Overview
People with innovative ideas are not necessarily good at marketing. Following interviews with over 100 crowdfunders, we found that leveraging one’s social network was one of the most difficult aspects of crowdfunding work. ShoutOut is an online application that uses social network analysis (SNA) to help identify who to connect with when publicizing a crowdfunding campaign.
Understand
Understanding how crowdfunders work has been a focus of my PhD research at Northwestern. When studying how crowdfunders leverage their social network, we both re-analyzed previous data and performed further user research on this specific topic.
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InterviewsInitial interviews with over 70 crowdfunders showed that crowdfunding project creators leveraged the crowdfunding community of project creators and supporters to draw inspiration, seek feedback, and gain publicity. However, they also found these relationships to be time-consuming and difficult to initiate because it required identifying the right people to connect with. I performed 15 further interviews, and found that crowdfunders face difficulties understanding their network capabilities, activating connections, and expanding their network reach.
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“I have good friends that I haven't been able to get to the site. It’s very shocking. It kind of, like, shows you who your real friends are.” |
“When I was getting started, I didn't have that name recognition. All I had were contacts in the community, and so I had to spend a lot of time putting myself out there, blogging, sharing thoughts, getting into discussions, going back and forth with people, responding to comments very quickly... And with that, I was able to get some modest success and then build upon that and build upon that.” |
Create
Taking into considering the findings from user interviews, I developed a series of paper and interactive prototypes that would help crowdfunders understand and leverage their social network.
Paper Prototypes
I created 20 initial wireframes outlining how social network analysis measures could identify useful connections. Ideas included finding people who played unique roles (e.g. connectors) in one's social network, or finding people in one's network based on similar interests.
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Interactive prototypes
Following testing of paper prototypes, we iterated on the design to create four interactive versions of the tool. These interactive prototypes were created in Keynote, which allowed participants to click "buttons" on the slide to move to a different slide as if it were a website. This low fidelity version allowed us to identify issues with the platform flow and visuals before creating higher fidelity designs. The images below show a few screenshots of one version of the tool which would allow crowdfunders to identify sub-groups within their network, message them individually, and keep track of who did and did not respond.
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Test
Informal user testing was performed throughout prototype development, which helped to identify which ideas to pursue. Once we identified four promising tool concepts and developed interactive prototypes, we led a series of formal testing sessions.
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User TestingI tested wireframes on 10 people (5 female, 5 male) who are in the process of publicizing their design projects and considering crowdfunding. I first asked participants to describe how they would currently reach out to their network for publicity support, then had them interact with the four interactive prototypes. Participants were asked to "think aloud" as they interacted with the tool to describe what they liked and disliked about the interface.
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Data Analysis
All user testing was audio recorded and transcribed. I coded the data in an excel spreadsheet where I tagged data from the transcripts with certain codes to identify common themes. For example, while interacting with the prototypes, many participants described how it was useful to identify which friends were interested in their project topic. However, they were concerned about reaching out because they felt they would be annoying them.
“If I can't call them on the phone and if that's going to be weird then I wouldn't really want to message them… Unless it was like, ‘Oh hey we haven't talked in a while, but I saw you're really interested in design. I'm working on this project. Maybe you can help me spread the word’... I feel like having something like the common interest definitely helps.” |
“The people that are experts, it can be sometimes intimidating, because if I was friends with a lot of people who were really good at manufacturing, I might be intimidated to talk to them about [my project] given that it was just a bandsaw-cut prototype… I probably will be a little shy about it, but having a touch point to that community would be incredibly helpful." |
Web App Design
Following in-depth user testing, I narrowed down the four prototypes to one final design that would allow crowdfunders to visually explore who to connect with in their network based on shared connections and interests.
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The Team |
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Hui, J., Gerber, E., Gergle, D. (2014). "Leveraging Social Networks for Crowdfunding: Challenges and Opportunities." ACM Conference for Designing Interactive Systems.
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This project was created for the Northwestern Segal Design Cluster Fellowship (2013-2014) where I was advised by Dr. Elizabeth Gerber and Dr. Darren Gergle.
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