What's the diff between UX and CX?

[bhaugen]

What's the difference between User Experience and Community Experience?

I'm not saying they are necessarily contradictory. But here's an egregious example where they were:

• A contributor who shall remain nameless to a network that shall remain nameless logged his time in a way that was most convenient for him to get paid from some ensuing income,
• but did not log the use of community-funded equipment and materials, so those contributors did not paid.

Can you think of other differences? This is an issue on my mind a lot when I see discussions that explicitly prioritize user experience.

(I hope this is not on my mind only because I am personally not very good at UI/UX design, but I confess that might be part of it...I do, however, think that community experience is a different perspective and wonder how other people would think about it if they brought it close to the front of their minds.)

[gcassel]

That's a deep and important question. I'm just winging it here, but I"m gonna try to kick that can into the path of social/cultural techniques, instead of being a software design issue.

I think if software gives us all of the tools that humans need-- including open, accessible and reliable accounting processes for online transfers and transactions-- it's up to networks and projects to use those tools effectively. I guess I'm saying that the community experience should be determined by community values, norms, and agreements-- including any formal protocols or even 'rules' they may use, such as constitutions and policies and procedures. (Though I prefer good communications, sociometrics and documentation to strict rules.)

So, I would say that software should focus on UI, UX, and all that crucial back end stuff you deal with, and make human beings work other stuff out among themselves-- through their UIs, using natural language.

Does this make sense?

[gcassel]

To be a bit more specific about your example Bob: I think communities should try to create reasonable security to ensure proper logging of use of community resources, for those resources which they do think need to be logged. I think communities may often decide that certain resources (i.e., coffee, or water cooler cups, lol) are so trivial that they can simply be freely available in an open commons. Other resources may require logging, at least by honor system-- which doesn't efficiently work unless there's at least a little risk of 'getting caught' for not observing community expectations or rules.

Some resources, of course-- ideas and information-- have practically no marginal cost of reproduction or distribution, but they do involve an upfront cost of research, development and/or purchases; and that upfront cost should be figured into proactive or retroactive budgeting strategies: i.e., internally crowdfunding a purchase, and/or instituting a per-use cost. Anyway, I consider these cultural issues, hopefully to be determined per inclusive process within each community-- although it'd be great to develop some generic organizational 'recipes'/formulae for common types of networks and projects, in addition to giving them great value accounting tools.

[bhaugen]

@gcassel

So, I would say that software should focus on UI, UX, and all that crucial back end stuff you deal with, and make human beings work other stuff out among themselves-- through their UIs, using natural language. Does this make sense?

Not in our experience. We have worked with several groups in our current disguise as Mikorizal. I worked with a lot more previously as a programmer and field support person on manufacturing supply chain software. Each of those communities had several problems that they knew upfront were shared community problems. And all of those problems wanted software support, that had to be designed to solve the community problems.

For example, in supply chains, it was coordinating resource flows. In food networks, the biggest problem that could not be solved well by hand was probably distributing income, but distributing food and lot tracking were also difficult. None of those were individual user experiences, they were community experiences. Everybody was affected. If they didn't work correctly, everybody suffered.

But it's more than just working correctly. For example, in Sensorica, we got the value equations and income distributions working correctly, but people need to understand what happened better. We're thinking about and working on that problem. We've done a bunch of on-page documentation of the details behind the results. Here are some suggestions from Bayle Shanks that we plan to implement, along with some Sankey diagrams to visualize the flows.

In all of those cases, there are obvious overlaps between individual and community experiences, but the problems and solutions all arose because it was a collective, not an individual.

[bhaugen]

Here's another community experience problem that we in the NRP project did not know how to solve, but maybe the ValueFlows project can tackle it:

NRP is very configurable. Which as I am fond of saying is both an advantage and a disadvantage, because now you need to configure it. You can get a flavor from some of the tutorials, but in practice, @fosterlynn walks people through the experience. Which is not very scalable, to say the least.

But I think it needs to be even more configurable. Needs to be skinnable. Navigation needs to be configurable. The underlying model needs to be configurable. Tibi of Sensorica wants to be able to define his own value equations using mathematical expressions that the software would execute. (I'm highly skeptical that the math would be tractable enough, but in theory it's doable, and LOD might even be able to make it somewhat doable in practice. If anybody could master the required math, which would include graph traversals.)

So then, both the advantage and the disadvantage would be greater. So how could we design radical configurability to be understandable and tractable? Especially, how could we make it a community experience instead of the specialty of a few people who train themselves to be able to do the configuration?

[gcassel]

For example, in supply chains, it was coordinating resource flows. In food networks, the biggest problem that could not be solved well by hand was probably distributing income, but distributing food and lot tracking were also difficult. None of those were individual user experiences, they were community experiences.

@bhaugen , this is much of the stuff I'm concerned with too. We don't know each other very well, and sometimes I use too much shorthand. I juggle too much and rush. I think we've developed (and approached) similar concerns from very different backgrounds, with different current emphases.

You wrote:

Each of those communities had several problems that they knew upfront were shared community problems.

That's critically important work, but much of my background in media networks has been about people who do not agree on what their problems are. And I think in fact this is the biggest crisis in the world: helping people to communicate better, to coordinate, cooperate and -- when genuinely applicable -- to collaborate on shared plans, shared investments and labor.

I know you've been doing great work based on real human needs, for a long time. I think your focus points are quite close to my main focus points, in seeking reasonable, equitable and efficient distribution of social power. I believe you're trying to refine robust and resilient systems which support networks as I prefer to use the term: intentional communities of autonomous agents who co-operate to find genuinely creative, emergent energy and patterns. (Or something like that.)

Meanwhile, lots of entrepreneurs are trying to identify problems and to capture perceived markets of users with a variety of proprietary and/or for-profit 'solutions' which, IMO, can only generate sustainable user bases through implicit (or explicit) trust. Some of those entrepreneurs, maybe most of them, are probably just trying to operate as ethically and efficiently as possible within our warped economy. However, the speed and implicitly exclusionary nature of (some) of their efforts stresses me out. So, I am trying really hard to learn how to communicate with everyone who wants to identify genuinely shared interests, and to cooperate and/or collaborate on those interests.

I apologize if the above seems tangential to this specific topic. I agree with your overall focus on community instead of individual. I would agree with a back-end focus on systems which seek to clearly and consistently track all sorts of transfers and exchanges, to equitably distribute any and all shared resources. (Behind even that, we have Value Flows.) I would simultaneously emphasize the individual users' experience, because I think that is ultimately essential to a community's experience. However, the individual user's experience should not IMO be a significant focus of our most basic and interoperable modular tools. The individual user's experience should be articulated and differentiated on a per community basis, regardless of how broad or narrow that target community is. The target community of Value Flows is practically universal, right; so I think that the target user of Value Flows should be extremely generic.

[bhaugen]

@gcassel that all makes sense to me.

Just to clarify, I think both the community and individual user experiences are important. I raised this issue because I saw a lot of "UX first" emphasis. I would go CX first but don't neglect the users. (Or people, as somebody in another thread remonstrated. Don't call them users! They're people!)

The P2P foundation has equipotentiality as a principle, which I take to mean each person in a community is important and their full potential should be celebrated and helped to develop.

So in the community experience, I'd like the individuals to have room to grow into their full community potential, and the community to grow into their full potential to benefit their individual members.

But yeah, to get back to the details, easier said than done.

[gcassel]

I raised this issue because I saw a lot of "UX first" emphasis.

I think this relates somewhat to our society's emphasis on marketing and advertising culture. I'm really glad that you resist it.

[almereyda]

We have moved the ValueFlows organization from GitHub to https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows.

This issue has been closed here, and all further discussion on this issue can be done at

https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows/forum-valueflo-ws/-/issues/39.

If you have not done so, you are very welcome to register at https://lab.allmende.io and join the ValueFlows organization there.