Hello, TGIF. I think this is the first time I've try posting a blog on a Friday. I had a hectic week!
So, this is the fifth and the last article in the miniseries Ranks Designed to "Flow". Previous blog articles from this miniseries can be access through these links:
1. Spacing the rungs of your ranking ladder
We've covered a lot of ground, and I've introduced many design principles for building an optimal ranking ladder for engaging your superusers. I must emphasize that it is very important to implement these rank design principle in the order that they are presented. It is meaningless to flow with your superusers, if you don't know your superusers' capability. And it is useless trying to surprise your superusers with special privileges if the gaps between your ranks are so large that it takes them years to get a promotion. They will never get there and never be surprised! However, the first two steps do involve some analytical work, and they are the most difficult and most important step (especially step 2). Once you know your superusers, everything that follows is easy.
Until now, I have been talking about the principles for designing a single ranking ladder that rewards the posting behavior of community members. Although message posting is a common participation within online communities, modern community platforms now furnish their members with a host of activities. Consequently, superusers may come in many flavors depending on the kinds of activity they participate in. The superusers that we've considered so far are content creators who excel in posting messages. But superusers may be critics who rate contents by giving kudos and report inappropriate contents, and others may be organizers who label and tag contents. Therefore, an ideal ranking structure should have multiple branches for rewarding different kinds of participation.
To create a multi-branch ranking structure, you simply juxtapose everal ranking ladders together. Each ladder has a set of ranking criteria that is based on different participation metrics. For example, rather than post requirement, some ladders may use kudos requirements, and others may have a tag count requirement. Based on the superusers' participation, they will climb different ladders. Some well-rounded superusers may even excel on several ladders. Moreover, ranking ladders can be merged by creating participation criteria using the logical AND.
So how many branches should you have? According to Forrester Research, online participation pattern can be segmented into 6 categories via the social technographic profile: inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. Since inactives do not participate, and spectators only consume contents passively, there are at least 4 categories of active participation that you can reward. But in theory, there is no limit to how many branches you could have in your ranking structure. The more ladders you have, the more unique your superusers will feel about their contribution (and reward). But more ladders required more management. A multi-branch ranking structure should be the last step in the design of your ranking structure. Having many poorly designed ranking ladders is much worse than having one that is well designed. My advice is to start with one ladder for your creators. When you are able to manage steps 1 to 4 with all the yearly adjustment, add one for your critics, then collectors, and finally joiners.
Congratulation! This concludes my miniseries on the optimal design of your ranking structures. Next time we'll explore something different. Have a great weekend.
Photo by Jon Wiley
After 3 weeks of Health Factors, I guess (from the fact that my last post received no kudos) you are probably a little fed up with it. So let's take a break!
It's been a while since we talk about rank design, so this is a good time to revisit the topic. This is the 4th article in the miniseries on designing the optimal ranking structure for your community. Previous blog articles from this miniseries can be found here:
Give your superusers a little surprise
Part of the fun and the challenge in gaming is the unpredictable elements in games. The player can never truly know the outcome of his play. When the gamer has just figured out the game, he moves into the control state. When he is able to predict the outcome, the game is probably too easy for him. And soon he will find the game boring and move onto something more challenging. Likewise, a fun and challenging ranking ladder should be cryptic, and it is best when there are some elements of surprise built in. In a previous post, I talked about switching after year 2 to a very regular and predictable arithmetic progression (a.k.a. linear progression) for our ranking ladder. The problem is that your smart superusers will most likely figure out this ranking scheme.
So, how do you keep the superusers engaged under such a predictable (boring) ranking criteria? I will describe 4 things that you can do to spice up your ranking ladder even when it is a predictable and boring arithmetic progression.
1. Name your ranks creatively.
It is inevitable that some superusers will eventually figure out the post requirement for promotion, and will expect a promotion at the right time. But if you name your ranks cleverly, they still won't know what they are going to get next. So, don't name your ranks in any obvious progression. For example, a terrible choice of rank names would be bronze, silver, etc. Without even writing it down, it is blatantly obvious that the one after silver is going to be gold, then probably platinum, titanium, and then diamond. Give your superusers some serendipitous joy when they get promoted and use your imagination when naming your ranks.
For statisticians, there is a simple trick to make things less predictable. Just add some noise (or randomness)! Rather than following any formula strictly, you just need to randomly jitter the number a little bit. For example, it is very easy for anyone to figure out the pattern in the following linear progression: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, etc. By add some random noise, the sequence becomes much harder to predict: 11, 18, 32, 41, 49, 63, 74, etc. Notice that the challenges between the ranks will remain roughly the same (compare the figure of the jagged ranking criteria here with the figure of the smooth ranking criteria from my previous blog post). The shape is virtually the same, but this one is much harder to figure out. You can start jittering the post criteria from the first rank if you wish, but please be sure to "make some noise" when you switch over to the highly regular linear progression.
3. Privileges do matter.
Even with added noise and the most humorous and interesting rank names, superusers may still get tired of the routine rank changes without other incentives. This is especially true after you switch the ranking criteria over to the highly predictable linear progressions to avoid over challenging your superusers. If you follow the recommendation in this miniseries of blogs, this should happen roughly 2 years after the superuser first participated in the community. After 2 years, don't you think it is time to show your superusers that you recognize how special they are? So tell them (it only takes an email) and grant them access and customization privileges that are not available to others. Start with something simple, such as allowing your superusers to use a personalized icon. Then as they move up the rather boring rank ladder, they will be intermittently rewarded with different privileges that are totally unpredictable.
Attaching special privileges to a rank through our permission system is an extremely effective way to engaging your superusers. However, you might want to let time test their loyalty and goodwill before giving out too many privileges. Therefore the perfect time to give out special privileges is after the superusers have moved through the first 24 ranks. However, if you really trust your superusers, you may do this earlier on your ranking ladder. This also applies when switching your superusers into a MVP program.
4. Show your trust.
An important reason to give special permissions to your superusers is to establish trust. A deep relationship built on trust is likely to be more lasting than a superficial relationship that is built on other incentives. So show your superusers that you trust them. Invite them to beta test programs in private boards and treat them as your most valuable assets. Give them power to take action in the community, such as moving posts and perhaps deleting inappropriate content. Let them help you moderate your community. Can you really trust the superusers with that much power? I believe that you should. Because it is highly improbable that a superuser would just throw away all the reputations and privileges they've earned through hard work over long period of time. The more they have invested, the more they will treasure their unique social status.
Now that your rank ladder is all spiced up, you should be able to keep your superusers engaged "indefinitely" (contrast the above figure with the figure from my previous blog post). Next time we'll wrap up with the grand finale: synthesizing all the rank design principles we've explored to build a complete ranking structure. Stay tuned at mich8elwu.
Previously, I have blogged on using the principle of flow to build ranking ladders and scale them to match the skill level of the superusers in your community. Because these blog articles are the foundation for this blog, I strongly recommend reading them first if you haven't. They can be found here:
Flow with your most prolific superusers
In a benchmark study I conducted last year, we found that healthy and vibrant communities that have many superusers generally have a large number of ranks. In fact, the benchmark list of top communities has an average of 31 non-role-based ranks (ranks that are achievable through participation). If we include role-based ranks (that were assigned), the average is 59. Among these top communities, the number of ranks goes as high as 134 ranks. But does this apply to your community? The important questions are: How many ranks does YOUR community need, and how many is enough?
The answer is that you need as many ranks as necessary to keep your most active superuser engaged. The exact number will depend on how prolific your most active superuser is. I will illustrate this with the calculation on Lithosphere again. Last time we've designed an optimal ranking ladder for Lithosphere. The post requirement for each rank are: 3 posts, 9, 18, 30, 45, 63, 84, 108, 135, 165, 198, 234, 273, 315, 360, 408, 459, 513, 570, 630, 693, 759, 828, and finally 900 posts at the 24th rank. We've also calculated the post rate for all users who have been in the community for more than 2 weeks and sorted them. If you look at the previous blog, you will see that ScottD is the most active superuser on Lithosphere (he also happens to be our community admin, but let's ignore that for now). He has posted 451 messages in total and his post rate is 1.16 posts/day. If ScottD wasn't our admin, he would be on the 16th rank now. So the proposed rank ladder with 24 levels is definitely enough for now.
A natural question is when will this rank ladder become insufficient? If ScottD posts 450 more messages, his post count will exceed 900. After that, his contribution will no longer be rewarded by this ranking ladder. Soon after, he may become bored with the community. How long would that take? Since we have ScottD's post rate, 450 more posts would take him about (450 post)÷(1.16 posts/day)=388 days. So in a little more than a year, it will be time to adjust this ranking ladder. What do we need to do a year from now to keep ScottD engaged in his personal flow state? Add more ranks! But how should we set the rank criteria? Remember, if it's too easy, ScottD will be bored, and if too hard, he might become frustrated and leave.
Why wouldn't we just add 60 more ranks and be good for the next 10 years? You can, but I certainly would not recommend that because ScottD's capability may change. Perhaps another more prolific superuser will come along, or maybe some other superusers will surpass ScottD. So we may need to change the spacing of the linear progression again the following year. In general, it is a good idea to re-compute the post rate of your top superusers yearly (or semi annually) and adapt the post criteria to keep the "flow" with your superusers. Alternatively, if you have a superuser MVP program, you can also switch your top contributors to an assigned-rank system to build a more personal relationship with your superusers.
Next time we will add some mysteries and surprises to spice up your ranking ladder and explore what happens after we switched the ranking criteria over to the arithmetic progressions. Come and follow my update at mich8elwu. May the flow be with your superusers!
An important mechanism for getting into the state of flow is to have a balance between ability and challenge. In a community, this means having a set of ranking criteria that matches your superusers' ability. If the criteria are too easy, superusers will quickly reach the top rank and become bored. But if the criteria are too difficult, superusers will become frustrated over their lack of advancement. In either case, the risk is that superusers will give up trying and abandon the community eventually.
Know your superusers!
Knowing your superusers is the key to designing a ranking structure that matches their capability. This is done by computing the post rate for all users that have registered for more than 2 weeks on the community. I will illustrate this calculation with Lithosphere as an example (see screen shot). As of June 6, 2009, Lithosphere had 524 members who have registration age of more than 14 days (2 weeks). Column B shows the total post count by these users (including blogs, ideas, comments and replies, but excluding deleted messages). Then I divided each user's post count by their respective registration age in days (column C) and sorted the resulting post rate (column D).
Now, if you believe the 90-9-1 rule, the top 1% (the 99 percentile) should be your superusers. In our experience, the fraction of superusers consists of only about 0.1% of the community population. Sean O'Driscoll also claimed that only 0.5% of the members in his data are superusers (see Interview with superuser guru Sean O'Driscoll from our 2009 Customer Conference). If we use our conservative estimate of 0.1%, the capability of Lithosphere's superusers is simply the 99.9 percentile of the post rates. Capability, in this example, means how fast your superusers can post. Using Excel's percentile function, you can calculate the 99, 99.5, or 99.9 percentile values from the post rates (column D). From the screen shot, we can see that the 99.9 percentile post rate is about 0.851 posts/day. This is the approximate capability of the superusers on Lithosphere. The superusers on your community will have a different number, and communities with very active superusers will have a larger number. I've certainly seen communities with superusers posting up to 35 posts/days. Armed with this knowledge of your superusers, you can now scale your community's ranking ladder so that its ranking criteria match your superusers' capability.
Our empirical data suggests that, on average, community members expect a promotion to higher rank once every month. This would require an average of 12 ranks in 1 year, or 24 ranks in 2 years. Using the ranking criteria formula I presented last time, we can calculate the post requirement for the 24th rank. If we use the incremental difference of 10 as in my previous blog, then c(24)=(10/2)×(24+242)=5×(24+576)=3000 posts. For Lithosphere superusers (posting 0.851 posts/day), this would take them roughly 3525 days or 9.7 years to reach a post count of 3000, because (3000 posts)÷(0.851 posts/day)=3525 days. Clearly this ranking criterion is too challenging for the Lithosphere superusers. At 0.851 posts/day, we can only expect the Lithosphere superusers to post about 621 posts in 2 years, since (2 years)×(365 days/year)×(0.851 posts/day)=621 posts. Even if we make a wild speculation that the superusers capability will double in 2 year, this would only brings the expected post count to 621×200%=1242 posts, nowhere near 3000 posts.
Clearly, we need to rescale this ranking structure. With simple algebra, I solved for the incremental difference as a function of the post criterion from the formula I presented in my previous blog article:
But what do we plug in for the post criterion c(n)? Since Lithosphere is a young community, the superusers definitely have room for improvement. I will assume a 20% yearly increase in the superusers' capability, so that their expected post count over 2 years could potentially reach (621 post)×(120%)×(120%)=894 posts. Therefore roughly 894 posts should be the proper post requirement for the 24th rank, hence d=2×(894 post)/(24+242)=1789/600=2.98. Rounding this to 3, we may now generate the optimal ranking criteria that are match to the capability of the superusers on Lithosphere. The post requirement for the first rank is 3 posts, then 9, 18, 30, 45, 63, 84, 108, 135, 165, 198, 234, 273, 315, 360, 408, 459, 513, 570, 630, 693, 759, 828, and finally 900 posts at the 24th rank. Even if Lithosphere's superusers did not improve their capability at all, they would have gotten approximately 621 posts in 2 years and ascend through 19 ranks requiring 570 posts.
So, is your ranking ladder too easy or too difficult for your superusers? A sanity check by computing the post rate of just the top users on your community and comparing that to the post requirement of the top rank can quickly tell you if your ranking structure makes sense. A ranking structure that is design to "flow" could engage and captivate your superusers with superior efficacy. Next time we will answer a question that every community manager once had, "How many ranks do I need, and how many is enough?" Stay tuned at mich8elwu.
Hello and welcome back. It's been a while, so we'll review a bit throughout this article. Last time I described the concept of flow and discussed how it is governed by an individual's abilities and the challenges he encounters. I also talked about the connection between flow, gamers and superusers. In this miniseries of blogs, we'll apply this to optimize the ranking structure for your community. We all know that reputation matters. Here, we will show you the details that make it work.
Spacing the rungs of your ranking ladder
Previously, we discussed how games transport players into flow. A well designed game usually has many levels. with the difficulty between levels increasing slowly so that the gamers can easily find challenges that match their skills. By extrapolation, an engaging ranking ladder for the superusers should mimic the gradually increasing difficulty levels of a game. Although the ranking criteria may depend on any combination of metrics we collect, I will use the most common criterion, post count, as an illustrative example.
So how should you space the rungs of your ranking ladder? There are two possible solutions. First is an arithmetic progression (a.k.a. linear progression), where the successive terms are obtained by adding a fixed value to the current term. For example, the first rank might require 10 posts, and then the higher ranks require 30, 50, 70, 90, 110, 130, 150, 170, 190, etc (red ladder). Because arithmetic progressions grow more slowly than geometric progressions, they are better suited for ranking criteria. However, because such ranking criteria are very regular, they may be too predictable to challenge highly competitive superusers.
If you want to challenge your superusers, I recommend using a sequence with a linear increment, where the difference between successive terms grows linearly. For example, the first rank might require 10 post, then subsequently, 30, 60, 100, 150, 210, 280, 360, 450, 550 etc (green ladder). Unlike the arithmetic progression, where the difference between successive terms is always 20, the difference between successive terms of this sequence increases linearly: (30-10)=20, (60-30)=30, (100-60)=40, etc. This sequence can be generated by the following ranking criteria formula,
where d is the incremental difference between successive terms and n is the rank number. The example I presented above has an incremental difference of 10, so it can be generated by 
Keep in mind, the key is to have small gaps between the rungs of your ranking ladder. An ideal ladder might start with a geometric progression, since the early terms of a geometric progression are fairly closely spaced. As the gaps between the ranks increase, you can control them by switching the ranking criteria to a linear incremental scheme. And finally, you can move to an arithmetic progression to prevent the gap size between ranks from growing so large that it is nearly impossible to move up the ladder.
Now that you know how to build your ranking ladder, next time we'll scale it so that the ranking criteria are tuned specifically for the superusers in your community. Stay tuned at mich8elwu.
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