The Centre of Usability Research of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven carried out ethnographic research of the Belgian ’16plus’ online community in order to investigate its sociability factor. “16plus” was set up by the Belgian national television channel VRT as a pilot test for content distribution before establishing an elaborate full-blown platform. The results of this study can be considered as lessons learned for future communities.

The focus of “16plus” is to stimulate young people’s creativity and offer them a platform for showcasing it. According to the users responding to the survey, this element is what makes this community quite special in comparison to other similar Flemish services.

However, despite finding it a unique platform for publishing personal creations, users react on the low activity rates (often not more than 100 users online), particularly during holidays, in comparison to other social networking sites such as Teletet, Noxa and Redbox, usually hosting hundreds of users online. Users also observe a decline in comments on their creations.

“16 plus” contains creations such as audio clips, video files or images. Users can watch uploads in different categories such as ‘top rated’ and ‘most recent’. It is a clear and user-friendly website with an easy registration system not requiring a lot of personal data.

The rating system seems to be failing the young users’ expectations: they think it should only be possible to vote for an entry once, and that voting statistics should be revealed. Rating is important for them, as they want their creations to appear with the ‘top rated’ ones to gain more visibility.

There is not much social interaction going on at ’16plus’ as compared to other websites where users have gotten to know other people. According to one of the users, ’16plus’ doesn’t seem like a real community because the user profile is so limited; there is no guestbook and no forum. Users cannot see other members or who’s online, and can only publish one tiny picture of themselves under their profile. Most users prefer larger and editable user profiles. They say that the more data available in profiles, the bigger the chances of meeting people with similar interests.

Many of the survey participants are very creative and would like to perform artistic jobs. These youngsters, sometimes described as ‘generation Einstein’, are smarter than previous generations; they have an extensive knowledge of new technologies. The computer is ‘a social machine’ to them (Groen & Boschma, 2006)* .

The community ’16plus’ was chosen as a means to investigate sociability. The results of the survey should lead to practical recommendations for the design of online community platforms with social interaction services for young people.

Isabel Van den Broeck, Center for usability research, Mediacenter K.U. Leuven



*Boschma, J, Groen, I. (2006) Generatie Einstein slimmer, sneller en socialer. Communiceren met jongeren van de 21ste eeuw. Pearson Education Benelux.