Professional groups, networks and communities are awesome, but it needs some care.
Here’s a list of 40 fundamental issues we see with professional community apps.
1.Purpose
1.1 People
You can’t easily find the members relevant to you from 100s of members.
It’s tedious to message everyone and find out who's relevant for you.
In most cases members profiles don’t exist or they’re not information rich that you have to check their website or other social media profiles
No relationship building is happening unless you take explicit actions on it.
You can't search for people based on their interests or skills.
Life is too short to be among uninteresting people. Finding like minded people energizes you.
1.2 Collaboration
There’s no specific features enabled for networking among the members
There are no organic collaboration opportunities triggered
Quite often the platform doesn’t capture and showcase what you’re looking for or what you can offer to other members. Eg. There's no explicit option to showcase your work or services
It's difficult to promote your services without appearing spammy
1.3 Information
Too many posts and messages to read, don't know which one is relevant for you.
It’s not easy to find valuable content which was previously posted in the community.
You don't get summary or key highlights of the community on a weekly basis.
There's no way in which it can capture the best highlight of the day curated from all the members and content
Information is not generally organized, there are different types of too much information that’s shared
2.Culture
Different communities have different cultures. Community apps don’t usually cater to these cultural nuances and the user types, to provide an experience unique to that community.
Most of the community tools cater to the tech savvy and text savvy users.
Some of the widely adopted community apps are actually built for work collaboration and wouldn’t be the right fit for a community use case. In a work collaboration environment everyone is from the same organization and working towards a common project, while in a community environment everyone is usually from different organizations and not working together for a common project.
There are not many community apps which are designed for mobile first audience
3.Engagement
There’s no default functionality which brings in the ‘wow factor of that community’ to the members on a weekly basis. Eg. What if there’s an option for the admin to share the ‘power of community’ factors like ‘New members joined’, ‘Jobs and other opportunities’ shared, top member and community insights.
The app doesn’t tell you what you can do as an admin to improve your community engagement
Maybe you as a member don't want to interact with the community daily, yet it shows up on your screen.
There's no incentive for being an active participant in the community unless the admin takes initiative to make that happen
4.Efficiency
You cannot create sub groups or interest groups inside a community for focused discussions
Requires you to spend a lot of time scrolling through unread messages or posts to find relevant information
There's not much visual design elements that are used to make the communication and presentation better
Many of the community apps assume that assigning all members to a group chat room or to a common community feed is the ultimate way of engaging the members. But the truth is that’s just one of the many ways to engage a community. Eg. What if there’s a mechanism to organize round robin networking?
Your phone memory gets eaten up with all the media forwards which you'll have to manually clean up
4.1 Productivity
You can't exit the group due to FOMO, but there's no option of temporary exit or stay inactive
There’s no option to create a temporary conversation group of three or more people so that others are not disturbed
It wants your attention on an hourly basis, if you leave it unattended for a week, you can't catch up with the conversations and interactions happening over there.
It treats all posts and messages equally. There’s no way to separate and understand Important and urgent messages from the members.
Doesn't help you achieve your personal community goal
4.2 Distraction
In chat based community apps muting and archiving doesn't help, the message or posts show up on your screen again
Unread messages create mental fatigue and FOMO
You end up spending mindless time on random conversations and it just won't stop buzzing keeping you distracted all the time
5.Communication
Admin messages and posts get lost in the clutter of the other messages
In chat based community apps there's no option to reply to a new message as a thread most of the times without bothering everyone in the community
In chat based community apps there's no way to find out what the message is all about without reading it.
6.Intelligence
The app doesn’t help you understand what your members want.
Which of the above problems you resonate with?
What’s the no. 1 challenge that you’re having with your community?
We’re all ears.