Developing an online social community for a Business Organization

Abstract

In this project, I am aiming at providing a design solution for an online social community used for a company that would enable it to be a place for not only user-user interaction, but also user-company communication. The goal is to enable any given company to gain a better insight of its customers and hence provide them with better services. In this manner, the company will have a closer connection to its target users and the users will know the people behind the scenes better. To achieve this goal, the current social community called “MyLavasoft” has been used as the base to apply the new design on. MyLavasoft belongs to the “Lavasoft” team (the original creators of Ad Aware: the original Anti-Spyware Software) and is aimed at “Community done right”. Alongside improving the communications performed in an online community, the other objective covered in this project is: making a fun and user-friendly online social community, which would encourage active user participation and enhanced user loyalty to both the company and the community. This is to transform the end-users from passive recipients of products and services into active contributors of information. Various Interaction Design methods have been used throughout the pre-studies, planning and the actual design process phases to split the problem at hand into pieces, and putting it back together in a new way. The result is then illustrated through a system structure and summarized as design guidelines that could be used not only for “MyLavasoft” in particular, but also for any other social community that is aimed at enhancing company-customer communication and active user participation.