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Designing Social Navigation for a Virtual Community of Practice

Wen Xu, Jun Hu and Karel Kreijns

Abstract. Social navigation in a community of practice is an approach of locating information with increased social awareness. Social navigation alone is not a system, whereas the community of practice is. User requirement definition on social navigation is difficult. On the one hand, without the context of the community of practice, it is hard to collect the user requirements on navigation, especially when the concept of virtual community is new to the target user group. On the other hand, to set up such a virtual community, preliminary studies on social navigation is however necessary. This paper presents the experiences how we dealt with such a chicken and egg problem. Different approaches were used, from theoretical study online questionnaire, observation on an existing virtual society, analysis on similar systems, to prototyping and expert walk-through.

W. Xu, K. Kreijns, and J. Hu, “Designing Social Navigation for a Virtual Community of Practice,” Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment, Series, 3942/2006, pp. 27-38: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2006.
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DOI: 10.1007/11736639_7