Social Media | Church & Web Design

Designing For The Social Web – Passionate Use

October 14th, 2011 by Matt Haff

The Five Stages of the Usage Lifecycle

Passionate Followers

What makes companies like Apple, Chick-fil-a, and Starbucks stand out from the crowd? The answer is simple, passionate followers.

Apple spends 1% on advertising?! Because they are great at producing a passionate fan base. Apple fan boys/girls are the leading factors of Apple’s success. Why are there no windows fanboys? Because it’s not an innovative product that creates a passionate following.

Sharers are great for several reasons:

Sharers advertise for you
What sharers say is more powerful than what you say
Sharers tell you why you’re great

There are two types of sharing, the first is implicit sharing. Implicit sharing happens when an item is shared as a byproduct of participation. On Del.icio.us, for example, your bookmarks are shared by default, so that others can see them even if your original intention was to simply save it for later. The other type is explicit sharing, which is how we usually share: on purpose.

Give them something to share!

If the goal is getting people to share stuff, then there are a few things you must consider. Allow people to share by providing them with a permanent URL, making it embeddable, making it a PDF, and making it printer-friendly. Your next step is to give them something they want to share. It really depends on the person, but in general people like to share:

Ideas that reinforce what we already believe
Ideas that surprise us
Ideas that help explain something we already know
Things we know another person will find valuable
Useful tools – anything that makes a tough task easier
Fun things like pictures & videos
Things that make us look good.

Last but certainly not least!

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this series, keep in mind that this applies to much more than a social web app. You can’t have successful passionate use without the other four steps. Don’t focus on “viral” focus on passionate! Besides, where do you think viral comes from?

Designing For The Social Web – Regular Use

Apps, Social Media, User Experience

Designing For The Social Web – Regular Use

September 29th, 2011 by Matt Haff

The Five Stages of the Usage Lifecycle

Designing for Ongoing Participation

Congratulations! You’ve gotten people into your app, now how do you keep them happy and participating over the long term? There are two parts of getting ongoing participation right:

Identifying the right motivations for use. Understand why people are participating in the first place.
Creating interfaces that support and encourage those motivations. Interfaces elicit participation by supporting those motivations appropriately.

Why Do People Participate?

It’s not about economic but social capital. These are some examples of motivations based on social capital.

Identity – enable identity management, profile pages, show what they’re doing
Uniqueness – emphasize it!
Reciprocity – mutual benefit, give them a way to give back
Reputation – number of friends, reviews, ratings, comments, fans, etc.
Sense of efficacy – give them a way to feel like they are being productive
Control – not total control, but give them things they can customize
Ownership – use the words “you”, “my”, “me”.
Attachment to a group – allow them to find other people similar to them
Fun – do I really need to explain this to you?

Designing For The Social Web – Interested

Social Media, Web Design

Designing For The Social Web – Interested

September 14th, 2011 by Matt Haff

The Five Stages of the Usage Lifecycle

People-Powered Research

Once people find out about your product and they become interested, they will have questions and are ready for you to tell them what they want to hear. Pay close attention here, while people want you to answer their questions, they do not want to hear you tell them how great your product is.

People don’t care about what you have to say about your product. Customer reviews allow people to learn about a product from the experience of others without any potentially biased seller information. When people are uncertain, they rely on social connections to help them out and usually compare themselves to those in their social group, not to society at large.

What Interests The User?

There are three general steps to consider when creating your web app.

Focus on the primary Activity - The first question you must answer is: What is your audience doing? Only one activity is primary, think about apps that you use daily, the ones you rely on the most. The most successful ones are focused applications that support one specific activity. The applications people find most compelling allow them to excel at a single activity. Ask yourself “What do people have to do in order for us to be successful?”

Identify your social Objects - Once you’ve got the activity down, you have to identify the objects that people interact with while doing that activity. What are the objects that you share with other people: photos, videos, music, blogs, messages? Give the social objects a URL. URLs make them easy to share, find, and allow people to link directly to them.

Choose your core Feature set - From the activity and objects you can derive a core feature set. Focus on the features that make the primary activity easier and the social objects more apparent. Each feature means more complexity, so learn to say no. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

The Sign-up Hurdle

You’ve made the user aware, answered all of their questions and built a great app that is useful, now what? Now is the trickiest part of all, get the user to sign up.

The first, and lasting impression. If you lose someone in this initial transaction, they’re very unlikely to return, having convinced themselves that your app isn’t worth using.
All questions, few answers. At this stage people have the most questions, and in answering you can use the opportunity to tell your story.
Potential to kinetic energy. At this stage people are getting ready to take their first actual steps in using your app.
Critical Choice. The user is choosing to either start a relationship with you or have it with someone else.

Social Media, Web Design

Designing For The Social Web – Unaware

September 9th, 2011 by Matt Haff

This will be a five part series based on the five stages of the usage lifecycle.

I first picked up this book about a year ago and it’s been in my stack of meaning to get through books. I’m very odd when it comes to reading, I seldom read just one book at a time, it usually takes me months to make it all the way through just one book. Anyways, here is some food for thought and some neat bits I pulled from this book.

The Five Stages of the Usage Lifecycle

Raising Awareness

Supposedly the average person sees 500-3000 ads per day. Even if you have the best product/service in the world it won’t matter if people don’t know about it. How do we raise awareness on our product/service when people are constantly bombarded with advertising?

We need to be efficient at allocating our attention. In other words, we need to pay attention to what matters, and try to ignore what doesn’t. Addressing the user’s biggest pain points and telling an authentic story is crucial to getting their attention. Your biggest concern should be telling an authentic story.

Customer service is the new marketing

Because we are now in a era where social media is the leader of marketing, your customer service is more important than ever. It is crucial to react positively to negative feedback. If the user says your product stinks, don’t ignore them, hear them out and find out why it stinks.

The value of authentic conversation is you create happier people. Users recognize that you care when you have authentic conversations with them. You also gain awareness and interest in your software from satisfied customers spreading the word. When you have conversations with people you will be able to create a better product, by having a much better sense of what’s going on. You’re able to gather much more information to inform your design. When you meet a passionate user it will be hard keeping up with all their feedback! Users will become co-inventors, sharing ideas and helping you develop your product.