Preliminary Heuristics for the Design and Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice Systems
By Mark Notess, Usability Specialist, Indiana University, and Josh Plaskoff, Knowledge Management Consultant, Eli Lilly and Company

Online communities…communities of practice…knowledge management…human capital. For some time now, companies have believed that they can be more effective—and more profitable—if they could only get their people to talk to each other and share what they know. Globalization, acquisitions, and diversification have led to workforces that are more spread out and more varied. In addition to creating the need for a flexible, agile workforce, the evolving and sometime volatile business climate has reduced the ability of companies to rely on stable groups of people who slowly grow their expertise over many years.

To address this need, companies have built or bought knowledge management portals, tools for growing communities of practice, and other expensive, often complex software systems. As with other software systems, however, utilization is not guaranteed, and the return on investment may never materialize. What functionality should such systems provide to increase the probability of payback? How can product specifications be evaluated? By what benchmarks can existing implementations be inspected?

This article offers a set of heuristics drawn from published academic research into online communities of practice. These heuristics may be used to inform design, or they can be used as heuristics in an evaluation process. These heuristics are preliminary—we have successfully applied them informally to evaluate an existing system at a large corporation. During this evaluation, the issues uncovered matched well with the issues raised by users of the system. The heuristics also uncovered additional issues previously unrecognized. At the same time, we recognize that more testing needs to be conducted.

The Heuristics
Software systems supporting online communities of practice should consider providing the following functionality:

1. Support for ideation and the evaluation of brainstormed alternative
An important aspect of communities is the ability to communally generate and evaluate new ideas about the processes within the practice as well as the function of the community. Tools that can provide this ability range from simple asynchronous discussion and synchronous chat to sophisticated packages designed specifically for idea generation, ranking, and selection of those ideas. Some key questions to consider for this dimension are:

• Are there tools that enable creating a shared "virtual mental space"?
• Do the tools allow the ranking and evaluating of generated alternatives?
• Are there both synchronous and asynchronous mechanisms for participating in idea generation and evaluation?
• Do all the tools allow equal participation?

2. Structured information and interaction
Participants will more actively engage in electronic collaboration if the interactions are structured in time, space, and scope. Community in general is most effective when activity is driven by context of its rituals and its purpose. Tools, events, and content should be structured to provide this context for action. Specifically, some key questions concerning structure are:

• Does the environment foster content-related interactions built around structured tasks?
• Do the synchronous and asynchronous tools provide a structure for participation?
• Are a variety of roles supported in the environment and the interactions (such as playing devil's advocate, synthesizer of ideas, or divergent thinker)?
• Is there a "cyclical" nature to the events that take place in the space (regular meetings, rituals such as birthday recognition, rites of passage, etc.)?
• Does the purpose of the interaction drive the design of the tools?
• Do the tools allow creation of rich context (expert feedback, private reflection, debate, dialog tracking, etc.)?

3. Unifying purpose and focus
A community thrives on the ability of its members to believe in and articulate its purpose and goals. If a community centers around a particular practice (such as a profession or use of a software package), it is important that members are able to use a common language in expressing what they are about and what they are trying to accomplish both to each other and to those outside the community. It is also important that they are able to address common problems that they are facing together and collaboratively. The following questions address this unifying purpose and focus:

• Does the space allow the creation and support the articulation of a common and clear purpose (a charter or prominently figured statement of purpose, for example)?
• Does the space allow for sub-communities that address the common purpose of the community as a whole?
• Does the space provide for meaningful discussion about the definition of key terms and concepts?
• Do the tools provide for discussions about cases that represent common problems or issues?

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