Continuing our usability series using YAP as a case study (see previous posts: the engagement snapshot, subgroups and last members online), here’s one I particularly like: the profile bar.

This is a feature which Groupsites.com (where YAP is hosted) has as standard, and is similar to the profile bar we all know from LinkedIn:

See how I’m a good girl and have completed my profiles?

If you are setting up your own white label community, it’s worth asking if the platform you are using has this feature. It’s an easy way to get people to start doing stuff on the site – filling in their profile is an obvious first step, but often people are busy and just fill in their name. (Everyone’s guilty of that, including me on plenty of other sites than these two!)

A profile bar can gently nudge a new user to add a photo (and we’ve seen how important that is to showing real people in your community), and to add other details which will enable others to make connections with them at first. As you get further into the process, it might take some slightly more involved actions to really complete the profile bar – anyone who’s on LinkedIn with a good percentage of their profile bar completed will see nudges for actions like “recommend someone” – which means doing more than just filling in fields.

It might get a little harder to complete the profile bar right at the end, but if you’ve got it 80% completed, doggone it you’re going to do what you need to do to finish! Or maybe that’s just me… but I think this works really well to keep people coming back and to nudge them to do certain actions inside your site.

Some platforms also allow you to assign points to various actions. You can then set it up to nudge people to fill up their profile bar relatively quickly, which again makes them feel more engaged with the community as a whole through the actions they need to take to complete their profile, and ideally you could even set it up to show someone’s status as “expert” or “champion” later on as they do more stuff, are more engaged and can then show subsequent newbies what to do.

The profile bar is just one “nudge tool” of many possibilities. As you design your community, think about what other nudge tools you could have which help people get acquainted with the site and then “level up”.