When the web started it was primarily about content-sharing: mostly text documents. It quickly evolved into commerce, which gave rise to the consumer Web. Since the launch of Facebook and other social sites, we have seen the transformation of the Web into the ‘Social Web’ – every major website has added or is adding a social dimension to its experience. This has vastly altered the competitive landscape for most web-centric companies and will have a business impact on most enterprises, depending on the degree and speed of response. This article discusses why a high-quality social experience can now be a competitive advantage and 7 steps to build successful social experiences into your website and online applications.

1. 7 Steps To Successful Social Experience Design
When the web started it was primarily about content-sharing: mostly text documents. It quickly
evolved into commerce, which gave rise to the consumer Web and the dot-com boom in
1999—with flagship companies such as Amazon, eBay and Google leading the way. The concept
of community and social interaction had started making its first appearance in the form of
Amazon reviews and eBay ratings for buyers and sellers. Since the launch of Facebook and
other social sites, we have seen the transformation of the Web into the ‘Social Web’ – every
major website has added or is adding a social dimension to its experience. Additionally, social
channels/platforms focusing exclusively on the Social Web such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin,
Pinterest and lately location-based social sites such as Foursquare and local-deals sites such as
Groupon, Living Social have been seeing explosive growth.
This has vastly altered the competitive landscape for most web-centric companies and will have
a business impact on most enterprises, depending on the degree and speed of response. A
high-quality social experience can now be a competitive advantage.
Following are 7 steps you must consider while building successful social experiences into your
website and online applications:
1. Powered by People: Social experiences are all about people-to-people connections and
relationships. Create platforms for people to interact and engage with each other. Give
people a way to share their name or a profile/avatar that will allow them to maintain
relationships in all their connections. Also, people are driven by their self-identities. Give
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2. people a way to showcase what differentiates them from others. Facebook does this via
user names, while other sites allow users to create detailed profiled about their
interests and preferences.
2. Be activity-driven: The hallmark of a great social site is one which involves and engages
people in more ways than one. The lives of constituents are enriched as a result of the
activities. Hence, beyond hoarding fans, consider situations and environments for
people to connect, download, share, review, rate, create groups, find answers to
questions, collaborate, play games.
3. Maintaining the real-world connect: Social sites are not meant to disconnect people
from real-world, real-life experiences and events. People want to share their online
activities in the real world, talk about it and enrich it. They also want to use online
media as a way to showcase their offline world, relationships, hobbies, passions and
interests. Consider including social objects into the experience such as adding photos,
locations, events, favourite products, books, thought of the day, tagging photos to
locations, ranking and reviewing offline experiences.
4. User-curated content: In the past, brand owners and organizations would create a
bunch of content objects (such a documents, videos, images, brochures, articles, PR
stories) and “push” it to viewers/ users. This kind of static, push marketing is not
effective anymore. Customers demand sites that allow them to voice their experience,
grievances, share reviews, raves and rants about products. They also like to use the
power of community to elevate other users in the group and content that they value.
For examples, content such as news stories, pictures move higher up or down on a page
depending upon the viewership, ratings, likes, social commentary around it.
5. Set the rules of social engagement: Some of the most subtle but important decisions in
the architecture of a social application are not in the user interface per se but in the
logic and rules for interaction. For example, when Facebook was launched, it was
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3. available to only those people who had a Harvard.edu email ID. This created the aura of
exclusivity. Recently, many luxury shopping sites host online secret sales only for a
select guest-list. In other cases, the social connections are open and users can follow
any user – for e.g. Twitter. In designing your social experience, consider the goal and
mission of the site and what kind of relationships do you want constituents to establish
among themselves.
6. Gamification to encourage engagement and participation: In designing social
experiences, organizations can also look at “gamifying” their user experiences.
Gamification uses game mechanics such as rewards and recognition (badges, social
status, points, leaderboards) to increase engagement and encourage participation.
These give any social experience more of the addictive qualities of a game. Companies
like Happiest Minds provide social gamification engines that can be effectively
integrated to increase engagement and activity in various scenarios such as websites,
training programs, e-learning, customer communities, intranet, online retail, marketing
campaigns as well as with enterprise applications such as CRM, CMS and ERP.
7. Social Referral and Loyalty: Social Experience Design can also be effectively tied to
understand “customer lifetime value”. For example, let’s consider a typical loyalty card
program. Most brand owners reward customers for buying more. These rewards can be
in the form of cash back or discounts on future purchases. However, by designing social
referral into traditional loyalty card programs, brand owners can reward customers to
“buy more, try more and recommend more”. Additionally, each referral that leads to
conversion can be identified and further rewarded.
In conclusion, many websites are now evolving to become social sites using these design
principles. Some sites have successfully scaled beyond simple sites to large-scale social
platforms that engage with millions of customers around the world.
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4. About CXP Design
CXP Design (www.cxpdesign.com), founded by Rupa Shankar, is a platform for marketers,
technologists, designers and leaders to discuss and gain a deeper understanding of cross-channel
customer experience design, develop empathy for customer needs and learn how to create
products and services that deliver "wow" experiences for customers.
When we check into a hotel. When we shop on-line. When we buy a pair of shoes. When we get on
a flight. These are experiences by which we measure brands every day. However, most companies
are without the tools to purposefully design those experiences for maximum value. That’s where
CXP Design comes in.
Day in, day out, we live, sleep, eat, breathe and unravel the riddle that is human experience, leading
to more loyal and committed customers for our clients.
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Rupa is an Associate Director at Happiest Minds Technologies (www.happiestminds.com), a next-
generation IT Services & Solutions company at the forefront of Providing Advisory, Implementation and
Managed Services on Social computing, Mobility, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud computing,
Security and Unified Communications. At Happiest Minds, Rupa is responsible for uncovering and
activating innovative digital and social engagement strategies for its clients, spearheading the
development of frameworks and solutions for different industry verticals and enhancing the global go-to-
market strategy. She taps into her past work as both a design practitioner and marketer to help Happiest
Minds clients envision and define broad, end-to-end customer experiences.
© Rupa Shankar
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