Ordering items in listings always presents something of a problem. Whether the list presented is the result of a search query or just represents a natural ordering of items in a taxonomy, you generally have to wrestle with issues of scale (too many items in the list) and relevance (what do you show first?). Users are impatient and probably won’t want to scroll or page through too many items in the list to find exactly what they want.

Simple ordering schemes get you only so far—take alphabetic, for instance. True, it does enjoy a certain internal logic and may appear to be imminently predictable and useful. But it’s no good if your users don’t know what items they’re looking for. Or what those users are named. Or where, in a paginated results listing of 890 items, the “J”s might start.

Ideally, then, you’d know something about your users’ desires and direct them quickly and efficiently to that exact thing in a listing. This is the type of stuff—personalization based on past habits—that Amazon does so well. But a personalized recommendation approach assumes a lot as well; users probably have to be registered with your site or at least have a cookied history with it. But more importantly, they have to have been there before. After all, you can’t serve up recommendations based on past actions if there are no past actions to speak of.

So, once again, your reputation system can come to the rescue. Reputation-ranked ordering is available regardless of a visitor’s prior relationship with your site. In fact, community-based reputation can compensate for a whole lot of contextual deficiencies in a search setting. Figure 8-1 shows a typical search result listing on Yelp.

The query provided was a fairly broad one (the term “pizza” scoped to Columbus, Ohio) and lacks a certain amount of context about what I might want to see. I might have, for instance, given a more specific search term like “bbq pizza” and gotten a very different set of results. Or I could have been more specific in neighborhood locale. And remember, I’m just any old visitor, not a registered Yelp user, so there’s no real context to be gleaned from my past history.

Figure 8-1. If I want a pizza in Columbus, odds are good I want the best pizza, right? Best Match results on Yelp are flavored with reputation from user ratings.

With a bare minimum of context to scope on, Yelp does a pretty good job of showing me pizza restaurants that I might want to consider. They do this by rank-ordering search results based on establishments’ reputations (their community average ratings). In fact, they present another facet by which you can order results: “Highest Rated,” which is even more explicitly powered by community reputation. In an example like this—one with a broad enough context—there’s very little difference in the presentation of these two facets.

One of the lowest-effort but highest-reward features you can include on your site is a gallery or a showcase that highlights excellent contributions from the community. Give this showcase a place of prominence, so that first-time visitors can’t help but notice it. A handful of high-quality content should be one of the first things a new user sees on your site. (See Accentuate the Positive.)

Figure 8-2. Vimeo goes out of its way to welcome new visitors, including not one but three different Greeting Galleries.

Notice the view that greets you when you arrive at Vimeo (Figure 8-2), a well-designed video-sharing site. There are not one but three different ways to browse the site’s best content—“Videos We Like,” “Explore,” and “Right Now.” These tabs present three different types of reputation for video content: “Videos We Like” is an editor-influenced view (see The human touch); “Explore” appears to be quality-driven (probably based on usage patterns on the site, and the number of “Likes” that videos receive); and “Right Now” puts an emphasis on current, fresh content by incorporating decay. (See Freshness and decay.)

Content showcases are not only useful at the front door of your site. Smaller, contextually appropriate showcases placed at strategic locations throughout the site can continue to communicate an expectation of quality and show the best contributions within that section of the site.

Figure 8-3. Buzz on the Boards highlights message board threads based on activity (where are hot conversations happening), then sorts based on quality (which individual posts are highest-rated).

Figure 8-3 features wireframe designs for a minishowcase, “Buzz on the Boards,” that never went live on Yahoo! UK’s sports pages. The widget was designed to pull contextually-relevant conversations out of sports message boards and surface them on daily sports news articles. The goal was to educate casual, visiting article readers about the availability of community features on the site. Hopefully, to pull them into the conversation—as participants—at exactly the moment when they’re most opinionated and ready to engage with others.

You can also highlight your best and brightest community members in a showcase. Figure 8-4 shows a “Community Stars” module, also planned but never released for Yahoo! UK Sports. This module first pulls active and high-quality contributors from the system based on poster reputation, and then does a secondary sort based on those users’ posts reputation. This guarantees that—not only will the best contributors appear here—but only their top contributions will be considered for inclusion.

Figure 8-4. This module is based on contributor reputation and the quality of the posts featured, but the language downplays this. No reason to create a popularity contest, right?

The rules for people showcases are no different than for content showcases, but you may want to alter your approach to the design and presentation of this type of showcase. Labels that apply easily and comfortably to content may invoke the wrong effects when applied to the people in your community.

Don’t shower featured contributors with effusive praise—“Best & Brightest,” for instance. Remember, for every person you single out for praise on your site—however well deserved that praise may be—you are simultaneously ignoring a much greater number of contributors. Don’t dis-incent a large number of your community. No one likes to feel that they’re laboring in anonymity, especially when others seem to be basking in praise.

One of the dangers inherent in controlling content display by reputation is that of being overly presumptuous; who’s to say that the decisions you make for your community about what content they do or don’t want to see are the right ones? Why not let each user decide for himself what level of conversational noise he prefers? For information-rich displays (listings, comment threads, search results), consider providing a quality threshold interface element that lets users “ratchet up” or “ratchet down” the signal-to-noise ratio that they’re prepared to accept. Another common pattern is allowing users to reverse the sort order of the content, with worst evaluations first.

The granddaddy of reputation-based content moderation is Slashdot, and it employs this strategy to great effect. Figure 8-5 illustrates Slashdot’s multiple levels of content obscurity: comments below a certain score are abbreviated in a thread—just enough content from the post is left “peeking out” to preserve context and invite those who are curious to read more. Those comments that dip below an even lower score are hidden altogether and no longer sully the reader’s display.

Figure 8-5. Slashdot seemingly hides more posts than it displays. It’s a system that favors your rights as a discriminating information consumer over everyone else’s desire to be heard.

To avoid the presumption trap, make these controls user-configurable. Let users choose the quality-level that they’d like to see. Don’t bury this setting as a user-preference. Make it evident and easily accessible right in the main information display; otherwise, it will probably never be discovered or changed. (A bonus to keeping the control easily accessible: users who want to change it frequently can do so with ease.)

You may be concerned that providing a quality threshold will unfairly punish new contributors or new contributions that haven’t had enough exposure to the community to surpass the level of the threshold for display. Consider pairing this strategy with Inferred Reputation (see the section Inferred Reputation for Content Submissions) to give those new entrants a leg up on the quality game.

Remember The Gong Show? It was a popular American game show in the 1970s—contestants would come on and display a “talent” of their choosing to celebrity judges, any one of whom, at any point during the performance (OK, there were time limits, but that’s beside the point), could strike an enormous gong to disqualify that contestant. Trust us, it was great entertainment.

Today’s Web has a smaller, quieter (and, sadly, less satisfying) equivalent to that show’s “gong.” It is a judgmental little widget—the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down vote—that often accompanies user-contributed entities as a form of participatory crowd judgment. (See the section Two-state votes (thumb ratings).) Consider providing at least this level of explicit user voting for content on your site.

It’s probably best to provide your users with some means of expressing an opinion about content. Otherwise, they will likely co-opt whatever other mechanisms are available to do so; either user comments (and threads) will quickly fill up with back-and-forth bickering over peoples’ spelling abilities and “+1” type posts or abuse reports (discussed in the next section). And we don’t want to encourage inappropriate abuse reporting. Sometimes arming the community with a simple, satisfying mechanism to say “I disagree” is enough.

Reporting abuse is serious business. It is an explicit input into your reputation system unlike any other: it potentially has legal repercussions. It is basically a user-to-user reputation claim (which we generally discourage; see Good Inputs). Users should not think of it as an evaluative act, i.e., is this content good or bad—rather it should feel like a straightforward act of discovery: “Whoa! This shouldn’t be here!”

Your interface design should attempt to reduce the likelihood that users will conflate abuse reporting with other, more evaluative, reputation inputs. Discourage users from reporting anything that is not actual abuse. Figure 8-6 demonstrates a number of design changes that the Yahoo! Answers team enacted to clarify the intent of all the controls, and—as a side benefit—to reduce the likelihood that users would erroneously file reports against undeserving questions or answers.

Figure 8-6. Yahoo! Answers redesigned a number of reputation input mechanisms, both to make their semantic meanings more clear (adding labels to most of the icons, for instance) but also to remove the proximity of one of the most critical inputs, Report It.

In general, here are some good guidelines for maintaining the fidelity of your abuse reports, to ensure that they remain good inputs that produce high-confidence content reputations:

An approach that serves a number of different ends is the concept of Inferred Reputation for content submissions. With this approach, your application presumes a level of quality for a submission based on the karma of the content submitter and an appraisal of the intrinsic qualities of the submission itself. This appraisal may take any number of factors into consideration: the presence of profanity; the completeness of accompanying metadata, the length or brevity of the submission, and other community- or application-specific evaluations that make sense within the given context.

Once evaluated, the content submission is given an initial reputation. This can be displayed alongside the submission until it’s garnered enough attention to display an actual, earned reputation, as in Figure 8-7. (How will you know when to switch over to display the actual reputation? When enough community members have rated the item that it’s surpassed the liquidity threshold. See Liquidity: You Won’t Get Enough Input.)

Figure 8-7. In the absence of any specific knowledge of this post (only one person has rated it), Yahoo! Message Boards assumes that it’s a 3-star post.

Why would you want to use inferred reputations? For a number of reasons.

Inferred reputation is all but mandatory if your application features a Configurable Quality Threshold (see Configurable Quality Thresholds). When users have their threshold for content visibility set too high, then—unless you show Initial Ratings—new postings will, by default, not appear at all in content listings, which, of course, means that no one will rate those items, which means that no one will see those items…you can see the problem here. You will have created a self-referential feedback loop. (See Beware Feedback Loops!.)

Inferred reputations can also help influence contributor behavior in positive ways. Their simplest, but perhaps most critical, function is to educate your users that the quality of their contributions have consequences. Put simply: if they post better stuff, more people will see it. A visible and tangible initial rating makes this case more strongly than any number of admonitions or reminders would.

Just-in-time reputation calculation

A powerful enhancement to inferred reputation is the idea of showing the assumed rating to the content contributor even before she has contributed it. This amplifies the positive-modeling benefits mentioned earlier.

Then, you can allow the contributor to modify her content submission before posting it, in an effort to improve the quality, improve the initial rating assigned, and be featured more prominently on the site. The facets for improvement can be any of a number of things: simple formatting fixes, community-standards violations (e.g., SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS), or perhaps modifying a submission to be less derivative or repetitive of a submission that’s come before it.

Figure 8-8 shows one such embodiment of these just-in-time principles. This draft of a design for Yahoo! Message Boards affords the person posting the message an opportunity to reflect on what he’s about to post, validate it against community standards, and—if desired—change the message to improve its standing.

Figure 8-8. Don’t like the rating that your new post is about to display? Fix it!

In the last chapter, we discussed personal reputations (see Personal Reputations: For the Owner’s Eyes Only) and hinted at some of their utility. But you may still have questions: why keep a personal reputation? If you have no intent to display it to the community (a “public” reputation), shouldn’t a completely hidden (a “corporate”) reputation suffice? Why would you keep a reputation, and go to the bother of displaying it but only for the person to whom it applies?

Personal reputations have great utility as a type of “running internal dialog” between a site and its users, showing personal reputations to users to let them know how they’re doing with respect to certain facets of their engagement with the community. Upon login, for example, you might show users the Learning Level they’ve achieved toward a certain task so that they may track their growth progression and understand what actions are necessary—or what skills must be mastered— to reach the next level on the scale.

LinkedIn keeps a very simple, but compelling, type of reputation that serves this end (see Figure 8-9). It shows you the degree of completeness that your LinkedIn Profile has achieved.

Figure 8-9. Your LinkedIn profile is only 25% complete?!? Better get crackin’!

The motivational benefits of this feature are enormous. There is a certain compulsive, game-like quality to its presence. Author and online community authority Amy Jo Kim has written and presented about the appeal of “collecting” (and the power of completing a set) in game mechanics, and the applicability of these impulses to online experience. This LinkedIn widget deftly takes advantage of these deep underlying impulses that motivate us all.

It’s almost impossible to see that partially empty progress bar and not want to fill it up. LinkedIn takes the additional step of providing hints about the exact ways to accomplish this.

So what, then, is the advantage of handling this as a personal conversation between site and user? Notice that LinkedIn doesn’t show you other people’s profile completeness scores. Leaving this as a personal reputation means that the user is never stigmatized. She is free to advance and proceed at her own pace, but is never branded or labeled in a public fashion. Her interaction with your site remains hers and hers alone. Even on a largely social site, not everything needs to belong to the commons. Many times, reputation is better kept discrete.

Creating content to share online can be a lonely business. Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly how you’re doing. This is a beneficial side effect of gathering inputs for content reputation: you can package up the results of those inputs, and present them back to content contributors in educational and motivational ways. Give them detailed direction on how well the community is accepting their contributions and even suggest ways to increase that acceptance.

This, again, can function within the realm of personal, site-to-user, reputations and need not be a public affair. Of course, any reputations that are public will benefit contributors as well; they are free to review and compare their standings against those of their peers. But you should also feel free to give even more feedback to a contributor about how they’re doing in a personal and confidential fashion. Flickr presents a rich dashboard of statistics about your photos, including many details of how the community has responded (see Figure 8-10).

Figure 8-10. Favorites, comments, and views all feed your photos reputation on Flickr. The “Stats” feature breaks them down for you.

The User Profile is an invaluable asset in your social strategy. In many ways, it provides the most “tangible” and visible presence for the users on your site. It functions as the locus of a user’s identity and, as such, can accommodate a number of different reputation display patterns. Consider showing each of the following on user profiles.

My Affiliations

By now, you should be aware that reputation is earned within a context. While individual actors are probably the last person you should ask about their reputation, each of us does control one very important component of our reputations: the contexts we choose to affiliate ourselves with. Sometimes, the degree of reputation you’ve earned somewhere says less than the fact that you chose to frequent that context in the first place.

Surfacing the breadth and variety of reputable contexts that a user frequents can be crucial information for other users to make value judgments about that person. You should, of course, allow the profile-holder some degree of control over exactly which affiliations they choose to display or obscure. Some models allow for displaying only those associated contexts that a user has requested to appear on his profile.

Figure 8-12 shows a typical LinkedIn profile with group affiliations displayed. These can be considered self-selected reputable contexts; the particular combination of them can tell an evaluator a lot about a person, and provides opportunities for establishing shared interests.

Earned reputations can also provide deeper insight into a user’s affiliations and interests. Figure 8-13 shows a user and the participation medals he’s earned on Yahoo! Message Boards. Here, affiliation information is a powerful tool for assessing this user’s competencies.

Figure 8-12. You’re judged by the company you keep. Even a simple list of groups that you’ve joined on LinkedIn says a lot about your interests and how you choose to use your time and energy.

Figure 8-13. Participation history adds another dimension to your affiliations. Now you can see not only where Jonny Reb spends his time, but exactly how much he’s invested in each context.

My History

An extremely popular piece of reputation information to disclose on a user profile (and a profoundly powerful one) is simple a user’s “Member Since” date. Like a business establishment that boasts of its decades- or centuries-old history, once users on your site have achieved a certain seniority will want others to know and honor their status of longevity.

There are other important pieces of historical information that you should consider providing. Perhaps just a simple listing of a user’s last N contributions to the site. Yahoo! Answers uses the user profile as a centralized, easy-access “dashboard view” into a person’s history of contributions. (See Figure 8-14.)

Figure 8-14. Let your users’ words speak for themselves. Yahoo! Answers lets you review a user’s Questions and Answers from the profile, regardless of which context the question was originally posted in.

My Achievements

First popularized by the Xbox 360 gaming platform, the notion of rewarding specific user achievements is catching on. Figure 8-15 shows one such embodiment on the software programming Q&A site StackOverflow.com. Once they’re earned, Achievements can be displayed on a users profile in perpetuity, providing a fun, engaging, and browsable history of that user’s interaction with the site.

Figure 8-15. Stack Overflow awards badges for any number of user achievements; “woot!,” for instance, celebrates users who have “visited the site each day for 30 days.”

It can be very powerful to display a user’s reputation directly within the context of her contribution. Amazon identifies “Top Reviewers” in situ, right at the point where you’re reading one of her reviews. (See Figure 8-16.) If done discretely, this approach is useful for a couple of different reasons.

It provides some differentiation between items. In a long scrolling page of product reviews, or music playlists, or video contributions, it can be a nice, quick visual scanning aid to see certain contributors called out for special attention.

Figure 8-16. There’s no need to leave the page to see this reviewer’s bona fides.

In a long scannable list of user-generated content, it may be useful to visually “tag” or identify contributions that have achieved a certain level of reputation (or whose contributors have). The goal is to aid in scannability, so do this only if the complexity of the interface allows for it.

It helps, when doing this, if you’ve set reasonable boundaries for the exclusivity of reputations (see Keep great reputations scarce). Otherwise, everything will be tagged as special and nothing will stand out. Figure 8-17 is probably on the borderline of how much reputation information you should attempt to codify into your content listings.

Figure 8-17. Sporting News assigns contributor ranks to each blogger, and annotates lists of blog-entries with their Star Rank. (But, boy, that’s a whole lot of stars!)