"Groups are the core of social life and they determine who we are." - "Into Sociology"

Introduction

Humans are social animals. Our lives are surrounded by various groups that provide us with the intimacy and sense of belonging we need. With the development of the Internet, our groups have gradually moved online, and we have also found new groups online. However, whether online or offline, their continued existence is inseparable from interaction, culture and norms. As a gathering point for many online groups, QQ groups have recently been continuously optimizing and enriching their capabilities in interaction, culture and norms to serve more groups.

Design goals

The group continues to grow from gathering to the later stage, and different periods correspond to different design goals.

Parr 1. Discovering Groups

Help like-minded groups get together

In the real world, people gather together to form groups because of common goals. When the Internet allows groups to break through spatial constraints, people will look for groups with the same interests that are difficult to find offline.

In the early days of the Internet, groups were a privilege for QQ Sun-level users. The scarcity of QQ groups at the time made users think more carefully about what kind of groups they wanted to create. In the context of creators consciously creating and users joining with a purpose, QQ provided different group categories for users to choose from very early on.

As the Internet penetration rate increases, online social networking has become a daily routine for people. The increasingly rich entertainment life continues to stimulate people's diversified communication demands. Establishing a group chat is no longer a threshold, and new group chats continue to emerge on social platforms.

At this time, group owners hope that their groups can be discovered and joined by users in the vast sea of ​​groups. On the other hand, participants who are also faced with a large number of group chats are eager to quickly find the group they are interested in.

QQ has made optimizations in group creation and group search to help group chat participants and participants meet each other better.

Flexible group label settings

The boundaries of QQ group categories are clear and mutually exclusive. When the group owner selects the film and television category when creating a group, and the user does not select this category when searching, the group will be filtered out in this screening. In reality, content has no clear boundaries, but is related and intertwined. For example, a film and television group established because of a popular TV series can simultaneously trigger different social topic demands such as plot discussion, star chasing, CP, music, beauty, photography, etc.

QQ uses tags to enrich the personalized settings of QQ groups. Because tags can be superimposed, the platform can evaluate group chats in more dimensions and make more accurate recommendations to users. Tags can also be customized, and users can add new Tottenham to tags at any time to keep the platform tags fresh.

QQ has added a new step for adding tags when creating a group chat, providing clearer guidance for newly created category groups. After creation, the group can also be modified at any time in the group profile editor.

When searching for groups, the category filtering method is no longer used. Secondary quick filtering tags are used to enhance the user's search guidance for the page, while expanding the content area to show users more group recommendation results.

After users filter out a specific type of group chat, they are faced with a large number of recommended results. How to choose to join is a difficult point in user decision-making.

Intuitive and easy to understand group dynamics

In the early days of the Internet when there were few groups, the size of group members was an important factor in whether users joined group chats. However, today, users have more diverse demands for group chat social networking and will choose groups of appropriate size based on their own consulting needs.

QQ breaks down the active elements of group chats, using small flames to indicate the liveliness of group chat messages. It also adds new icons such as files, photo albums, and administrator activity to help users understand group chats more comprehensively and choose to join.

Part 2 Interaction

Motivate chat

The stronger the sense of belonging of members, the more active they will be in participating in the chat. Through research and analysis of group users, we found that members' sense of belonging is reflected in the following three dimensions:

If the above three aspects can be effectively improved, it can enhance users' sense of belonging and stimulate their motivation to chat.

More fulfilling group chat levels

In real life, social status such as occupation and rank can guide our behavioral norms, let everyone have expectations for the behavior of each role, and help new members integrate into the group more quickly, thereby improving the sense of communication. At the same time, social status also provides a goal for the group, allowing each role to win or obtain a higher status according to their own wishes, improve personal sense of accomplishment, and thus enhance a sense of belonging.

The title system in QQ groups simulates the concept of social status in real life, with different titles corresponding to different levels. Titles allow for a certain level of uncertainty in the interactions between online group members who are strangers to each other, helping users integrate into the group and gain a sense of accomplishment. However, it also has obvious shortcomings:

Broad levels lead to a large number of people at the same level in larger groups, unclear role behavior expectations, scattered responsibilities, weakened sense of communication, longer status spans, and insufficient incentives in the process of obtaining status. At the same time, unclear level names have a weak sense of recognition, which weakens the sense of achievement of members. In order to improve the sense of achievement of members, we hope that the level relationship will be clearer and the process of obtaining it will be more fulfilling. Therefore, we will make the more recognizable digital levels explicit, and at the same time subdivide the original 6 levels to 100 levels, so that high-level users have a stronger sense of achievement and more frequent incentives in the process of obtaining levels. At the same time, because the title name can reflect the characteristics of the group and increase topicality, its content and display are also retained.

Interactive logo that reflects uniqueness

"Collective Loneliness" also mentioned that users like online social networking because it allows them to rebuild their personalities. Every individual is unique and hopes that their good qualities can be discovered. We hope that users in the group can also discover their uniqueness online and build a good personal image to enhance personal recognition and communication participation, so that they have a stronger sense of belonging in the group.

The real characteristics of users cannot be captured, so we can only infer their personal characteristics based on their behavior in the group. At the same time, characteristics are used to increase user recognition in communication, so they will be displayed in the chat panel. How to show these achievements that reflect personal characteristics? Here we borrowed from the status symbols in real life: when people recognize their social status and hope that others will recognize it, they will wear corresponding symbols, such as those who are satisfied with their married status will wear rings, and generals who have achieved achievements will wear medals. When you have a certain trait in the group, you will get the corresponding symbol-an honor icon.

To reflect the uniqueness, all the marking degrees are only available to a small number of people. Because the behavior within the user group is a dynamic process, someone may have talked a lot yesterday, but suddenly stopped talking these days. All the characteristics are only temporary and will be replaced or disappear when the conditions are not met.

Part 3. Culture

Precipitation group featured content

In the process of group growth, the culture belonging to the group will gradually accumulate. Culture is a complex concept. It is created by the group and can have different forms. It can be content accumulation, values, behavioral norms, science and technology, etc. Good culture can improve the creativity and cohesion of the group, become the embodiment of the group's value, and play a positive role in the development of the group.

QQ already has passive and active content accumulation methods. Files shared by members in the group will be automatically accumulated in the group files, and photos can be consciously uploaded to the group album. QQ has newly launched Group Essence and Write Together to enrich the accumulation types of group content and encourage group members to actively co-create their own group content.

Daily interactions can be set as group highlights

Culture originates from daily life. The chats in a specific group of people with similar interests will have their own cultural language. From the Martian language of the 90s to the jargon of the 00s, fan circles, the second dimension, ancient style, etc. all have their own online jargon. The interactions in the group chat are recorded in the form of text, voice, pictures, etc. These contents are the cultural carriers of the group.

So how can we extract the wonderful content from it into culture and make it recognized by more members?

Drawing on the practice of disseminating valuable culture offline, we give this right to the authority within the group: the group owner and administrator. For the long-term and healthy development of the group, the group owner and administrator are more proactive in identifying content that is valuable to the group and setting the content as the essence.

The marked essence contents have golden logos, which is a recognition for the sender. Click to quickly enter the essence list page to view more contents recognized by the group, and encourage group members to actively interact in the group.

Actively co-create new content

Cultural creation can be in the form of countless individuals creating countless works, such as Tang poetry; or countless people can create a work together, such as Chinese characters. QQ group albums, files, and essences belong to the former, and we also hope to provide the latter form of creation, because for online groups, it not only enriches the types of cultural creation, but also adds a new form of member interaction, which is both interesting and emotionally connected.

With the form of co-creation, we also need to clarify the specific content of creation, which should have the following characteristics:

By observing user behavior and offline scenarios, we found that co-creation of text works has the above characteristics. For example, real-life message boards, co-editing scripts, online chain games, and problem discussions all embody the above three points. So we proposed the concept of writing together, so that everyone can write the same content together.

We also need to meet this design goal:

For high efficiency, the initiation path can be quickly initiated and written according to the scenario:

After initiation, during the writing process and group chat, we will show everyone's edited content and participants in real time; after the members finish editing, we will guide them to send it to AIO to let more people know that everyone is editing the content together and the number of editors, so as to reflect the sense of group participation and guide more people to participate. Later, we will also add a sedimentation entrance for all the content written together to help everyone accumulate culture.

Part 4. Specifications

Improve group management efficiency

During the expansion of a group, some disputes may arise within the group. The group owner needs to constrain the behavior of group members by establishing norms to maintain the health and long-term operation of the group chat.

As the size or number of groups increases, it will bring management pressure to group owners and administrators. QQ provides more new functions for setting standards to assist group owners and administrators to manage groups more efficiently and maintain the healthy operation of group chats.

Efficient and standardized group nicknames

In different occasions, people will wear different clothes to blend into the scene and atmosphere of the occasion. Some different activities and meetings also have specific clothing requirements.

A group nickname is like a piece of exclusive clothing in a group chat, distinguishing group members from individuals and other roles in the group chat.

By requiring group members to change their group nicknames, the group owner provides group members with the simplest sense of ritual for integrating into the group, while also forming a collective style within the group.

However, this ritual experience is not smooth. The rules for modifying group nicknames are usually written in the group announcement, which is on a different page from modifying the group nickname. Especially on mobile phones, this increases the difficulty for group members to compare the rules when editing their nicknames.

For this purpose, QQ has added a function on the group nickname modification page for administrators to fill in group nickname rules, and supports adding preset words. Administrators can set fixed prefixes as preset word templates based on the group rules.

When group members modify the group nickname, they can directly see the naming rules of the group nickname. When there are preset words, they can directly click on the preset words to automatically enter them, eliminating the difficulty of entering special characters.

Announcement supports read receipts

Announcements are the main way for administrators to convey group chat rules and regulations, event notifications, important messages, etc. to group members. QQ group announcements have been following the development of online group chats, and continue to enrich the functions of group announcements: presenting to members in special message styles, allowing multiple announcements to be filled in, supporting top announcements, etc.

It has been observed that administrators sometimes send notifications directly in group chats in order to obtain responses from group members for statistics. Therefore, there is a need to support administrators in collecting read receipts from group members.

When group members receive announcements, they have to go through the confirmation process to enhance their awareness of reading announcements. When the administrator edited the announcement, he turned on the switch that required group members to confirm receipt. QQ will help the administrator count the reading list of the announcement. For members who have not confirmed, the administrator can notify them to check again with one click.

New message management for robots

The quality of speech in a group chat directly affects the atmosphere of group members and is an important indicator of the healthy development of group chats. Administrators need to supervise and control the speech and members in the group. When the scale of the group chat increases, the management cost of the administrator also increases.

Q Group Manager is a group robot that assists administrators. It already has intelligent management capabilities such as group welcome, scheduled messages, and self-service Q&A. In addition to the existing capabilities, Q Group Manager has added a speech management capability.

When the administrator turns on this function, when a non-whitelisted link message appears in the group, the Q group manager can withdraw it and issue a warning to the sender. The speech management function can be expanded to set banned keywords, sensitive word recommendations, kick people based on the number of triggers, manage logs, etc. Stay tuned.

Mini Programs Provide Multi-Group Management

A healthy group cannot be separated from the hard work of the group owner and administrator. The traditional group chat management path is scattered in the group chat settings of each group. When a user manages multiple group chats, the path to find the group and enter the management page each time is very long.

The group management applet brings together groups created by users with management permissions, reducing the administrator's search costs. Each group directly enters the management page, greatly shortening the operation path of managing the group. Each group management homepage displays group data, intuitively presenting the group owner with a recent data overview of the group chat.

QQ continues to explore management needs, constantly improves management tools, enhances the intelligence capabilities of group management robots, and tries multi-group batch management functions to help group owners and administrators maintain the healthy development of group chats.

Outlook

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." - William Shakespeare

All stages are similar, but each stage has its own uniqueness. Interaction, norms, and culture are the needs of all groups to survive. QQ groups now provide groups with common capabilities in these aspects. However, each group has its own uniqueness, such as fan groups, game groups, home-school groups, etc. In the future, we will build stages that meet the unique characteristics of various group chats, so that all roles can better and faster integrate into the role and feel the characteristics of the stage they join.