Raising the quality of conversations and driving a higher level of engagement

Role: UX Designer

Team: Product Manager, Community Manager, Product Director, Community Director, Visual Designer, and Development later on

The Huffington Post has one of the largest and vivacious communities online; however, a little known fact is while there are millions of comments, there is a smaller amount of actual contributors voicing opinions. As part of the HuffPost Community Team, we wanted to not only raise the quality of conversation on site, but to drive a higher level of engagement as well.

We worked as a lean, autonomous team to plan out a new Community system for HuffPost beginning with a new way to think about commenting: Conversations. Simply building another commenting system wasn’t going to fly because a comment is a quip, not an intelligent dialogue. We wanted to build intelligent dialogues.
To figure out how to do this, we went out into the community and asked people what possessed them to comment on HuffPost, and if they weren’t, why not?

Conversation musings

We found out that commenting for the first time can be scary: it’s like entering a room of over 100 people and having to shout your opinion with a megaphone. What people really wanted was a way to sit around a small table and discuss meaningful things with people who mattered. From that point, our team’s challenge was, how do we take a room of 100+ strangers and make it feel like a warm, comforting dinner with friends?

Conversations wireframes

Enter Conversations. Through rapid ideation, we as a team decided on an overlay system to help people feel they were entering a small room with a finite amount of people from the comment stream.

Then there were the badges. People don’t care about badges. People want to be respected. As a team, we also mapped out an entirely new reputation system to rid HuffPost of the childish badges and build a true community around respect.

The Reaction Bar

This was a contentious item, and a hard lesson to learn.

We wanted to give people the ability to not only comment to articles, but to react emotionally to all content. The first step of that was the reaction bar for comments allowing community members to react emotionally to comments.

This was my baby, and we ended up tossing it, because we decided as a team it wasn't as valuable as other pieces of the system, and we had to be stringent with the first release.

I learned that sometimes you need to throw your baby out with the bathwater for the greater good., because it's not just about your ideas or wants, it's about the team.

Conversations on HuffPost

Conversations was implemented on HuffPost. Since then, HuffPost made the decision to switch to Facebook comments.