CUNY Academic Commons

Hi All,

We've heard from our user testing that people who join the Commons often don't know where to start when they join or what they can do on the Commons. We can all imagine someone who joins the Commons with a specific purpose in mind -- someone who, say, wants to create a website and therefore creates an account for that purpose -- but what about someone who is just looking to join the CAC community? If that person simply creates an account, there will be no interaction with that user and no real community feeling.

I want to suggest that as part of our new onboarding strategy, we suggest some groups to users who are interested in specific topics, and provide a menu with checkboxes that allows the user to join those groups while creating an account. Doing that will ensure that the user starts off by joining groups and that the user will receive emails from that group and feel part of a community.

If we had our group tagging all set up, we could move from a user's potential interests to auto-suggestions for groups. Since we don't have that in place, I want to suggest we show the user a list of the following:

-- the five most popular public groups on the Commons
-- a list of the five most popular public groups around the subject Technology
-- a list of the five most popular public groups around the subject of Libraries and Open Access
-- a list of the five most popular public groups around the subject of Teaching
-- a list of the five random public groups

In each case, the user would see the group name and a checkbox that would allow the user to join the group.

What do you think?