My badges on Foursquare

One such service, Foursquare, asks mobile Web users to check in whenever they arrive at a new location. Users can choose to alert their friends or even Tweet about their new location. This is one of the many location-based social networking services that are coming into popular use. Foursquare has adopted badges as one way to motivate users to check in. Examples include the “Adventurer” badge for checking in at your 10th unique location or the “Local” badge for your third check in at a particular location. These badges give you nothing more than a visual reward on your profile page. It’s similar to how a Scout earns a badge for completing certain activities. Other sites like StackOverflow have used the badge model to recognize users for good contributions to the site. Here the goal isn’t to increase participation, it’s to increase the quality of participation.

Online forums have used a reputation or karma score for some time now. Unless somebody started using a forum at its inception it quickly becomes more and more difficult to catch up with others. Badges are distinctly different in that they are attainable even by new users. Having badges at multiple levels of difficulty (StackOverflow does this explicitly) allows new users to get into the game and “catch the bug,” if you will. The quest for more badges becomes addicting and their participation frequency increases. I like to refer to this as the “win-all-you-can” principle.

Let’s extend this idea a bit further. I think this can be used outside of social networking and to great effect. What if a corporate intranet was treated like StackOverflow? Users could receive badges for helping with the maintenance of the site. An “Organizer” badge could be rewarded for adding tags to an article or a “Cleanup” badge for flagging out-of-date content. High levels of participation could even be rewarded with monetary compensation. While this sounds a bit hokey, it may be just the thing that brings social participation to typically asocial sites.

So what do you think? Is the stretch too far? How about other ideas for badges outside of the social-networking space? Comment it up, folks.

As I said during the interview, it’s important to make your users feel smart.  You accomplish this by ensuring that users know exactly what you would like them to do.  Take Google for example.  There’s a text input and a search button right in the center of the screen. Google is a good example  for accomplishing one purpose, but most sites are much more complex.

During the show Kipp talked about producing content and it’s importance to a successful Web site.  As I said during the interview, having great content is the hardest part of creating a compelling Web experience.  Unfortunately at first glance it’s the most overlooked portion of a site.  Good design and entices your audience and directs them to your content. Let’s take my friend Josh Lockhart for example at joshlockhart.com.  I’m going to step you through what a user might think as they visit his site.  “Okay, what is this site about.  Oh, here it is right in the image: RapidWeaver themes.”  Cool.  I’m interested.  So, how do I buy one?  Look there’s a “Add to Cart” button beside each one.  Great.”  So, Josh is trying to communicate what he does and how you can purchase his products.  Both of those goals are accomplished through design.  Once you get past those initial questions, you can then explore his great collection of content (or in this case, products).

While Josh shows the breadth of his content on the home page, it’s no overwhelming.  Be careful that you don’t put too much content on the page.  Every element on your page is communicating in some way.  If you don’t carefully consider what elements you include, you’ll be communicating too many things at once.  Think about several people talking to you at once.  If they expect you to hear it all and you can’t, you’ll won’t feel smart.  The same is true on the Web.

Friends, I’ve only touched on a few of the basics here.  Here’s one article that I wrote after Robert Hoekman Jr.’s talk with his 7 rules for great Web application design.  I’ll also post some of my favorite resources later today.