Over six million subscribers spend over 22 hours per week playing World of Warcraft (WOW). I've been reading Nick Yee's research at Stanford on WOW game design elements that help explain its success. There are some interesting lessons from MMPOG games on how to architect community sites for the web:
1) Quick Payoffs - traditionally, MMPOG games drawing on the Dungeons and Dragons genre made players jump through numerous hoops before they conquered a level or upgraded their character. In contrast, WOW gives neophytes quick payoffs on their gameplay - within the first twelve hours. This progress hooks players, encouraging "amateurs" to keep playing.
2) Social Interdependence - fundamentally, MMPOG designers realize they are building a community, not just a game. The social relationships between players keep them in this virtual world. To encourage these ties, designers ensure that no single player can overcome a quest on their own. Individuals have to work together to succeed - they have no choice. Self-organizing into permanent guilds becomes inevitable - and adds to the peer pressure on players to play regularly.
3) Player Reputations - powerful artifacts help players overcome dangerous dungeons. Even more importantly, visible artifacts carried by avatars provide bragging rights that encourage their acquisition further.
Payoffs, inter-dependence, and reputations - these elements contribute to the formation of any community. On successful community sites with a loyal following - flickr, yelp, or even youtube - the reputational element seems most important in drawing in new users. The quicker your contributions get showcased and people start commenting on them, the more motivated you are to keep participating. The payoff on these sites is inextricably tied to your reputation, and the sooner you get one, the likelier you are to continue participating. Social interdependence grows over time as relationships develop with other users - and serves as a great retention tool when you care what others on the site think about you.
Keeping these design elements in mind explicitly should help in creating more addictive sites to draw in and retain users.
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( 2.9 / 373 )Bob Carson has an interesting post on social media. The basic assertion (simplified) is that the average person is overwhelmed with social media, technology, and life in general. As such, it is hard to expect them to invest in social media.
While I agree with Bob's preamble, I disagree with his conclusion. Caterina Fake puts it nicely in this post: for user-generated content sites, a dedicated cadre of volunteers fuel the content that the rest of us voyeuristic, lazy, mass market thirty-somethings enjoy. Caterina says 1-10% of users upload content, but I've heard it's on the lower end of this range. Everyone else just consumes. Social networking sites such as facebook and myspace on the other hand require mass participation for any value - a much higher hurdle to achieve and require from your users.
Bob is right in pointing out that applications that address specific consumer issues are still hard to find. The "let's get all my friends online so we can interact in a new way" portion of the bubble is behind us. Going forward, razor-sharp applications that use social media as a tool to resolve consumer (or business) issues will be much more compelling. And I would argue that many (if not most) of these tools will be of the 2% participation variety - a small group of people will generate the content that makes life much easier or better for the rest of us, just like flickr.
So in my opinion, a more accurate restatement of Bob's argument would be that services requiring mass participation will be much harder to build than targeted applications that generate content from 1-10% of their users for everyone else.
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( 3 / 404 )Gophernow has recently been getting publicity on various blogs. The current wave started with an article in Lifehacker. Other bloggers then took up writing about the site as well, from Mike Yamamoto at CNET to The Gothamist and others.
The attention has been great - our traffic has obviously skyrocketed - but it also caught us a bit by surprise. In addition to inevitable scalability bugs (which have since been sorted out), we have several enhancements to the available restaurants as well as to the site itself that we plan on releasing in the coming weeks. So please be sure to check back in periodically as we continue to improve the service.
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( 3 / 417 )Web 2.0 sites are starting to bleed together in their visual look/feel - rounded corners and multiple pastel/bright colors juxtaposed against lots of white. In searching for inspiration for our projects, we came across effective sites that still use basic colors or the absence of colors to create memorable user experiences - even in the 2.0 age. Here are some of them:
1) Apple - rounded edges, but primarily gray, silver, and blacks
2) Gilmourish - another gray, black, and white combination
3) Bill Emory - just black and white
4) Texas Church Project - gray and white
5) Green - Flash site celebrating green
6) BSOD - very basic blue and white
7) Blue Screen - more sophisticated darker blue treatment
8) Zico - another really refreshing treatment of ocean blue
9) Out of the Blue - a blue Flash treatment
10) Louisiana Red - a gritty dark, tomato red
11) Pink World - stay away if you don't want to be overwhelmed by pink
While our design voice is still (very) undeveloped on our sites, we are trying to find inspiraitons that aren't pure derivatives of the current design craze. We've tried to make Gophernow gritty, deliberately using Ajax to smooth the user experience but not to polish the site and make it "slick." Trippert is still really rough, but the new design we're working on has a distint look/feel - not just another flickr clone - but slick in its own way.
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( 3.1 / 414 )
One of the craziest things I've seen in a while (and I have to say pretty disturbing also). A guy in Stockholm selling advertising space on his body for $1000 per square centimeter - everything but his face and hands. You know capitalism has become rampant when one of the more visible expressions of counter-culture becomes an advertising medium.
Next thing you know people will be making tattoos scannable with cell phones so that people can access real-time comparison shopping information. Or maybe nano RFID-chips embedded in tattos?
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