Motivate Online Users by Moderating and Providing Tasty Testing Experiences

Abstract

Online user communities and social networks are both used for user involvement in innovation process. Even though both of them have active participants as key driving force for innovation, they are still not the same. Therefore, this study investigated citizens' motivations to participate in an online user community, and compared how these motivations differ from motivations to participate in social networks. We conducted a UX study with 51 participants in total. The findings revealed that the role of moderator is a crucial for active participation and keeping up users' motivation. In addition, our findings suggest that an online living lab community shares common characters with other social networks, but it cannot be replaced by social media. The differences between online living lab and social network community are related to user motivations, and the needs of the customers and researchers for living lab activities. In this paper, we present a process of Oulu Urban Living Lab with user involvement supported by the PATIO online user community. Also requirements, system architecture and a new version of PATIO are described. Even though an amount of participants in our living lab study is relatively small, we want to share these insights for professionals of industry and academy.

Digital User Involvement in a Multi-Context Living Lab Environment

“…The activities carried out in online contexts are thus both real and realistic to actors. However, the literature on innovation system value based on digital user communities is still scarce (Arnkil et al, 2010;De Moor et al, 2010;Xie and Jia, 2016;Huang et al, 2018).…”

“…A digital user community and user involvement tool PATIO with over 1000 voluntary registered users has been utilised in the activities of a local living lab since 2011 (Anttiroiko 2016;Huang et al, 2018;Haukipuro, 2019). PATIO provides companies, organizations and research institutes an opportunity to participate in the development of products and services through an easyto-deploy digital tool.…”

“…The PATIO user community has been growing constantly from just a few active users in 2010 into an active community of more than one thousand users in 2018. The increase in the number of users has been recognized as a twofold phenomenon: attracting new users to register, arises from PATIO having interesting content (Laizane and Haukipuro, 2012;Huang et al, 2018). Thus, while the activities and topics in PATIO have been diverse, the user community is diverse as well.…”

“…Furthermore, in a 2018 activity conducted in PATIO, 36 users in total participated in the evaluation of a mobile application aimed at influencing public decision-making (Huang et al, 2018;Haukipuro, 2019). Characteristic for ICT-based development activities is that they are shortterm and take place in certain phases of development, including user testing of a prototype or concept evaluation.…”

Guidelines for Facilitating User-Centric Product and Service Development in an Open Innovation Environment

“…It is important to choose the right methods to support several ways of user participation and collection of experiences, ideas, values and opinions. This will have influences also on how to motivate users [23] to participate in open innovation environments (OIE). Therefore, it is important that processes and practices in OIE can support efficient user involvement.…”