What is user life cycle in an online community? What does it look like?
Within a community each member has its own lifecycle regardless of the stage of the group itself. Amy Jo Kim, a social researcher, identified five stages of user journey in an online community:
- Peripheral. Lurker users with an account on the site
- Inbound. Newcomers who do their very first actions on the site.
- Insider. Regular users.
- Boundary. Leaders of all kinds.
- Outbound. Not very active users who had been active in the past.
Not every user passes through all stages. Users can also go in both directions, for example from a regular user one can become a community leader and then step down to become a regular user agin. In most cases the level of one’s activity depends on their personal circumstances.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.