(See part one for some fascinating travel and eating anecdotes, and part two for the first half of Joshua Porter’s workshop)

Designing for sign-up

Contrary to what I (and presumably others) thought, this isn’t about the sign-up form! It’s more to do with the need to articulate the core value of what’s being offered to the user. In pseudo-physics terms, it’s about converting potential energy into kinetic energy.

Research has been done that suggests that sign-up is nine times harder than we think it is:

• users overvalue their current solution by three times, and
• providers overvalue their offering by three times

Getting from interested to sign-up – there are three types of visitors:

1. I know I want to sign up
2. I need to know more
3. I’m sceptical

To meet those three visitor types where they are, there are three strategies for sign-up:

• immediate engagement – you can use the site and still see what’s in it for me (WIIFM) without signing up
• articulate benefits and features
• use levels of description, e.g.
  • Netflix.com sign-up screen
  • Tripit.com

The carrot vs. the stick: Netvibes lets you do stuff first, without signing up. If you want to save your stuff, though, you have to register. This is a stick, rather than carrot, approach but it can work well.

Luke Wroblewski calls this “progressive engagement”, though Joshua prefers the term “instant engagement”. Some examples are Slide.com and Freshbooks

Reputation

“Social problems don’t have technical solutions”

The Yahoo Developer Network have some design patterns for reputation in their pattern library.

Reputation rewards need to be tied to quality as well as quantity; you need to reward (and highlight) desired behaviour. The example given was that of Heidi Klausner, a reviewer on Amazon whose number of reviews equates to >5.5 per day since 2001. There is some speculation out there about her authenticity (i.e. whether she’s actually a team of reviewers) but her reviews seem to contain nothing that can’t be gleaned from the back cover of the books in question.

What’s interesting is that, while no-one will get anywhere near Ms. Klausner in raw number of reviews, other reviewers perform better using other, more intelligent metrics. Some have a much better ratio of helpful reviews to total reviews; others have more reviews marked as helpful.

Reputation isn’t just about people’s behaviour and actions; personal profiles contribute as well. “The profile must fit the domain”, however, so don’t ask users for the name of their dog on a business-focused site, for instance. Yelp.com is a good example of a site that combines lots of different reputation patterns.

“Optimise for value-added behaviour”

Reciprocity

On LinkedIn, when someone recommends a colleague they’ve worked with, it’s very rare indeed that the recommended person doesn’t return in kind with a recommendation (so much so, that a failure to return the compliment is seen as an insult). This feeling of indebtedness can also apply to websites that users place value on, e.g. Amazon (again!).

Amazon now order their reviews by most helpful, not by date, and they display the rating spread (i.e. how many of each star rating), not just the average rating. 1-star reviews are important because people want to know the worst experience people have had, as well as the best, so they don’t buy a bad product.

eBay’s feedback profile contains lots of data. The join date is a very important piece of information; a longer membership period increases trust. eBay removed reciprocity from seller/buyer feedback as it created a toxic relationship between the two parties: sellers wouldn’t leave feedback until a buyer left positive feedback; if a buyer left negative feedback, the seller would respond in kind. Ultimately, who needs to know how good a buyer is? Apparently, eBay had wanted to remove the seller->buyer feedback for a few years but eventually bit the bullet and did it.

What can’t you do?

• Amazon.com: you can’t rate a review as helpful (or not) from a reviewer’s list of reviews. If possible, this would allow bulk, targeted fanning or hating of specific reviewers, taking the focus away from the review and onto the reviewer. An ad hominem form of rating, if you like.
• You can’t Digg someone’s Diggs on your Digg friends’ activity or profile page – again, this would make it about the person, not what they had Dugg.
• Facebook’s newsfeed had users up-in-arms when it launched, as they saw it as an invasion of privacy. None of it was data that was new or previously unavailable; it was just aggregated in one place for the first time. Facebook’s response was to introduce fine-grained privacy controls, which apparently no-one really uses but their mere existence pacifies people, making them feel in control.

Metrics (for pirates – AARRR!)

The usage lifecycle goes like this:

Unaware -> Interested -> First-time use -> Regular use -> Passionate use

Compare to this metrics scheme: AARRR, which stands for:

• *A*cquisition
• *A*ctivation
• *R*etention
• *R*eferral, leading to…
• *R*evenue (profit!)

Your sign-up process is a funnel; it’s very likely that, of 100 people who hit a landing page, only 60 will make it to the sign-up form, and only 20 will complete sign-up and hit the confirmation page. All funnels are leaky. [It's possible to track funnels in Google Analytics, though better solutions exist, apparently]

However, number of users is not a valuable metric (take note, sales and marketing!). What is important is engagement, but how do we measure that?

Engagement analysis

Retention is a good measure of engagement. If people keep coming back, you’re doing something right.

• Do a Cohort Analysis on registered users who visit or do some other activity on the site.

The Viral Loop

How well are users bringing new users into the system?

• Word of mouth
• Embed a widget
• Mimic an action (e.g. Facebook apps)
• Forced sign-up
• Direct invite

The problem with Metrics

“You get what you optimise for”

“At Blogger, we determined that our most critical metric was number of posts. An increase in posts meant that people were not just creating blogs, but updating them, and more posts would drive more readership, which would drive more users, which would drive more posts.” — Evan Williams, founder of Blogger.com (and Twitter)

Fin

That’s the end of the workshop notes – check back for the conference write-up!

To be continued…

(If you’re short on things to do, part one contains fascinating details of my journey and dinner)

Thursday morning brought a slight respite from the high winds and torrential rain of the previous night. Breakfast in the hotel was really, really good: muesli/dried cranberries and yoghurt followed by my choice of Eggs Benedict. Oh, and the Smoothie of the Day.

Looking at the map, I reckoned that Clearleft’s offices (the location of the workshops) were about half a mile away – I estimated a 10 minute walk. The slightly less-than-crow-flying route meant that I breezed in the door on the dot of 9.30, the stated start time. But lo! That’s just the coffee and pastries; no need to panic.

After signing in and obtaining my badge-cum-programme, I was waved at by none other than Adrian Long, who I’d not seen since leaving Uni in 1999. C’est un monde petit.

The actual workshop: Social Web Design – From Strategy to Interface.

The workshop was led by Joshua Porter, who’s ex-UIE but now runs his own business, specialising in the design of social web apps. He famously (well, in web design terms) wrote The Del.icio.us Lesson blog post, defining how “personal value precedes network value” or, basically, a site needs to be useful to one person over just being useful to many people; it will become useful to many people if people use it because it’s useful to them.

A few aphorisms to start with:

• “What worked in the Industrial Age doesn’t work in the Information Age” i.e. where once each user of a mass-produced product had essentially the same experience, now each user’s experience is highly individual.
• “Your audience is the only thing that matters”
  • in-house designers have a massive advantage over consultants: domain knowledge
  • there should be no barrier between the design team and the audience
• The recent focus on usability is great, but “if ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles” (Douglas Englebart, creator of the computer mouse)

We need usable plus useful. How are we providing daily value to our users?

Strategy: finding focus

There have been countless Web sites whose strategy is mashing up two other Web sites; this is a strategy of mashing up two other strategies and, as a result, is not really a strategy.

Over time, it is likely that your audience tends towards being made up of 15-year-old girls who, because of their lack of inhibition, will sign up for anything. Boston.com’s registration page was cited as an example of a site that, like our own Community Websites, expect sign-up before giving very much value to the user. The big problem is that, if you make people sign up before doing anything, you’ll end up with the wrong audience (the aforementioned 15-year-old girls).

This is a Fuzzy Strategy or, putting it bluntly, “Old-school business thinking”: where making money is the primary goal; the goal influences strategy and therefore influences design.

If the user activity is “create a widget”, the old-school, fuzzy approach can be shown like this:

Landing page -> Sign-up ($) -> User creates widget

In the rearranged, activity-centred approach, it goes like this:

Landing page -> User creates widget -> Sign-up ($)

In the second model, money-making is less of a focus than meeting user needs. [These principles are very much in line with the philosophy of Obliquity, though the word was never mentioned. Obliquity is the idea that "overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly".]

Design Strategy

Moving to a model of “user-value first, money second” requires long-term thinking, as value is created over time. If we do this, User Experience (UX) must be primary, and drives all other strategies.

To do this, we must optimise for use. If we create something that people love to use, the business will be fine. [N.B. IOPP has a stated aim to be customer-focused]

Why are we still struggling with this stuff?

• competing interests
• political infighting
• short-term thinking
• buzzword bingo
• no ongoing evaluation
• fake strategies

“Software doesn’t usually fail because of a lack of programming talent… it usually fails because the talent is not pointed in the right direction” — Joshua Porter

Joshua then asked us “what’s your favourite software”. The answers were all applications that are very focused on a very specific activity, and do that one thing well. This is consistent with both Unix and the Web: small pieces, loosely joined.

Advocates of User-centred Design often suggest asking “Who are your users?” In social software design, though, it’s better to ask “what are your users doing?” [N.B. On our sites, once upon a time, the answer to that question would have been "reading", but the list of activities is now much, much longer]. This is Activity-centred Design, or…

• What do people have to do to make you successful?
• What are you making people better at?
• What are your users passionate about?

An interesting comparison was made between “traditional” bulletin boards (giving discussion & support in an unstructured way) with social networking sites (with specific, aggregated data) e.g. Patients Like Me – users input very specific details of their illness and symptoms, and over time the system determines who their “neighbours” are).

Lessons from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

• The Commander’s Intent: “if we do nothing else, we must…”
• Feature Creep can kill strategy

Social Objects

Social Objects are the things that users work/play with on any given site, e.g.:

• Flickr -> photos
• Upcoming -> events
• Last.fm -> music
• YouTube -> videos

On YouTube, greater than 50% of the page real-estate is taken up by these social objects.

To find out what your objects are and the activities users carry out on them, it’s often necessary to conduct structured research. When you’ve discovered your objects (nouns), you need to find your verbs (actions). Social features are verbs that involve more than one person.

To be continued…