Lithys 2016: GoPro - Community Design of the Year

Lithys 2016: GoPro - Community Design of the Year

GoProLogo.pngCompany: GoPro

Entry submitted by: Jeff Terrell (Director, Support Community)

Community: GoPro Support Hub

Lithy category: Community Design of the Year

 

GoPro, Inc. is transforming the way people visually capture and share their lives. What began as an idea to help athletes self-document themselves engaged in their sport, GoPro has become a standard for how people capture themselves engaged in their interests, whatever they may be. From extreme to mainstream, professional to consumer, GoPro enables the world to capture and share its passion in the form of immersive and engaging content.

 

Our community goals

 

GoPro’s mission is built on the idea that when you create the tools to help people capture and share their lives, something magical happens. Their shared content inspires others to get out there and do the same. We call this “The GoPro Movement” and it’s a testament to our inspired customer community and the world’s interest in participating. As stewards of this movement, it’s our job to make it easy for the world to join in.

 

When we launched the GoPro Support Hub, our goals were tied directly to this mission. Specifically, we wanted to build a platform that did three things:

 

  1. Places GoPro enthusiasts at the center of a support community designed to inspire them and invite increased engagement.
  2. Engages audiences and enlist superusers to contribute value to the community by answering member questions and developing an emotional bond with our members at scale.
  3. Assures that our platform, trusted content, and incentives provide the unified foundation for this program that embodies the values of our trusted brand.

 

Ultimately, our goals for the GoPro Support Hub are tied to acquiring and engaging customers to experience our brand, giving those customers dynamic support and learning opportunities from both GoPro experts and experts within our customer base so everyone can get the most out of our products and services, and celebrating our members and sharing the content and knowledge they’ve developed.

 

Within GoPro, we often use the word “stoked” to express when we’re excited about something. The GoPro Support Hub is our way to help spread the stoke.

 

The design elements that make our community unique and stand out from the rest

 

Featured Search Bar

Nearly all platforms have a search function, but for the GoPro Support Hub, we decided to bring that front and center and invite the user to “Find a solution. Share a solution, Ask a question. Stay stoked.”

 

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Navigation Grid

In addition to a traditional navigation tree, we built a more visual six-panel interface that encourages users to dive into our five key product categories, or into our in-house produced video tutorials. Each panel responds interactively to the user with engaging lifestyle images as the user mouses over, creating a dynamic experience that demonstrates the types of shots the user can capture with the products in that category.

 

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Product Carousel

Within each section, users find an image carousel of all of the products available in that category. Posts are automatically tied to a specific product based on labels the poster selects, giving other users the option to read and reply to posts on a category level, or to apply a visual filter so they only see posts related to the specific product they are interested in.

 

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Profile Hovercard

Designed to help members recognize and connect with each other, the profile hovercard feature is a pop up that appears whenever a user mouses over another user’s name. The card presents the other member’s username, avatar, rank and badges, core user stats, and the option to send the user a private message.

 

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Badges

Our badge system is customized in a very GoPro way. With names like Conversation Starter (new threads), Nailed It (solutions), Hi-5 (kudos), You’re It! (tags), Dishin’ Out 5s (kudos given), and Wingman (replies), and descriptions written to reflect our unique brand, we want to motivate users to keep earning badges so they can find out what the next one will say.

 

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How we executed our community design

 

The GoPro Support Hub was designed in partnership with our Customer Support, Creative, Software & Services, and IT teams. The design is based on our company’s design perspective that great design doesn’t need to draw attention to itself. Our goal is to keep the aesthetic clean, simple, elegant, and understated.

 

Core to these goals, and in support of our mission to make it easy for people to capture and share engaging content, we deliberately decided to feature images of and by our customers wherever we can. In fact, GoPro products rarely appear in the lifestyle images found on the GoPro Support Hub. Our focus is on what people can do with GoPro products, not on directly marketing the products themselves.

 

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With the foundational elements decided, we focused on integrating the GoPro Support Hub experience into the main GoPro.com site. We’ve done this in a number of ways:

 

1. Integrating the user’s already-established GoPro profile from the main site into the Support Hub via an SSO pull. This allows the user to have a seamless experience across both platforms.

 

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2. Featuring the Support Hub on the GoPro.com Support page, which is accessible from the main header navigation on every GoPro.com page.

 

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3. Integrating Support Hub content into our on-platform knowledge base so users with questions can find both GoPro-created articles as well as posts by our expert users.

 

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The final step of our design process was to assure that we are embedding the GoPro Support Hub with a personality that matches the GoPro personality by assuring that our moderation team engages with our customers in a consistent and on-brand manner. Through trainings and regular team meetings, we are working to leave our users with the feeling that the GoPro Support Hub experience is authentic, friendly, inspiring, and even innovative.

 

Our metrics

 

In the first six months since the launch of the Support Hub, we have seen the following growth in our Traffic and Engagement stats [please note that these numbers are expressed as a compound monthly growth rate over the period]:

 

  • Unique Visitors – Grew 37.5% each month
  • Total Visits – Grew 36.9% each month
  • Total Posts – Grew 7.3% each month
  • Views of Accepted Solutions – Grew 72.7% each month

 

Other engagement measures are also showing strong growth. These results are for the first quarter of 2016 vs. the prior quarter:

 

  • 70.3% increase in the number of users starting a topic

  • 75.8% increase in the number of users having a post they’ve written marked as an Accepted Solution

  • 77.6% increase in the number of users who have given another user a Hi-5 (kudo)

  • 56.4% increase in the number of users who have received a Hi-5 (kudo)