Community managers spend plenty of time on content, engagement and growth. But the more revealing question is this: how intentionally are we designing the experience people have at every community touchpoint?

After a short break, the first post-summer Community Leaders Forum was led by James Thornton. James is Community Manager at Typeform, a platform people use to create forms and other interactive experiences. James has over 10 years of experience, starting in content and later moving to community and customer engagement. In his work, James brings together principles from product design, service design, and community building.

The McDonald’s experience

James opened with an unexpectedly useful example: his regular Monday visit to McDonald’s in Barcelona. The food matters, of course, but what makes the journey effortless is everything around it: the familiar signs, ordering kiosks, payment flow, waiting area and order-status screen. Different locations may vary, but the journey feels recognisable to pretty much everyone. Because each touchpoint has been deliberately designed.

The (simplified) experience is as follows:

You enter McDonald’s with a need and walk out with satisfaction. This experience is not by accident. Every touch point is deliberately designed by a team of experts and precisely mirrors McDonald’s very first value: “We put our customers and people first.”

The McCommunity’s experience

Walking in with a need and walking out with satisfaction is the same in communities. That’s the intention at least. The experience of a community is not the platform itself, just like the store isn’t the experience of McDonald’s. “Users don’t remember that” James clarifies. The experience of a community can happen in various places on the community. Users remember knowledge bases, mentoring, onboarding, workshops, events, newsletter, or being a champion.

This philosophy led Typeform to create Tune Up Your Typeform. With Tune-up, customers bring a real form they're working on (the challenge). Typeform then tunes (improves) it with them real-time during an online Zoom call. Rather than pushing generic educational content with assumptions of what users need, they're starting at the customer’s actual problem and need in their form.

"It's like MTV’s pimp my ride, but less glamorous because it’s about online forms."

Tune-Up is a lot more than just a webinar. Crafted into a full live experience it's delivering a lot of value to the Typeform community. Tune-Up has become a series of experiences that lead to a much deeper customer relationship.

Typically about four or five forms (in a 1 hour session) are tuned-up live. The customers who submitted a form get direct help, while everyone else can learn from the improved features and learn more about Typeform functionalities.

Finding where help is most needed

Just like the McDonald’s experience, the team of Typeform experts had to precisely pinpoint where help was mostly needed. To do so, the team asked themselves where the pain of users is happening. Where do people actually need help?

Supported with product and usage data that flags when someone doesn’t find value or experiences pain points, they realised that the need existed in the form itself.

How do we design value for everyone?

Not every submitted form can be tuned. Out of ±80 submissions, they pick 5 forms to tune during the live session. So how do you make sure that the users who do not get their form tuned also walk away satisfied?

James explains that there they recycle one touch point (Tune Up Your Typeform) into other touch points to create a much bigger ecosystem of value:

• A user can submit their form, their challenge and their ultimate goal and have it reviewed live
• A user can attend the live session and learn from others
• A user can watch the recording (shared on the community platform)
• A user can read a case study

Give people a reason to come back

Once a user has received value, it might not always be enough for them to come back. Communities often see transactional interactions. People have a need, come to your community, find what they’re looking for and only return when the need arises again.

James sees people return when the experience is both recognisable and fresh. The structure stays consistent: several real forms, live expert feedback and practical learning. While the customers, challenges and conversations change each time. Consistency builds confidence; freshness creates anticipation.

Creating value beyond a community platform and a live Tune-Up session

What began as a webinar has since expanded to a series of engaging customer experiences that are promoted in their community. They currently invite customers and promote it more broadly in newsletters.

Tune-Up now creates value well beyond the live session. One valuable by-product has been customer advocacy. People whose forms were tuned have shared unsolicited testimonials, recommended the experience on LinkedIn, joined Typeform’s affiliate programme, and returned to collaborate in other ways such as speakers or product testers. Advocacy was never the original objective; the team simply wanted to help customers create better forms. Advocacy followed because the experience made people feel successful, and gave them a story worth sharing.

James explains that there is a wider community outside of the actual community (platform) that could benefit from the Tune-up sessions. To reach this audience, they have done several experiments with the lifecycle and marketing teams. An interesting discovery they made along the way was that shrinking the number of people receiving the email led to higher attendance rates.

They constantly try to find ways to improve it, align it with the needs of the users, and reach a broader audience that can benefit.

Key takeaways

The biggest takeaway from James’ session is that great community experiences don’t happen by accident. They are designed around a real user need, when it is needed and delivered through multiple paths to value.

For community managers, that means looking beyond the community platform and asking four practical questions that revolve around touchpoints where users interact with the product:

1. Where does the need first appear?
2. How can we help at that moment?
3. How can everyone benefit, not only the featured participant?
4. What will make people return or recommend the experience?

Tune Up Your Typeform shows what can happen when a team starts with those questions instead of asking, “What content should we create next?”