How do I encourage users to fill their Profile

Question

We are building a concept , where we want to encourage users- to write their learning experiences. Learning experience could be

• personal informal learning, for example- how I cooked curry, how my friend installed software on my Tablet ..

• Job related learning, for example - how I learned to declare an Array, How I learned to iterate through for loop, How I googled and came to know that, Google is launching nexus.

• Academic learning, for example - how my teacher taught me to calculate financial sheets, how my teacher taught me maths ..

• Future Learning, for example - What I am willing to learn in future, I want to learn how I can design APPS for android, I want to learn user experience techniques in Android ..

I am right now creating a wire frame to show these different learnings as a user's learn profile.

But I am not really sure, how I can encourage my user to write different learns he/she experienced/experiencing.

EACH USER WILL BE ASKED - WHAT I Learned ? HOW I Learned ? WHERE I Learned ? WHY I Learned ?

A worst thing I know is, no user will ever get encourage to write in few paragraphs about their learnings.

Can you help me here.

Answer 1

well, I do not know about your strategy, but it is very easy to award them if they fill out all their profile information. Stackoverflow does it simply with the concept of badges, like you get the badge Autobiographer if you filled out all the fields on your profile.

If you reward people for doing it and other people can see that they have been rewarded, many users would do things very happily! :)

Answer 2

Before I ever do any UX, UI or visual design I apply behavior modeling to every project where there is an action we want people to perform. Your concept is a compelling case for behavior design because you are asking someone to articulate a lot of information.

I supplied links to materials at the end of this post. In nutshell start with the ideal behavior you would like to see happen. "Contribute a meaningful learning experience to my site" for example. Now that's vague. Break it down into smaller behaviors that you can design for... "Enter a paragraph about a learning experience.", "Tell where it occoured", etc. Once you have a set of behaviors you want apply Fogg's behavior model to brainstorm on how to elicit the response.

Essentially, a behavior occurs when a trigger, motivation and ability happen at the same time. Put a trigger in front of a motivated, capable person and the behavior you want is more likely to occur. Obviously this post is not a lesson. Study the materials online. It takes some practice before you get the concept but it will inform every other design decision.

The key concept to understand is that motivation is difficult to change. Don't focus on it. Rewards are great but not effective unless they perform the behavior first. So focus on making the behavior EASY AS POSSIBLE TO DO.

Some ideas that come to mind:

• Don't make a user sign in first. Let them submit an experience with out signing up. Once they do you can say "register or sign in so that we can share it with others"

• Show them examples of other experiences so they have a model to go by.

• Make the UI as flexible as possible. Perhaps they can fill in partially. Perhaps why they did it is personal and they don't want to share that aspect.

The bottom line. Understand and apply behavior modeling before you create the UI and you will be more successful in persuading people to perform and action.

I hope this helps.

Read the research and techniques of Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford for details on behavior design:

http://www.behaviormodel.org/

http://www.behaviorgrid.org/

Answer 3

I agree with the rewards idea - look at Microsoft's Bing, or Xbox achievements, or the myriad of sites that give "cookies"(yes, pun) for logging in with Facebook, Twitter, etc etc. The only problem is, you don't want to drive away users who feel like they are being pressured or bullied into sharing their information. Sometimes, a blank profile is hiding a very socially shy person, not one who simply does not take the time.

What about allowing or requiring users to use handles or, since it's writing based, a pen name? This would likely loosen up a lot of users and if they're comfortable, they will write more. (For example, the sites of anon. love letters or support groups always have content that feels more genuine, at least to me.)

Oh, and make sure to have the basic writing tools built in, similar to this very comment box. People are funny sometimes about being able to storytell how they want to, and those who are learning/writing/etc inclined more so.