Paper short abstract:

This study investigates the user involvement strategy at a company that operated one of the world's largest social game and online communities for teenagers, Habbo Hotel. The key findings demonstrate how collaboration and feedback loops between developers and users change over ten years.

Paper long abstract:

Social media services feature significant change -- in scale, site, features, actors and communities -- as they start from small projects and transform into taken for granted infrastructure, find a market niche, or decline. This change forms a methodological challenge for social media researchers and a practical challenge to user involvement strategy. However, much design literature assume 'one-off projects', which limits its applicability to ongoing service design.

This study investigates user involvement strategies and practices in the construction of a social media service following the biographies of artefacts and practices approach. It examines (1) how users' actions in and around social media shape its design after market launch, (2) how social media developers' user involvement practices evolve over time, and (3) how user categorisation changes with social media. This study adopted an exploratory case study approach and the data was collected during 2003-2010.

The site of investigation was one of the world's largest social game and online communities for teenagers, Habbo Hotel, operated by Sulake Corporation. The data was gathered from developers and users through a multi-method approach, using traditional qualitative and quantitative methods as well as online data sources.

The key findings demonstrate how collaboration and feedback loops between developers and users change over time. In particular, this study highlights the effects of changes in the target group, the broad variety of applied user involvement methods, rhythms in development, and users' contributions after market launch.