Project at a Glance

Problem

The client, Pegasystems wants to grow their online community Pega Discovery Network, and wanted to learn more about:

  • What factors make someone want to join an online community?
  • What factors make them want to stay there?
  • What drives someone to join a professional/technical community online?

Concept

My research is exploratory, dealing with people’s attitudes of joining, belonging and contributing to communities more specifically online communities. I selected this framework because the client already has a fixed community they are trying to grow; they have already established that the online community approach suits their larger business goals.

My Role

This was an individual project.

Tools/Skills

  • Study design

  • Interviewing

  • Remote interviewing

  • Personas

  • Summarizing findings

  • Recruiting

Research

Recruiting

The study consisted of five adults, male and female, currently employed in professional and technical fields. They range from junior to senior stages of their careers and levels of participation in both online and offline communities that at personal, professional, and technical.

This is to capture the different audiences of the PDN to understand their motivations and behaviors around joining and participating. Varying the genders, roles and professional experience will limit bias in understanding only certain segments of the community since these groups might have different behaviors. Studying users who do not partake in online or professional communities could help discover what needs are not met by current communities and potentially find ways to attract new audiences.  

Techniques/Methods

The research consisted of a combination of interview questions and writing activities. The activities and questions were designed to be leading questions to find out more about people’s behaviors in regards to joining and belonging to communities that are professional and personal, and their involvement in those communities. The activities were designed to be completed in person and with remote participants using Google hangouts and Google Docs.

Personas

Based on the research findings I created two personas: “novice” and “expert”.  

Evaluation

 

Challenges / Limitations

The study was limited by lack of a budget, and required me to recruit people from my network who were willing to complete a one hour session without compensation.

The study had only one female participant, and mostly mid and senior level professionals.

Next Steps

Studying 20 more adults employed in professional and technical fields would give the client more data to confirm my findings and personas. Studying more females and junior level professionals would fill in gaps in current data.

Lessons Learned

This was my first individual study and biggest challenge was making sure people answer the questions asked. They were all individuals who knew me prior to study, so I had to learn to be firm and get them to answer questions, even if they wanted to be vague or couldn’t think of examples right away.