The New Production of Users

Changing Innovation Collectives and Involvement Strategies

Sampsa Hyysalo, Torben Elgaard Jensen, Nelly Oudshoorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138218772
• eBook ISBN: 9781317299943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Behind the steady stream of new products, technologies, systems and services in our modern societies there is prolonged and complicated battle around the role of users. How should designers get to know the users' interests and needs? Who should speak for the users? How may designers collaborate with users and in what ways may users take innovation into their own hands?

The New Production of Users offers a rare overview of these issues. It traces the history of designer-user relations from the era of mass production to the present days. Its focus lies in elaborating the currently emerging strategies and approaches to user involvement in business and citizen contexts. It analyses the challenges in the practical collaborations between designers and users, and it investigates a number of cases, where groups of users collectively took charge of innovation.

In addition to a number of new case studies, the book provides a thorough account of theories of user involvement as well as and offers further developments to these theories. As a part of this, the book relates to the wide spectrum of fields currently associated with user involvement, such as user-centered design, participatory design, user innovation, open source software, cocreation and peer production.

Exploring the nexus between users and designers, between efforts to democratize innovation and to mobilize users for commercial purposes, this multi-disciplinary book will be of great interest to academics, policy makers and practitioners in fields such as Innovation Studies, Innovation Policy, Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Studies, Consumption studies, Marketing, e-commerce, Media Studies as well as Design research.

1 Introduction to the New Production of Users

Sampsa Hyysalo, Torben Elgaard Jensen and Nelly Oudshoorn

DOI: 10.4324/9781315648088-1

Several years before Facebook, at the turn of millennium, in the early days of social media and online recreational games, a remarkably successful project saw the light of day in Helsinki. Two young media developers began building “Habbo Hotel”, a free-to-play online virtual world where people could chat and hang out. The web service featured retro pixel graphics and gained revenue from micropayments on virtual furniture that the visitors could use to decorate their own hotel rooms. It was a friendly, non-competitive environment, and soon became popular among people in their twenties as well as among teenagers.

In the years that followed, teens crowded the place, and the user base expanded. What was being done at the hotel and with its virtual furniture expanded too. Literally thousands of new uses, new configurations of the furniture, tweaks and hacks emerged. Hundreds of external websites dedicated themselves to Habbo. Much of the user-generated content was embraced by the designers and incorporated into their rapidly evolving virtual world. At the same time, the designers worked hard to keep the basic functionalities of the platform running. At the back end, they confronted and solved scalability issues, and at the front end, they continually updated crucial components such as entry, login, payments and furniture selection. The growth of the hotel was remarkable: with eleven language versions, customers in 150 countries and over 15 million visitors per month, Habbo was the world’s largest teenage virtual world for over a decade.

The developers’ ability to service these creative users was no coincidence. During the earliest phases, they drew from their own rich understanding of being users in the hotel. Informal evaluation practices, abundant email feedback, fan-authored Habbo-themed websites and discussion forums outside the hotel gave further ideas. When the number of users reached too many to keep track of, the developers turned to typical usages: logging in, learning to navigate in Habbo, connecting with others, creating a room, etc. As the hotel matured, the arrays of methods for knowing and working with the users grew, including usability and playability testing, market surveys, automated web analytics, persona methods and focus groups; in all, close to thirty different main ways emerged. In part, these were responses to new knowledge needs, in part attempts to deal with the diversification of the user base, but they were also a means of managing contact with the hordes of users in a viable way—one could not have rich interactions with millions of people.

Habbo managed to grow for ten years in a row before competition from other social media began to squeeze in on it. Its downturn was accelerated by a public scandal: the British broadcaster Channel 4 uncovered that Habbo’s online moderation was unable to prevent sexual harassment and keep the site safe. The Channel 4 program struck an Achilles’ heel: moderation had been a challenge for cost-effective growth all along. It had been shifted from the company to volunteers and then back to the company, aided by algorithm-powered chat surveillance. It had been shifted within the company from hotel country offices to one centralized office with less diversity in language and culture skills. Eventually, parts of the moderation were automated and handed over to bots, complemented by 225 employed moderators. But none of this prevented the scandal. Habbo, whose success was built on content produced by users and clever developer responses, also turned out to be vulnerable to the unwanted actions of some of its users.

The interest of this book is in the new production of users. Our starting point is the commonplace observation that the productive role of users is under constant development. Users in the twenty-first century will play different roles in innovation, production and consumption than they did previously. Users will develop new forms of innovative collectives that enable their engagement with products and technologies, and users will be faced with equally creative managers, designers and producers who will develop new strategies for involving and analyzing users. The new production of users therefore means both the new production by users and the new efforts to produce active users.

As we see in the Habbo case, there is a simultaneous production of “matter” and “form.” The matter is the incessant stream of opinions, ideas and technical solutions that are generated by users and that may or may not be welcomed by the designers. The forms are the organized ways in which users become productive—ranging from the users’ independent fan homepages to the strictly controlled usability tests developed by the designers. The new production of users in the Habbo case, as well as in all the other cases in this book, is thus about user creativity and about changing involvement strategies that produce creative users. The aim of the book is to provide a rich, updated account of the matters and forms of the new production of users, and to guide the reader through the contemporary landscape of user involvement.

In the course of this introduction, we will provide some background to the current production of users by going back to the first part of the twentieth century and recounting some key events that produced users and allowed users to produce in particular ways in the past. We will also review a number of more recent contributions, from the 1970s and onwards, that have directly laid the groundwork for the current production of users. But before we go into these matters, we will take another look at Habbo Hotel to draw out some of the noteworthy features of the contemporary landscape of user involvement.¹

The first thing that strikes us about Habbo is the extremely active role that users play. In some traditional understandings of business, it is commonplace to ask how the users will respond to the latest product from the company. In the case of Habbo, the reverse question is the order of the day: how will the designers respond to the latest practices and designs created by the users? Both users and designers at Habbo maneuver in a landscape where it has become a “fact of life” that users have significant productive capabilities. Not only do the users respond and appropriate the services of Habbo, they also envision and sketch out new features and new ways to render the service valuable. They do so within the platform, but they also carry out some of the action elsewhere by means of the hundreds of homepages that are associated with Habbo.

The uniqueness of Habbo is not that users and designers collaborate or co-produce. This has taken place before and in other arenas. But the difference to the past is the apparent ease and the degree to which users are now able to produce and innovate—even the preteens do this in Habbo.

The second thing to note is that user involvement has become a key object of industrial strategizing. Throughout the fast-growing and fast-changing Habbo project, the managers made a series of strategic choices about how to involve users, how to assess the results of this involvement and how to shift to new modes of user involvement. The move from designing a game for oneself and one’s peers to the sophisticated tracking and catering for user preferences was not a planned sequence. But it was clearly the result of managerial efforts to monitor, deploy and adjust user involvement, just as the management team would attempt to control other key operations of the business.

We should point out again that the uniqueness of Habbo is a matter of degree rather than of kind. Companies have always acted strategically towards their customers and markets. They have always attempted to produce or configure their users (Woolgar 1991; Akrich 1992). The novelty of Habbo is the degree to which user involvement has moved to become a central and normalized part of the business; Habbo rose and declined with its ability to manage the engagement of users. The strategizing around users was thus not merely an addition or enhancement of the core business, as was still the case a decade ago in most crowdsourcing, microtasking, open innovation communities and idea competition projects by companies. Now, these user involvement activities are no longer something extraordinary.

The active users and actively strategizing managers are highly visible figures in the Habbo case. But there is also a third facet that we wish to emphasize, namely, the resources, methods and tools that are available to users and managers. It is evident from the case that managers draw on a number of previously developed ways of engaging users, such as usability testing, market surveys, persona methods and focus groups. Many of these (social) techniques were invented decades before Habbo and are now widely available to managers who wish to study or engage with users in various ways. Recently, they have been complemented by a growing array of digital methods for keeping track of users. So, if the Habbo designers wondered if a new possible feature would be appreciated by users, they did not have to rely on guesswork. Instead, they could hire a usability expert to investigate the matter or they could quickly test-market the feature on selected users and make design decisions based on digital tracking of the users’ behavior. The methods for studying and engaging users are one crucial aspect of the landscape in which users and designers operate. Another crucial resource is the flood of online tools and platforms that allow users to share, discuss and exchange. These are more or less readily available means that can be deployed by contemporary users and designers. The conclusion, then, is that active users and strategizing managers operate and produce in a landscape where the methods and resources for engagement are widely available. In the contemporary situation, user involvement methods do not need to be invented; they are there to be selected and deployed. However, this does not mean that user involvement is easy. On the contrary, the Habbo case clearly suggests that involving the users is like riding wild horses. The managers had to try, deploy, combine and shift between a flood of different methods, and despite all this, the users remained quite unpredictable.

What we suggest then, from our brief examination of the Habbo case, is that the game is open in a new way. The methods and resources for user engagement are now more widely available than ever. The innovative capability of users has become a recognized fact of life, and managers have made user involvement a key part of their strategizing. These, we suggest, are the emerging, crucial characteristics of the new production of users.

The case of Habbo is only one indication that user creativity is a force to be acknowledged. There is currently an abundance of stories about business successes that draw heavily on creative and unpaid work from users. Some companies, for example, Lego and Ducati, encourage users to propose specific design ideas. Other companies, for example, eBay and Microsoft, create forums where users help other users figure out how to use the product. Users have even been bestowed with prestigious public recognition: in 2006, TIME magazine selected citizens to be the “Person of the Year” because of their creative, unpaid work in innovating the World Wide Web.

The contemporary examples of “open user innovation” or “crowdsourcing” are striking and undoubtedly important. It would, however, be quite misleading to see them as signs that users have now for the first time come to play an important productive role, as if users somehow came out of the woodwork around the time of the development of the Internet. To get a proper sense of the productive roles that users have played in the past and will come to play in the future, we should go back at least a century. In the following, we provide an account of attempts to produce a role for users at the beginning of the era of mass production. As we shall see, these gave rise to the numerous resources and methods for user engagement that are widely available today.

User Engagement in the Early Decades of Mass Production: Weaver's Problem and the Rise of the Liaison Disciplines

We begin our historical sketch with a quandary or predicament, which we shall call a Weaver’s problem. Henry G. Weaver was the director of consumer research at the American car manufacturer General Motors in the 1930s. In 1932, he produced a series of diagrams (Figure 1.1) that he used to make the case for the emerging discipline of consumer research (Marchand 1998; Pantzar and Ainamo 2000). As some sort of baseline, Weaver suggested that “a hundred years ago,” in other words, in 18...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction to the New Production of Users
• Part I Rethinking and Extending Theoretical Approaches to the Production of Users in Innovation
• Part II User-Producer Engagements Between Democratized Technology and Industrial Strategizing
• Part III Innovation Practices and User Communities
• Part IV Unwanted Innovation and Non-Users
• Afterword
• Index