the real world.
And we want to be reliable - we want to be on and working whenever you need it.
Post proelium praemium: After the struggle, the reward
That's my old high school's motto and I think it can be applied to our journey at Ramius. Sixent is the product of what we at Ramius have learned in designing, developing and deploying consumer and white-label versions of our CommunityZero platform to users. We are constantly listening for user feedback to help us improve and iterate our services. It's early days for Sixent - we won't have met many of the above goals yet. That said, our goals are aspirational - something we believe in and are striving for.
We'll continue to look to the above goals as the experience we want our users to have when they make use of our services to connect, communicate and collaborate with each other. We're excited for people to come try Sixent out and help us answer "What would it take for you to use Sixent every day?"
Comments (11)
Denise EastonDate 7-11-2008
Simon -- the depth of your answer prompts long and expansive responses but I will not go there. Instead one more interesting layer is the opportunity for users to also participate in a marketplace -- such as being able to post in a gemeral database products, services, companies, organizatons, jobs etc. This is not to muddy waters but rather to consolidate experiences. Maybe there could be an option that allows you to select whether you want a "main" catalgory listing to be part of a marketplace -- which would then lead to a listing profile. Looking forward to talking to you.
Simon ChenDate 7-9-2008
Thanks for all your great comments so far! Tip of the hat to Tom Holder for starting the conversation! A few of you have emailed your feedback directly to me - if any of you read this, I encourage you to post your thoughts here - they are all gems and will contribute to the current discussion. If y'all don't mind, allow me to address your below comments in another blog post. I think it's a bit too long for a comment here and, like Tom, I don't want to run the risk of timing out (issue we will have a solution for)! See you tomorrow!
Miodrag PerinDate 7-9-2008
I think we need to find a way to "integrate" the others into this platform, I love the design and GUI - also the plaxo integration, I think if we could incorporate updates to linked-in, and facebook for the US market, and XING and Studivz for the German market - we could have a one stop shop. Also, the ability to add any widget (like netvibes)...in terms of collaboration, I think we should not give up on the communityzero features, instead web 2.0-nize them and perhaps incorprate a wiki approach into the collaboration - such as introducing collaboration pages, and that would make this a total productivity tool...
Ryan AndersonDate 7-7-2008
Tom - Twitter allowed me to connect more personally with the people whose blogs I read, and to participate in events I wouldn't have heard about, meet people I wouldn't have met, and find new like-minded people. Some have become friends, some have become business contacts. It's as much of a time suck as you let it be, but it's no less manageable, and often far more useful than email.
I thought exactly the same as you before I really started using it.
Joseph ThornleyDate 7-7-2008
The places I go to each day provide me with a chance to connect with my community, acquire information, learn and share. What keeps me from going to a community is a garden wall and the lack of RSS feeds. It's too time consuming to visit a number of different community sites. Right now, the established community of Twitter and the openness of identi.ca are meeting my needs.
Alvaro TejadaDate 7-7-2008
I have been using Sixent for a while...since it came out as Alpha...And I'm really happy and impressed with it...I gotta admit that at first, I didn't see any value on it...But before I start creating my PODs and "Profiles" I realized that it's a great tool...It's really nice for me to be able to have different profiles...Because of course, there are some thing that you can't just show on a professional profile...I think that Ramius has done an excellent job...And I'm sure that they're going to keep on making it better.
Greetings,
Blag.
Tom HolderDate 7-6-2008
Pardon my curiousity but could you expand on "Twitter solved a problem I didn't know I had"? The only real problem I could see Twitter solving is an abundance of time on my hands. Please advise.
Ryan AndersonDate 7-4-2008
For me, it's not so much about the experience, but about what problem it solves for me. Twitter solved a problem I didn't know I had, and Facebook allowed me to connect with long lost friends. In my (limited) experience with Sixent, the answer is not yet immediately obvious. If it's just duplicating other services, then it's creating a new problem - more memberships - but if you can get to that key insight and make it painfully obvious how using Sixent every day will make my life better, then I will - just like I do with Twitter and Facebook.
Give me the fruit, and I'll spread the seed.
Tom HolderDate 7-4-2008
Sorry, I got going and forgot to mention that Google Calendars is the closest thing to what I want to be able to do. For some reason I cannot fully justify though, I can't bring myself to put personal appointments into Google. Some lack of trust there I guess.
Tom HolderDate 7-4-2008
Let's try again but with less verbiage. I think that Ramius, through Sixent and CommunityZero, do an admirable job of fulfilling goals 1, 3 and 4. The UI is slick and the "workflow paths" are straightforward and easy to grasp. I have some issues with ALL social networking offerings when it comes to goal number 2 - "Enable people to do meaningful and productive things together." In my experience, SN's are an excellent way to let people know what you are currently doing or what you have done in the past but I have yet to find an offering that does even a reasonable job of letting people know what your availibility is or what your future plans are.
Yes you can post your plans into a calendar or post an event listing or you can send out invitations but that just means that you will have another iteration as members of your social network decline due to conflict.
For myself, I need to fit things into a very busy schedule just within my own household and most of my planning occurs late at night or very early in the morning when most people are not available. What I need to be able to do is open up the calendar application, select a timeframe, and then select the members of my social network who I want to attend my meeting, tournament, barbeque etc. The application would overlay all events (based on the users profile preferences of course) so I can look for sweet spots in the schedule. Then I can offer the "open" dates and times as a tentative event in each of the other users calendars. That alone would cut down a couple of iterations and reduce the need for other users to juggle their priorities to attend my event.
Alright, you're thinking that's great for the great unwashed but our target is big business. The same thing applies for the plant manager who hase to juggle Company A's Widget run ships on this date, Company B's Gadget run ships on this date, we can begin assembly on this date so we had better be hiring on this date. Or the sales manager who has to plan a staff meeting with salespeople all over the world etc.
Nothing new here, shared calendars etc. but I have yet to find a website that does it effectively.
My $0.02.
My first one was better . . . damn time out.
