Main conference presentation

Designing your reputation system in 15 easy steps

Bryce Glass

Saturday April 12 2008, 1:45 - 2:30PM

Leaderboards, Levels, Points, "Top 10 Reviewer", Elite Status, Gold Member, Badges and Trophies—the options for representing a person's reputation within a community are almost as varied as the reasons you might want to do so.

Reputation can incent users to higher-and-higher levels of contribution, motivate them to stick around longer and form a deeper relationship with your product, but tread lightly: research and common usage have shown that specific reputation patterns lend themselves to some fairly specific contexts and—when used inappropriately—can harm your community dynamic. Ugly side-effects like increased competitiveness, lowered quality of contributions and petty squabbles may result. This talk presents 15 questions to take into account when designing your reputation system, including:

• What type of community spirit are you trying to promote?
• How exclusive should earned reputations be in your community?
• How transparent should you be with the inner workings of the system?
• Should reputations decay from non-use?
• Are there cultural aspects that you should consider?
• And more…

Finally, specific patterns are recommended to achieve specific goals. Each pattern has been tested by Yahoo! and all patterns are discussed within a framework of actual user acceptance: either in a live product environment or responses from comparative lab studies.