by Terry Makewell, National Museums Online Learning Project (Victoria & Albert Museum)

One of the main linchpins for the new Web 2.0 world is user generated content. As I mentioned in a previous post this is moving away from the read only web to a read/write web environment where the user really becomes part of the experience. They are no longer just a passive viewer of the content. They are adding to it and even creating if from scratch.

Within the museum sector many different websites have been created with the aim of getting the user to participate. There are numerous degrees to the model of participation. These range from users commenting, tagging or taking part in forums through to the sole creation of content on websites through bespoke methods or blogs.

One thing that is always difficult, if not impossible, to estimate is the size of user uptake. The ‘if we build it they will come’ mentality has been consigned to the pages of web history. When building a site that calls for user participation it is important to understand what are the star features that will get your users in and using it. The trouble is that it is often very hard to know what these are. The audience is constantly changing and evolving and what they want and what they have come to expect is constantly changing and evolving. Each new website raises the bar slightly higher.

It can be found that many major online projects which have tried to create an audience, where perhaps one hasn’t already existed, could be deemed to have failed since there has not been the uptake expected. But equally, audiences and online communities can appear in the most unlikely places. One such example is the Tile project.

In 2005 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London created an interactive to go with an exhibition micro-site. The exhibition was International Arts and Crafts which ran from 17 March until 24 July 2005. The interactive enabled users to create their own tile designs by using graphics which were in the theme of the Arts and Craft style. The Design your own Arts & Craft Tile interactive had no functionality built for interaction between users but did allow for each newly created tile to be added to a collective gallery, be printed out or emailed to a friend. As with most micro-sites that museums build around exhibitions, the success is normally expected to be proportionally representative to the physical exhibition. The interesting thing which occurred with the tile site was that an active community built up even though the site was not designed to have any social elements.

Why did this happen? It can be seen from the site that the first tiles which were created and placed into the gallery were authentic period designs. The users started out following the style of the exhibition. This was fulfilling the purpose behind the design of the site. Users also reproduced objects from the museum’s collection using only the set elements of the interactive. Set elements such as outlines of plants, flowers, a rabbit and a fish could be dragged and dropped onto the tile, rotated, scaled and coloured. It was in essence a simple tool to create different designs, but the ability to rotate, scale and colour the elements gave extra space in which the user could be creative. Soon users were being more creative by designing large scenes with one particular user designing a whole series of bunny Olympic tiles.

When each tile was created the user could place in the title of the tile and their own name. Soon users were implementing these two small text fields to communicate with each other. Users started to create tiles for each other with messages. They used the simple drag and drop design elements to create intricate graphic identities of themselves which they reused on many different tiles as avatars communicating with each other.

Even after the exhibition had closed the interactive continued to be well used. In around 30 months nearly 20,000 tiles were created. This was an average of over 600 per month. This teaches the Web 2.0 world an interesting lesson. Communities cannot be artificially created. There has to be a reason for them existing. There has to be a unique selling point – even if it was one that was never envisioned. Watch your website statistics, watch what the users are doing and develop these areas further. Give the users what they desire. Even nurture them into the new Bunny Olympiad if that is what they want.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 am and is filed under Culture online, Social media, Technology, Building audiences, Guest blogger - Terry Makewell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.