Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Sr. Director, Consumer Markets Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Barclaycard Ring’s community design is aesthetically beautiful and additionally there are 3 important elements that differentiate the site from other communities.   “Barclaycard Ring” is not only the name of the product but a Ring graphic also visually plays into individual member identity while symbolizing that the member is part of a community. We’ve designed the Ring to be a functional object that not only denotes individual accomplishment but encapsulates the community experience created in the site itself. Ring is a site within a site and the design represents a visual integration of a community inside a credit card servicing site. The visual elements of the two sites are perfectly blended and the resulting single site has its own identity, navigation and rules. The design is simple and elegant and requires almost no learning curve for the user. Even though the site concept is completely new and innovative members know exactly how to navigate between the various features on the site. Between the beautiful elegance of the design and the 3 differentiating elements above, we believe Barclaycard Ring’s community provides a step-change vision for the way digital communities will be designed in the future.   Beautiful “Pinterest-like” timeline gives members a snapshot of Barclaycard Ring’s ongoing story.     Card members can see their private information and then click over to participate in the community. As members navigate from servicing to community they move from a blue to orange background.                                       We show our members the financials for the product in an elegant and simple way.  Even more financial details are revealed to the curious community member.                                       Members can easily elect to donate all or a portion of their Giveback™ to charity by using the slide rule function.                                               Members vote on product features and evolve the core product.                                                     Member achievements are displayed in their “ring” and are illustrated by a wide assortment of colors that represent potential activities to improve the community.  

Company: Elisa Entry submitted by: Noora Halme (Noora) Community Manager Community: Elisa Palsta (palsta.elisa.fi) Community: Saunalahti Palsta (palsta.saunalahti.fi) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Saunalahti and Elisa had separate discussion/help forums for several years, original launches dating back to 2005 and 2009. That makes a total of ten years of conversations and community bonding! When we decided to bring our community to the next level and moved the old forums over to the Lithium platform, we had few things to consider design-wise:   We wanted to keep our community clear and simple, easy to navigate, visually new but similar to what our users were used to. With a decade of history with little or none design changes, we couldn’t risk losing our members due to a radical change from classic and simple design to something very cutting edge. Our current Scandinavian design reflects the minimal taste of our Finnish users. The whole web presence of Elisa and Saunalahti is being renewed during 2013, and we wanted to be the first ones to take the changes into account. Elisa is a pioneer of support communities among Finnish telecom companies, and as a community, we wanted to be pioneers also internally. We were excited about the great new features that could guide our users to the most relevant and helpful content. We wanted to present kudos, solutions, subscriptions and bookmarks on our forum pages in a way that would make it possible for all of our users to find relevant content easily. Our goal is to be easy to approach and intuitive. Two brands, one community. We have one community, but two separate brands. Elisa provides IPTV-services, e-books and home security systems and Saunalahti focuses on mobile and broadband services and our customers are interested in different things depending on their products and services. We want to be there to help and to listen on both brands, forum pages have to be similar, but still provide relevant content for all types of customers. This was no easy task, but we managed to do it!   Our main focus is to provide a safe and friendly environment to our customers to ask questions about our products and services - we're essentially a support forum, a challenger to traditional customer support via telephone and e-mail. The community is a natural part of our customer care for us and - more importantly - to our customers.   We have had loads of good feedback from our clear colors, simple navigation, simplicity and the visual similarity of our two forums that form one community. The usability of our forums has been much praised: even though the radical decrease of different boards, from 30 to 11 on Saunalahti and 23 to nine on Elisa, was frowned upon at first, our members soon begun to appreciate the simplicity. Bringing the kudoed posts and solutions to the forum pages has also been a much-appreciated feature. We have had an amazing growth on our community members, and what is most important, the amount of visits and the average time spent online!   Our much praised avatar collection is one of my favorite parts as well. We use clear coloring to separate our staff and even super users from other community members, we see this as an important factor that helps our new users to find the most trustworthy content. After all we have a whopping community of 50 000 members! Our basic set of avatars consists of 20 characters including these ladies and gentlemen:                           We added a bunch of new at the end of 2012, including few moustached-up versions for movember (they were a hit!):                           And don't tell anyone, but we still have few more in store:   Maybe we'll add few special ones for nose day and pink ribbon?   We have a long lasting tradition of choosing a member of the year, they are rewarded with a crowned version of the avatars and our superusers have their own avatar collection with a small starred banner:                           Finally, here are our staff members. Orange is for admin (that would be me), green for moderators and blue for other staff. Our moderators also requested a special avatar for movember and we have a grey one for the moderators, who have already moved on:               Now that the first year of the new community has passed, we want to keep on rolling! Some of our users are very active on other communities around the web and they're constantly driving us towards better usability. Our plans for 2013 include, but are surely not limited to: Ideas exchange! We’re implementing Ideas in few weeks. Our users have been wishing for “Ideas-smithy” (that would be Ideapaja in Finnish) for a long time and now we’re ready for it! The design will be even more simple than the one on our forum pages’ and we’re ready to listen the voice of our users on what they want to see and how they want to use the “smithy”.                                                 Banner rotation! New banner pictures for spring, 1st of may, autumn and perhaps also gay pride? User designed banners? Sky's the limit! Speech bubble -logo and branding aren't going anywhere, but now that we have a good grounding, we can let loose a bit. Product-specific designs, new backgrounds for new product launches. Even better visual integration to product pages of Elisa and Saunalahti. We'll be incorporating a new navigation bar (currently marked with a grey bar on top of the community pages) that will allow our customers to easily navigate between our product pages, help pages, forums and self services.

Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan thanks to a web app called the cockpit that is accessible on any smartphone.   The community is at the heart of Joe Mobile's website because it is very much the key to its success and its low-cost business model.   It was clear from the beginning that Joe's community should take center stage in our otherwise very lean website. Hence on Joe's homepage the community link sits in the header's navigation bar, a search field module appears in the middle just above the latest conversations module, and the blog finally rests on the lower right side, just above the fold.   The customer is welcomed via its pseudo and a ticker that notifies him of any unread messages.   You just can't miss that Joe is serious about being a community-based service. But that's not enough. Joe's business model lies on the fact that the community should be in charge of the first-level consumer support. We don't have any call centers, just a limited number of agents that use a form-based tool to deal with the most complicated requests.   For this to work, you need to organize the community space so that the customer, who often comes here for the first time, knows instantly what he is supposed to do to find the answer he is looking for. We have worked hard on the design to ensure that a newbie would find his way. This is how it's done :   First, a mega huge search bar People are very used to searching the google way, it's just the same with Joe. Chances are your question has already been asked…and answered already so Search should be your first stop.   A  horizontal community nav bar This design moves away from the commonly accepted best practices for new communities. However, knowing that it could be risky, we decided to go along with this horizontal design that clearly separate the section for prospective customers, who mostly have questions about our services and how to join, from the section for current customers who need help when activating their number or a more technical issue related to phone or the network.   A cozy place to chat Joe's community is about support, about people helping each other out. But rather than using the Q&A style module that could have been well suited for this purpose, we went along with a regular board design. This choice allows for longer discussions between members sometimes long after the correct answer has been given and validated since we never close subjects. We also dedicated a space, the Café Joe, for pure off-topic discussions and where new users can introduce themselves to the community.   This design is a success! With 30,000 searches per month and 17,000 posts for 1400 new topics, the community is thriving.   All section are very well balanced and we mad sure that "approved solutions" would be very visible both in the live search bar and the posts to be as precise as possible for anyone having a question about Joe.                           We just added The Facebook integration for the community again using the Facebook studio tools provided by lithium. This allows to open the community to a broader audience whilst retaining the same design principles that have worked for us so far.   Good design is key to a successful website. It is even more important when you service depends on the efficiency of the community. Forums can be messy and overloaded, a well-thought design is critical to give customers both a feeling of liveliness that brings a more emotional touch to your operation but also a efficient tool to very rapidly answer any question.