Each points offers some simple suggestions and points to consider when designing. Potential design patterns are recommended (and linked to) as examples for what could be done in your interface as you design and grow your service. Keep in mind that your context will dictate different specific solutions but the questions and concepts to think about will still be applicable.
From Chris Dixon’s Blog:
Network effects can be your friend or your enemy depending on whether your product has reached critical mass. Getting to critical mass in complementary network effect markets is sometimes called overcoming the “chicken and egg problem.” Back in graduate school (2003), my friend Jeff Rhodes and I wrote a paper titled “Six Strategies for Overcoming the ‘Chicken and Egg’ Problem in Complement-Based Network Effects Markets.” This is a frequent challenge when launching technology products, yet at least at the time we had seen very few people try to systematically document strategies for overcoming it. Some of our examples are a bit dated now, but if you are interested in this topic you might like the full paper.
I’m not going to take credit for this one — this is a great post from Laurie Ruettimann over at Punk Rock HR. It’s one of my favorite blogs of all time because of her common sense. Her comments in a few posts that are classic, and furthermore, I absolutely agree with.
The original post is here. Enjoy.
I like social tools and websites. I started blogging in 2004, I opened my first Twitter account in 2007, and I’ve joined every social networking site on the planet. I even co-founded a social network for HR professionals because I think technology is fun & interesting. I wanted to learn.
Unfortunately, there are days where I want to quit Facebook and go back to my real world.
I don’t mind your Farmville updates or your Mafia Wars invites. I can delete those requests and hide your activity in my feed. What bothers me is the hyper-aggressive use of social media to spew emotion, feelings, and opinion. People who are otherwise sweet & kind will comment on my wall and write the most idiotic, racist, and sexist stuff in defense of an otherwise irrelevant position.
I’m like Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace. I find myself yelling, “Get off my lawn!”
Here are my guidelines for Facebook. Let me know if you have others you would like to add.
I love social tools and value the online connections in my life. I like seeing pictures of your children. I want to hear about your pets and your job. This is important to me and makes my life better.
Very simply, I hope that aggressive users of Facebook will mature, slow down, and chill the heck out.
I love neighborhood bars.
A developer I work with owns one in Seattle called the Waterwheel Lounge, and one of my favorites is the local beer bar that I’m the (occasional) Foursquare mayor of, The Church Key. They have an almost ‘Cheers’ like feel to them because the locals show up.
Social networks are like neighborhood bars — people want to feel welcome, like they are part of the neighborhood. This was true during the BBS days (When I was part of Morrison Hotel and Chatline, yo), and it’s true now.
This is how to make your social media site or campaign as successful as a neighborhood bar.
Every bar has a personality.
Some are sports bars (or sports lounges in Vancouver), some are singles bars, some are dance clubs, and some are neighborhood bars. Bar customers have certain expectations. For instance, when I visit the Church Key, I’m expecting conversation. When I visit Grant and Green, I’m expecting really loud music from bands like the Missionary Position.
The Waterwheel Lounge is famous in Seattle for their Karaoke nights. Not my cup of tea (The next bad rendition of “Ring of Fire” I hear might be that singer’s last), but their Karaoke nights are huge.
The same goes for websites that want to have a social networking component: users have certain expectations of what they are going to find there. For example, why would there be a StumbleUpon or Delicious share link on a general content website in the hope that three users click on it? Does a LinkedIn share button belong on ESPN.com?
The feel of the site should reflect that. All sites need to build trust with their users, and the first thing sites can do is design a user experience that reflects the attitude of the site. Screen real estate is precious, but making sure that the real estate is appropriate to the users is important. If users are screaming for features, give them to them.
There is nothing more satisfied than an engaged user.
The first day I walked into the Church Key, the bartender Ben asked for my name.
The second day I walked in there, he called me by my first name, and has done so ever since. Since I was new to the neighborhood (and I don’t know too many people in San Francisco), I thought this was coolest thing in the world. To this day, I still don’t know the price of what I pay for, and I always overtip.
There are several other bars in the neighborhood, but none of them are like the Church Key: a comfortable sweater that isn’t new, but it feels like your best friend.
Websites are like neighborhood bars; visitors want to feel like they belong. Sites like Facebook, Daily Kos and The Huffington Post have such huge readerships. They are their own social networks that call you by your first name when you visit.
The connect features of the major social sites make it easy for users to sign in (they can use their social media accounts to authenticate), and more importantly they establish reputation for the user to other users. Everyone sees friendly faces, and some sites like Yelp! allow users to establish creative personas that contribute to the editorial direction of user generated content.
Whenever I walk into the Church Key, I look at the huge beer list of exotic beers, glaze over, and ask Benjamin to get me a beer. I describe a taste (I want something that’s a porter yet sweet), and he gets a beer that hits close to what I ask for, if not exactly what I order.
Three or four times I didn’t even ask for a beer, and found a 90-minute IPA (one of my favorites) sitting at my barstool when I walked in.
Great websites provide context of where users have been, and give them clues where they are going. If a user has read 58 sports stories about the San Francisco Giants, there’s a pretty good chance that the user either is a) a San Francisco Giants fan, or b) has Tim Linceum on his fantasy baseball team.
In either case, the website should present more stories about the San Francisco Giants. How many sites do that? (I know, not enough of them. I’ve done the research.)
This is harder than it sounds.
A lot of bars have poorly designed interaction areas — either it’s too loud, or too crowded, or just too uncomfortable. Those are the bars that come and go. Great bars offer a range of places to sit: a bar to sit with the locals, dark corners for late night dates where neither of you want to be seen, places to stand and talk and drink with friends.
Both the Church Key and the Waterwheel Lounge have places where you can find random people to talk to, and places to hide in corners with your friends. But in both situations, they make it easy for story telling and good times.
Great social websites with a social component also make it easy to share stories. Content will be written in a way that’s not only engaging, but encourages conversation. The Huffington Post is a great example — you might not agree with the content, but you can engage in discussion and find a community of your peers (or not so peers).
Bar visitors are fickle. Website visitors, even more so.
They like their places like a comfortable old sweater, but if it gets a bit too worn, they want something new.
No matter how many bars are out there, the great ones give visitors something new every once in a while. The Waterwheel does this by offering great contests every once in a while, and installed this awesome patio deck that I’m going to make a special trip up to Seattle to see. The Church Key rotates their beer list, so what they have one month will change the next month.
Great social websites mix it up every once in a while. They try some new things, like Facebook’s Open Graph. They bring in new writers, different content, more video. They also take away features that aren’t working (like the 85 social networking badges you might see) when it’s obvious users are not using them.
Great bars are genuine.
Great bars resonate.
Great bars speak to their customers.
Great bars are real.
For both bars, I’ve had very real conversations with the owners. They didn’t wear flair, they didn’t put on a fake smile — they have real conversations with the customers, bullshitting with them about the weather, or the local sports team, or even running bingo or trivia nights that get customers free drinks. They ask how you’ve been, and involve you in the going’s on at the bar.
They care about the customers, and speak in a voice that’s very real.
They make you feel like you’re part of the family.
Great social media brands do that, through great copy and even better social promotions.
For example, Jet Blue has a wonderful promotion that talked about treating dad to a getaway. Foursquare isn’t too serious, and they make it social where visitors can find other visitors at a location. Great social media sites use comfortable, friendly conversations that feel real.
They talk about what they’ve done right, and what they have done wrong. They speak to you as a person and not like a person impressed by flair. They want to make you part of the family, treat you with respect, and remind you that they like you.
From Marketing Experiments Blog:
If you’re like many companies, you might think outsourcing social marketing is your best bet.
But more than ever companies are working to keep social media in-house because it requires such an intimate knowledge of the brand and because of the personal nature of social media interactions in general. Customers want to talk to you, not an “outsourced” spammy twitter account. And when you leave them with no choice, they happily take their discussion to your nearest competitor.
…
Instead of hiring or tasking the best person for the job, whether that’s managing the Twitter account or actively engaging in forum discussions, many companies put their least experienced, least qualified people on an overwhelming number of social media initiatives. Usually this person is in marketing and may be tasked to cover topics or areas of social media they have little or no experience in. But this isn’t the most efficient and certainly not the most effective method for achieving social media success.
This isn’t so much a review but more of a pointer where you can get the most up to date information about the MySpace Application Platform. The blog contains a lot of useful information like what’s going to be changed, and what the future holds for the platform, and most importantly, the people writing the blog are not some lackeys, they are the leaders that make the platform happen. Another place to check out is the release notes — the blog refers to them occasionally, but the little details that change from release to release are contained there.
If your attention span is limited the 140 characters, the Developer Team also has a twitter feed for updates on system issues and site performance.
I picked the Los Angeles Angels Network because it’s my favorite baseball team, but the authors have created a bunch of applications for all the major sports teams, and each is branded to each team. If I were to create an application that was for sports and the MySpace platform, this is it (even though it’s obviously a port from Facebook).
The sports network applications are very rich experiences that has all the information about the team, trivia questions about the team where you are ranked with other group members, and you can talk smack about other teams. The canvas surface of the application has a summary page that drives traffic into all of the other pages of the application, and it’s very dense with content even if it is a bit overwhelming.
This is an extension of the MySpace platform because it also has commenting, essentially creating not only a group for fans to meet, but also drawing in other content they can find out about the team. It’s a mini-portal, done right.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
I’m taking a break from reviewing them this week because I want to offer a few tips that hopefully someone will take note of. Most of the MySpace applications aren’t very good from an usability standpoint, and it’s usually the little things they are missing that separate a good application from a great application. Additionally, the MySpace platform is still a moving target, but the end user doesn’t have to see that.
Don’t be that Johnny Bedroom hack developer that we considered when building the MySpace developer site; think of solutions that would make your application better. This stuff isn’t rocket science — even blondes can offer great tips!
Here are a few tips that might improve the user experience.
The MySpace platform is sometimes slow, and the end user is subjected to half-loaded pages with arrows in places where there shouldn’t be arrows for navigation. Since it’s all JavaScript, and at the beginning a loading image could be show, why not do that? All it takes is showing a layer at the beginning of the JavaScript call, and hiding that loading layer as soon as the page is built.
We’re talking three lines of code.
Please, don’t you want a better experience for your users for three lines of code?
As I have posted previously, nothing frustrates an end user more than an application that doesn’t appear to work, because they think it’s their fault. Test, test, and test again. This is especially true with some of the Flash applications on the platform — most of them have some kind of issue that makes them break.
What happens to your application when the connection to the platform breaks, or it returns a malformed result? There should be some code in the JavaScript that considers all error messages that could happen when interacting with the platform, and provide a solution for each one. It doesn’t have to be elegant, but it should hide that there was some kind of issue with the system.
Most of the applications I’ve seen so far look like the Omaha, Nebraska Greyhound Terminal (don’t ask, I’ve never been there). Hire a designer to work with you, and make the application look better — that will encourage usage, and give legitimacy to the application as a quality product.
The MySpace terms of use for the application platform doesn’t allow spamming the users, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reward people for encouraging installs; some of the applications have come up with some unique ideas, like giving out bonuses if over a certain amount of friends have the application installed, or another bonus when someone installs the application from your profile through a link. There are many, many ways to make promoting your application fun without breaking the rules.
Want to keep track of your favorite bands? My Local Events by Eventful goes through your friends’ list and finds events from them to show when they are coming to your town. You can also request that your favorite bands play in your neighborhood. They also have a very efficient search engine to find bands to you can add to your top bands list.
The issue with applications like this is that they require a critical mass of listings to make them useful. The application itself is well thought out and useful, but there aren’t enough listings to drive significant traffic yet. Plus the application is a bit thin in the functionality space (it would be nice if there were more links to photos and music) to make it a more complete application.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
If you're a UX Designer in San Francisco, ping me at Twitter. I want to add you to a list I have there.
