Content Analysis of Online Co-Design Community Interactions: A Case Study of Crowd-Sourced Threadless

Abstract The purpose of this research is to understand the nature, size, and lifecycle of online co-design community interactions through a focused case study of a real business with an aim to provide actionable strategies for co-design service innovation and advancement, and help to forecast future trends in crowd-sourced co-design. Crowd-sourced, socially-empowered design environments not only reduce the cost of design sourcing and production, but also address individual user's needs for experience sharing, entertainment, and relationship building in the virtual world. Although a great body of research has been established in both co-design (Hoftijzer, J., 2009; Piller, 2008; Relph-Knight, L., 2008; Piller et al, 2005, 2004; Ives, and Piccoli, 2003) and social network analysis (Mehler, and Skiena, 2009; Lin et al., 2009; Agichtein, and Liu, 2009; Ko et al., 2006; Wu, and Huberman 2004; Suh, and Kim, 2002; Park, and Choi, 2001), they often appear to be in two separate fields. Our study aims to better understand the nature of interactions in these unique design environments to better maximize the value of co-design communities. Threadless.com is a t-shirt co-design website that holds an ongoing competition for t-shirt artwork submissions. Anyone can create an account on the website and submit a design, as well as critique and vote on others’ designs. Threadless selects final winning designs from the highest rated designs and awards winners a cash prize. The winning designs are also produced and put up for sale on their website. Our study examines the Critiques Forum of Threadless, where users can upload multiple versions of their designs to be rated and commented on by other members within the community. The critiques of the submitted designs are a great arena for understanding co-design community interactions not only because the Critiques Forum is one of the most essential forums of Threadless, but also because they demonstrate the differences between interactions among co-designers on co-design websites and interactions among the general public on other social networking websites. A total of 367 submissions were included in this study over the period from September 29, 2009, to October 08, 2009. We conducted a content analysis of all the critiquing comments left by the Threadless co-design community on these submissions. From analyzing, sorting, and classifying the meaningful units of the comments, two large categories emerged: “design category” comments and “community category” comments. Subcategories in the “design category” comments included: color, shape/line, orientation/placement, text/slogan, general design ideas/concepts, add/remove attributes, production concerns, and prototype t-shirt color. Subcategories in the “community category” included: encouragement, discouragement, building ties, humor, and commercial. Other important aspects such as the community votes (“submit this,” “needs work,” or “don't submit”), number of co-designers involved in commenting, number of design sub-categories the original user took advice in, lifecycle of submissions, and total number of comments for each submission were also recorded. The 367 submissions resulted in a total of 2,085 comments left by 1890 co-designers. On average, each submission had 1.75 versions of designs uploaded, 5.68 comments left by 5.15 co-designers, and a 30.28-day lifecycle. A content analysis of the 2,085 total comments showed that the number of community category comments slightly exceeded that of the design category, indicating that co-designers’ interactions are geared towards not only designing, but also building a friendly and supportive community. In descending order, the “design categories” that received the most attention were: add/remove attributes, general design ideas/concepts, color, orientation/placement, shape/line, text/slogan, prototype t-shirt color, and production concerns. In descending order, the “community categories” that received the most attention were: encouragement, building ties, commercial, humor, and discouragement. One of the co-designers’ goals was to maximize the community votes for “submit this” and to minimize the votes for “don't submit” by sharing and revising their artwork. Let S be community success, B be the number of votes for “submit this” and D be the number of votes for “don't submit.” The community success of any submission i can be measured by the following equation: S(i) = B(i) - D(i) After computing the community success using the above equation, Pearson correlations (one tail) were tested. Positive correlations were identified between community success and the following variables: versions of design, number of categories the co-designer took advice in, number of co-designers, number of comments, and lifecycle of the submissions. Community success was also found to be positively correlated with both the number of community category comments and design category comments. Furthermore, the number of versions uploaded for each submission is significantly correlated with the number of comments and number of co-designers involved in commenting. Crowd sourcing has expanded the role of online customers from buyers to co-designers, co-marketers, and co-sellers. One key to the success of crowd-sourced co-design is to understand the flow of collective attention in co-design community interactions, which is a primary focus of this research. Our findings shed light on how crowd-sourced businesses should enhance and modify their interactive platforms, compensation, and decision-making strategies to build more vibrant co-design communities.