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Journal ArticleDOI

Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success

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TLDR
This paper begins to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success on the basis of obvious measures and some less obvious measures.
Abstract
Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper begins to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members' satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies.

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Citations
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An exploration of social engagement to promote quality of life for people with a spinal cord injury: Exploring the need for a virtual community

Leah Bulloch
TL;DR: In this article, a focus group and one-on-one interviews coupled with an online discussion forum was used to build an understanding of social engagement for people with spinal cord injury and explore whether there is a need for a virtual community that may help promote their QOL through social engagement.
Dissertation

The gaze of practical intent:An ethnographic exploration of socio-communicative distortions within hobbyists' informal learning spaces

TL;DR: In this paper, a multi-sited ethnographic study was conducted with aquatic enthusiasts to examine the characteristics and effects of the settings in which they are held to learn and to understand the presence and effect of communicative distortions.
Journal ArticleDOI

Online Healthcare Communities of Practice: Identifying the Critical Success Factors

TL;DR: The study concludes by proposing a conceptual framework to measure the success of online CoPs in health care sector and classified the existing researches, based on the area of evaluation.
References
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Book

Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction

TL;DR: The Sixth Edition of Designing the User Interface provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date introduction to the dynamic field of human-computer interaction and user experience (UX) design.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Usability inspection methods

Jakob Nielsen
TL;DR: Usability inspection is the generic name for a set of costeffective ways of evaluating user interfaces to find usability problems.
Journal ArticleDOI

Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty

TL;DR: Jenny Preece provides readers with an in-depth look at the design of effective online communities and details the enabling technologies behind some of the most successful online communities.
Book

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing

TL;DR: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing discusses the full range of testing options from quick studies with a few subjects to more formal tests with carefully designed controls and includes forms that you can use or modify to conduct a usability test and layouts of existing labs that will help you build your own.
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