Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success

TLDR

Online community success has received little systematic evaluation, leaving a gap in understanding its determinants. This paper seeks to identify key sociability and usability determinants that drive online community success, offering a foundation for developing measurable metrics. The authors suggest assessing sociability via participant numbers, message frequency, satisfaction, reciprocity, on‑topic content, and trust, and usability through error rates, productivity, and user satisfaction, recommending triangulation with qualitative data to avoid misleading conclusions.

Abstract

Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper begins to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members' satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies.