What Is Community Experience Design
Community Experience Design (CXD) is an emerging field that focuses on designing and optimizing the experiences of communities, whether they are online communities, local communities, or interest-based communities.
At Treeshake we apply CXD to fundraising, b2b sales and relations, business-to-government, government-to-industry communications, business to employees, and business to niche constituency comms. In other words, fields where there’s a defined set of people we’re looking to communicate with, onboard, and grow connectivity to. Usually community sizes range from 200 - 100k members.
CXD draws from various disciplines, including user experience design, community management, social psychology, and data analysis.
Some key aspects of Community Experience Design include:
🔍 Community research and insights: Conducting research to understand the community's culture, values, motivations, and pain points, as well as analyzing community data and interactions.
📝 Community strategy and planning: Defining the community's purpose, goals, and desired outcomes, as well as developing strategies for fostering engagement, collaboration, and growth.
🏗️ Community architecture and design: Designing the structure, features, and user experience of the community platform or environment, including user interfaces, information architecture, and interaction models.
🤝 Community facilitation and moderation: Establishing guidelines, policies, and processes for facilitating discussions, managing conflicts, and moderating community interactions to ensure a safe and productive environment.
📊 Community analytics and measurement: Developing metrics and methods for measuring community health, engagement, and impact, as well as analyzing data to inform iterative improvements and decision-making.
It differs from typical User Experience Design by optimising in a couple of key ways:
Directly identifying and contacting the right people to join the community, rather than simply opening it up to everyone initially. This sets the tone and culture.
Onboarding collateral, content, experiences, and actions.
Emphasising the long term connectedness. We don’t want to churn people through a one-off buying or decision-making process, but rather we want to both achieve the sale and the decision while growing the connectivity. So we have loyalty metrics and data in our CRM.
Equipping current community members to evangelise and bring others onboard.
A last note about CXD as we see it, is that the community members don’t always see or understand themselves as part of your “community”, however, we find that using this nomenclature ensures that we focus on the long term value, reciprocal exchange, and ecosystem effects of the relationships that matter and drive results for our clients.
