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Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success

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  • Jenny Preece

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Jenny Preece, 2001. "Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success," Behaviour and Information Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(5), pages 347-356.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:20:y:2001:i:5:p:347-356
    DOI: 10.1080/01449290110084683
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    Cited by:

    1. Kejun Chen & Yuehua Zhao & Ningyuan Song & Yufei Han & Jiaer Peng & Jiaqing Wang, 2024. "You are not alone: Characterizing users' relationship‐layer identities in online health communities," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 75(7), pages 807-828, July.

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