Church & Web Design

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?

What do you think?

Designing For The Social Web – First Time Use

User Experience, Web Design

Designing For The Social Web – First Time Use

September 21st, 2011 by Matt Haff

The Five Stages of the Usage Lifecycle

Sign-up

Once you have people interested, the next major challenge is to convince them to actually sign up to use your app for the first time. This is one of the most important steps for several reasons:

The first, and lasting, impression – your best chance to turn a person into a loyal user
All questions, few answers – answer their questions and tell your story
Potential to kinetic energy – people are getting ready to use your app
Critical choice – people are choosing to either start a relationship with you, or someone else.

As people settle into using your app, they’re making judgments about its long-term value. They are assessing whether this site is really for the, and worth switching from what they currently have. First-time use is a crucial step for keeping momentum. If people don’t see the value in your service and fall off here, they may never return.

Keep It Simple

Like journalists, web designers have a core task when designing for sign-up: they have to answer the basic inquiry questions:

Who is it for? Who is going to use it?
What is it? What does it do? What are its capabilities?
Where can I use it? Is there a mobile version?
When can I use it? Is it browser-based, or can I use it when not online?
Why is it important to me? Why will my life be better as a result of using this?
How does it work? How can I take advantage of this? How do I get started?

If Possible, Build for Yourself

When designers and developers build for themselves they are more likely to be successful. Building for yourself has a few advantages that can make a huge difference. It requires less user research because you are the target user and you know what you like. You’re using it from day one, so you are dealing with the core issues each and every day. You’re finding all the little nits, quirks, and hiccups that only real use finds. However, the biggest difference of building for yourself is passion.

There’s a real difference between being a hired hand on a project for a specific amount of time and someone who has ownership as well as passion for what they’re working on (ownership and passion can be exclusive as well, but combined, they pack quite a punch). The short-term, part-time attention of a freelance designer or developer can often lead to clunky, duct-taped solutions after the contract is over and the site is actually being used by real people. Cork’d has been the complete opposite situation, where we’ve been able to launch a product that would be considered “done” under most circumstances and then react to member feedback using the same attention to detail that went into the initial construction.

Dan Cederholm,
Designer, Corkd

User Interface

If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it. If the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it. Each feature means more complexity. 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?

A complicated interface suggests a complicated service, so keep it simple. Good how-it-works features provide multiple levels of detail, at increasing depth of description, allowing people to dig deeper as needed. This is one of my biggest pet peeves, upon signup, ask only for information that’s absolutely necessary. Don’t make me fill out my full address, phone number, gender, date of birth, etc. when I’m signing up for an online service.

What do you think?

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.

What do you think?

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.