For communication with its members, MatchBOX Coworking Studio largely uses emails and Facebook group conversations. However, these channels have not been as successful in fostering a feeling of belonging and community.
By creating an online community for MatchBOX, we hope to facilitate a livelier in-person community at MatchBOX as well.
Throughout the semester, our group went to MatchBOX more than 20 times during the same time on various days of the week (11:30-1:20PM, our class time) for sponsor meetings, to observe, host events related to our Discord later, or just to have a good space to work.
We were able to get relevant observational insights on the current community at MBX. While conversation would pick up a little during lunch time at the coffee bar, most people are working alone and don’t initiate conversation with other people because It’s hard to know if others are open to conversations while working.
Overall, there was a lack of togetherness and community based on these observations.
This project required the team to have knowledge of building and supporting communities in order to design around and suggest ways the MBX community could be revitalized. Because of this, for the first week, the team split up into different topics for secondary research. I worked with another team member researching community building online & in general.
Our team split into groups of 2-3 to ideate on Discord channels.
The focus was finding the best way to create a social category to increase the chances people will interact with each other online through commonalities and subsequently offline in the MBX space, too. Since MBX was a coworking space, all groups also included some variation of a separate professional category and category for MatchBOX space itself so our sponsors could make announcements.
My team member Sam and I came up with these channels, focusing on onboarding and the social category.
The team eventually based most of the Discord Channel creation around this sketch by another pair.
Once we figured out what channels to create, we just moved straight into creating the Discord channels and put in sample messages in each one so that new members would be able to tell what they’re used for.
Our Discord design worked in that MBX members were able to get to know each other more online and interacted regularly on the server during the project.
Many members posted in #introductions, #pets, and in #recommendations with book recommendations to each other. These were more easy, minimal effort social interactions.
On the other side, people didn’t use the professional corner that we created. This may be due to the fact that we didn’t prepopulate it for fear of unintentionally signaling “only designers can post here” as we were all UX design students. Or it could tie into our previous research that people just wanted to be social.
While we recruited early adopters to facilitate and start conversation, the UX team did the most facilitation of conversations on the Discord and there were only a few early adopters that were active on the server. This made it difficult as we didn’t want the server to seem like a server for us UX students.
Towards the end of the semester, the team hosted an early adopters event to have an in-person discussion with the early adopters about our Discord and recommendations we had. We planned to ask them questions on the Discord but they didn’t answer, and it turned out hosting an in-person event was good for getting detailed thoughts and opinions.
It was also good for getting perspectives from members who weren’t on the Discord to find out how we could make it more accessible to them.
Our overall insights were:
Many people from the early adopters event didn’t even know what Discord was but were open to it once they found out about it. We created a Discord onboarding presentation for general members and another transition document for staff.
We were planning on hosting another event specifically for onboarding, but because this was towards the end of the semester and we were running out of time, we decided to hand off the finished onboarding presentation to our sponsors so they could host their own.
At the end of the semester, we needed to wrap up and summarize the project with a final presentation and documentation for details on our design process, design rationale, outcomes, and future recommendations for our sponsor.
The UX team only worked with MBX during the semester that we were in charge of the Discord, so we stopped facilitating and sending messages to encourage conversations after our final presentation. Once we did that however, there weren’t many messages sent since then, so the server is inactive save for the QOTD Bot.
Hopefully MBX will be able to use our final suggestions to host their own onboarding event to use and launch this server again in the future. While it lasted, there were really great interactions among members that were active and even between a staff member that was active on the server and members.
