Landscape and Discourse Community Analysis Report

100 points

I recommend going with this assignment and will use class time to discuss it. However, if you are interested in an alternative option for the same assignment, check out Option 2: Prepare a corpus from an Online Knowledge Network.

Overview

Users. Content. Context. You’ll hear these three words again and again throughout this book. They form the basis of our model for practicing effective information architecture design. Underlying this model is a recognition that you can’t design useful information architectures in a vacuum. An architect can’t huddle in a dark room with a bunch of content, organize it, and emerge with a grand solution. It simply won’t hold up against the light of day.

Web sites and intranets are not lifeless, static constructs. Rather, there is a dynamic, organic nature to both the information systems and the broader environments in which they exist. This is not the old world of yellowing cards in a library card catalog. We’re talking complex, adaptive systems with emergent qualities. We’re talking rich streams of information flowing within and beyond the borders of departments, business units, institutions, and countries. We’re talking messiness and mistakes, trial and error, survival of the fittest.

We live in an era where technical communicators are frequently positioned not in the traditional role as go between, or translator, between company and user but rather curator of a user base that shares and solves its own use problems or even designs. For example, Red Hat has to cultivate and curate designs and problem solving for PatternFly here in town and create a situation that makes it easy for users to solve problems and contribute to its open source code. If Red Hat doesn’t support its open source contributors, its business model ceases to exist. At its core, a landscape/cooperative analysis UX provides an overview of the current state of the market or solution. You get to examine and compare data related to products and the competition’s products in the marketplace for a particular group of users or, in our case, a particular discourse community. Organizations typically use visual competitive analysis and other techniques to highlight issues with their products or make better decisions about their product strategies.

A Landscape analysis is a way to collect and compare data about products (and companies) in the marketplace. This method is often used to highlight strengths and weaknesses of products in order to make more informed decisions about your product strategy. A typical competitive analysis might include information, such as:

An overview of the product landscape (products, companies, prices, market share, etc.)

  • User demographics
  • Lists of product features
  • Social media presence (followers, posts, etc.)
  • Evaluation of visual design language
  • Voice, language, and content

Getting Started

The first decision you will have to make is to locate a community of practice (Wenger, 2011) and/or discourse community (Swales, 1990). In other words, a group that shares a broadly agreed set of common public goals. For example, Fortnight players, craft beer fans or brewers, or medical imaging professionals are all possible discourse communities. Second, find the places where those members of those discourse community members exchange intercommunication among its members. How do contributors know what knowledge is needed? How do people who need answers find them? How do members who can answer problems find the questions of members who need help?

For example, if I were using Swales I might answer the following questions

  • What are the shared goals of the community? Why does this group exist? What does it do?
  • What mechanisms, genres, or platforms do members use to communicate with each other (posts, answers, repositories, comments)?
  • What are the purposes of each of these mechanisms of communication (i.e to improve performance, make money, share research, improve a product UX, etc.)?
  • Which of the above mechanisms of communication can be considered genres (textual responses to recurring situations that all group members recognize and understand)? What are those genres features both social and textual?
  • What kinds of specialized language (lexis) do group members use in their conversation and in their genres (name some examples—ESL, on the fly, 86, etc.)? What communicative function does this lexis serve (i.e. why say “86” instead of “we are out of this”?)?
  • Who are the “old-timers” with expertise? What indicates that to the rest of the community? Awards? Badges? Number of posts? Who are the newcomers with less expertise? How do newcomers learn the appropriate language, genres, and knowledge of the group? Formally? Informally?

How to pick a good community of practice/discourse community

You know you have found a good community of practice/discourse community when you can:

      • make an easy argument that the community you are looking at is a “community of practice,” (Wenger) and/or a “discourse community,” (Swales)
      • Find multiple information platforms where your community of practice or discourse community engage in rhetorical information to support goal directed activity.

On comparing sites

Here is some advice I’ve adapted from WANDR Studio’s The Complete Guide to Competitive UX Analysis guide to help you with scrubbing your corpus:

To complete a thorough review of your competition, follow our standard competitive analysis template. The key steps used for competitive analysis UX research include:

      • Outline your goals and define your product/solution: What do you want your goal directed community to achieve?
      • Compile a list of direct and indirect competition: Where is the community exchanging information and building knowledge now? What platforms are they using?
      • Create a list of features and data points to compare: What information design does each platform bring to the community?
      • Identify the differences between products
      • Summarize your findings: This will help you begin to think about either revising or building a new platform for the community.

Like any good comparison, be consistent with talking about issues across platforms. If you talk about “onboarding,” at one site, discuss it at all the sites you are discussing so you can directly compare the primary functions, usability, and interfaces across sites. Along with a competitive analysis template, consider using visual competitive analysis techniques. Visualizing the differences between the competition makes it easier to digest the findings of your analysis. You gain an overview of the key pros and cons of your products compared to the competition.

Need more advice? Check out Mayur Kshirsagar’s excellent advice in A Brief Guide About Competitive Analysis. Keep in mind he isn’t focused on user contribution like we are.

Deliverables

  1. a report where you
    1. make an argument for a group to be considered a “community,” drawing on definitions from Wenger’s “community of practice” and/or Swales “discourse community.” This section should contain evidence for your claims.
    2. A comparison of the 3-5 main competitors. Once you uncover the information you need in order to inform your design decisions, it’s time to stop.
    3. A descriptions of sites
      1. Sign up & Login
        • Ease of account creation
          • Fast or slow
          • Hard or easy
        • Social Sign up/Login
      2. Initiating the main task
      3. Performing the main task
      4. Successful completion of the main task (learn more about task analysis)
      5. Community interactions with content
    4. For each competitor, take screenshots and notes as you navigate through the parts of the product you’re evaluating.
      In our next assignment, you’ll compile your screenshots and notes into a presentation where you highlight the most important information you learned.

Assessment

Submission: 50 points based on completeness and lack of lateness

Resubmission: 50 points based on either Option A (rubric) or Option B