User Driven Services: 7. User Generativity

7. User Generativity

Users contribute to User Driven Services.

User Driven Services build on active, engaged participation in value creation. Users should be empowered to augment, annotate, and contribute to the underlying service as much as possible. By enabling users to pro-actively co-create the service experience—and to share that co-created value with other users—services tap into the most motivated, qualified source of content and innovation in their product.

Examples

User profiles, pictures, and status updates make Facebook and MySpace highly personalized digital expressions of personal identity. Flickr lets users load photos to share with others. Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr let users tag and comment on other people’s content as a distributed worldwide dialogue in shared social spaces. Twitter integrates web and SMS updates from, and to, select lists of users to dynamically generate a real-time ambient, global conversation. GetSatisfaction and other online help forums allow users to post questions and get support from others using similar products. IRC is a global distributed chat system.

Questions

• Can users create new content within the service that contributes to value received by other users?
• Can users provide feedback that improves the flow of experience for others?
• Is user input a driver of system value?

This article is part of a series. It is the seventh of ten characteristics of User Driven Services:

1. Impulse from the User
2. Control
3. Transparency
4. Data Portability
5. Service Endpoint Portability
6. Self Hosting
7. User Generativity
8. Improvability
9. Self-managed Identity
10. Duty of Care

More soon…