David Emery Online

Ambient Interactivity

12 December 2007

A small thought today, continuing on from talking about the new Foals site yesterday. One thing we’ve done for the site, which we’ve had great success with when we’ve done it for other sites, is turn commenting on for pretty much every bit of content on the site. Now, this is made very easy by using Textpattern as the CMS powering everything but it leads to far more response then you might think.

I think this may be actually quite an important concept, that of ambient interactivity. Commenting on a site from a users point of view is easy; it doesn’t (at least with textpattern) require any logging in, user registration process or other UI hurdles to prevent the user interacting with the site. For the vast majority of user interaction cases this is really all you need.

Yes, you could go the whole hog and have a massively sophisticated site which is all social-networked up complete with user profiles, in-site messaging, photo and video uploading and gig attendance notifications, but really – what is the point? Do your users really get a huge benefit having to sign up and maintain yet another account on yet another site, and persuade their friends to come with them?

Most of the time – and I’m going to continue the music based metaphor but it really hold true for lots of sites – I think that registration-less interaction is a far more compelling method of fostering a community around your site without forcing both you and your users to jump through lots of hoops in the process.

“woooooooooooooooooooohhh

x”

...is just as good as seeing a little list of profile pictures of people “attending” next a gig listing, if you ask me.