I have a pretty amusing job. My job is to figure out what’s fun?. How cool is that? How many people in this world can say that their job is to understand why something is fun and help make it even more fun?
Having been in social gaming for 2 years – that makes me a vet. It’s been a fast, furious but thrilling ride that cost me some gold coins, but ultimately extremely valuable, so I’m not sweating it.
Still, after a few years of boom, social gaming is still going strong. Some naysayers thought it was just a fad but as social gaming continues to close the gap as an accepted form of mini-entertainment, it will only continue to grow.
Those who work in social gaming come from many backgrounds. Some come from gaming and others come from the internet / eCommerce world. So what you get in social gaming companies are these interesting amalgamations of highly creative game designers and data-driven, analytical product managers and marketers who applies internet-savvy philosophies into gaming. I come from the latter (but I wish I was the former).
Having lived and breathed social gaming for the past couple of years, I’m starting to notice something when I sign up for a new service or shop on the web. Those experiences are…. Kind of deflating. It’s almost like I want all of my experiences to be fun and games. And it got me thinking: why not?!
Web professionals have provided a ton of value to social gaming. And now, it’s time for social gaming to provide value back to web. Here are a few lessons that web can learn from social gaming:
1) Create a fun experience.
Of course, the idea of engagement is not new to web. As analytical web professionals, we ask ourselves – are people engaged? And what do we do? We go into Omniture and look at the drop off rates in the funnel. We see points where people are dropping off, so we look at that drop off point and try to do some A/B testing to get higher conversion.
Of course that’s important. But when people come to your site, it’s usually because they are trying to get something out of it. Engagement, is enjoyment, which is… fun. When we think of “fun” we usually think of carnival rides or going to a night club – but really, what’s “fun” is different for everyone. Some people find creativity as fun, where as others find challenge or competition or interaction with others as fun.
When thinking engagement, take one step back and ask yourself – what’s fun about your site? How can you create new products, features and experiences that would hone in on that fun and make it even more fun? When people find something fun, they’ll want to do it again. If you make your product fun, and they’ll come back.
2) Incentivize Daily Engagement
For those not familiar with social games, I’ll explain this a little. Pretty much every social game out there has a daily engagement incentive. If you log into the game and click on a link or play a game, or whatever, the game will reward you just for logging in. For every consecutive day you log in, you get a higher reward. Usually it goes on for 5 days, and then it resets. Even if people don’t have time to play every day, they may log in just to collect their rewards and not lose their place in line for the best reward.
Although timed-mechanics probably drive engagement more, this idea of a daily reward is still quite brilliant. Why? Because people have daily regimens. They’ll log into their favorite news site, then check Facebook , log into their favorite Facebook games to collect. Check their email. Go to their favorite sports team’s sites. Etc etc.
You might be thinking – yeah, but my site isn’t one of those every day kind of places. Or isn’t it costly to incentivize daily?
Incentivization doesn’t have to be in the form of monetary value. In social gaming, they incentivize digital money or goods. They’re just 0s and 1s.
But you’re thinking: In the world of the game, it is of value.
Okay. But that’s the lesson: You create your own value. That’s all digital money is – made-up money. Customers don’t see value in terms of just cold-hard cash. Value is what’s important to your customer. How can you provide customers value that can be rewarded to them daily? If you really think about it, there’s a way. And get your foot in the door of your customer’s daily regimen… how’s that for top of mind?
3) SHOW and TELL why it’s fun
Web services are not that different from social gaming – usually your prospect knows very little information about it before you start using it. It’s free, right? Low cost of entry, so why not! Maybe your friend recommended it. Or you saw an ad, or your cousins’s wife’s sister posted about it on Facebook. So you end up on this site and you read their 3 points they usually have about the site. And it’s usually something like:
Create the best thing ever with our widget-thingy
Get personalized information from widget-thingy
Share it with your friends!
So you go, “wow, that sounds pretty cool, let’s do it!” So you sign up for an account. You put in your name and your email address and your password. Maybe they tell you to invite your friends or upload a photo, and then you hit “create account” – and voila! You have an account to widget-thingy.com.
So now what?
Web services, why do you just leave me there? How rude! You were so welcoming to invite me in to create an account, and now that I have, you don’t even bother showing me around?
Maybe it’s because the audience progression was a little screwy when it comes to social gaming. Usually in web, you have your early adopters, and then friends of those early adopters adopt, and then those friends adopt. So you tend to have tech-savvy people first then, to slightly less tech-savvy people, and so on. But this is not what happened with social gaming. You went from social game makers to 40 year old women, pretty much overnight. So social games had to make their games easy to learn and put in tutorials to teach players how to play the game.
Tutorials in social games tell the player 3 things:
1) How to play the basics of the game
2) The goal of the game
3) How the basics of the game applies to the goal of the game
So, wouldn’t it be great if widget-thingy.com showed you exactly what to do in order to create the best thing ever with widget-thingy? Instead of leaving you hanging on some profile page where you have no idea what any of it applies to anything? Wouldn’t that make things more fun (and therefore engaging)? (Cases-in-point coming soon!)
4) Make virality fun, valuable and amusing This is a sore subject. Social gaming gets a bad rap almost entirely because of their aggressive virality tactics – excessive prompts to post on wall and mechanics that “force” players to invite friends to the game to progress. I’m not saying do this, by any means. But there are some good lessons to be learned.
Positive virality lesson #1: Mutual incentives for both you and your friend. This isn’t completely new, online sweepstakes often do this – Tell a friend and you get one more entry. But what if your friend also gets an extra entry? You’ve just provided your friend extra value and given yourself extra value.
For those not knee-deep in social gaming, Facebook has since disallowed game-makers from taking advantage of this in an attempt to curb spammage (incentivization of sharing to the sharer is not allowed.) So they can share and their friends will get a reward, but they won’t get a reward. And here’s where perceived value comes in again. There is a thought-process when people share things with others. It’s not generally socially acceptable to bug the hell out of your friends. So if it’s not beneficial to their friends, they may not do it.
Most social gamers see through these tactics. They hate it, but somehow put up with it. There is one virality mechanic that social gamers are generally positive about – and that’s the gifting mechanic. And that’s because they are helping their friends – providing value. They like to send them, they like to receive. It’s a win-win! And that’s how you want your customer to feel after sharing something about your product.
Positive virality lesson #2:Make the message something people actually want to share
Most 2.0 services have an “invite friends to join” feature built into their new user flow. It makes sense, but at that stage, you know very little about the site. So, why would people want to spam their friends about a site they’re not even sure if it’s good?
Put yourself in their shoes – literally. Well, literally in a figurative way. I mean, think about the person that’s sitting there and why they may want to share with their friend. Then, create a message that people will actually want to send. Something amusing that they would actually want to share.
Who are these people? What’s their personality like? What makes them laugh? What are their friends like? What’s their relationship like?
People may not be ready to recommend your product to a friend at that point. But if you create something worth sharing that’s relatable to them as people or it’s just simply amusing then maybe they’ll share it.. “just because”.
5) Integrate Monetization into engagement / your product Another touchy subject, social gaming has a very particular monetization strategy that can be hard to swallow. But one thing’s for sure: people are willing to open their wallets in the name of a little bit of fun, engagement, and for their passion. People buy virtual currency or goods because it enhances their engagement, or prolongs their engagement… and it doesn’t cost much just to give them a little bit of happiness in their day. (But those little bits have translated into a large chunk of change in the social gaming industry.)
Many startups fail when their monetization strategies are an after-thought. They’re added on because it hits them: “Oh shit, we gotta start making some money.” So they put up some ads that are off to the side, and wait for the money to roll in… but it doesn’t.
What’s powerful about social game’s monetization strategy is that it’s part of the product. Not something off to the side you’re paying no attention to. Players are fully engaged with the lure of spending. Whether this is right or wrong is another discussion for another time, another place. But there’s no denying that it’s a money-maker.
Thanks, Sheryl for another amazing talk. And thanks most of all for talking about it.
What’s especially inspirational about her talks is her blatant honesty with her own struggles, making her incredibly relatable.
I feel a lot of women don’t like to say they are a feminist because there are certain characteristics people tend to associate with feminism. Even if you were to remove your typical feminist stereotypes of being a man-hater etc, when I think of a feminist, I think of someone who has this natural gutsiness to take on the world. They have no fear and will fight and sit at the table with no pangs of insecurity – ever. This just isn’t true, even for men.
Her recognition that it exists makes her message to women far more reachable since we can look at her and think, “If a successful woman like her have insecurities too, then maybe, just maybe…”
For someone to have self-doubt and “feel like a fraud” – and actually admit to it when all you’re trying to do is to keep up appearances is extremely brave. And it’s all to help other women not be afraid to rise to the top.
I encourage women and men to watch her talk. But if you don’t want to watch the entire hour, here are her 5 pieces of advice for women in their careers.
Quilted Northern, it’s not “time to get real about what happens in the bathroom.” One should never “get real” about going to the bathroom. In fact, I don’t even know what that means.
If you haven’t seen the Quilted Northern commercials with women talking about “what they really want from their toilet paper.” You can watch this golden nugget here:
I could just imagine what happened here. Quilted Northern did some focus groups and asked women what they wanted in a toilet paper. They wanted to get behind the reason they liked the thickness of Quilted Northern brand toilet paper as compared to other brands. What they found out was astonishing. (To the brand marketers at Georgia-Pacific). Women like QN’s TP because it kept them clean… you know… preventing breakthroughs.
It’s not the insight that’s bad. Because the insight is good. Because yes, honestly, that is a spectacular reason for wanting a more thicker, cushiony toilet paper product. So they thought: let’s show women how much we know them and listened to them!
But creating a serious conversation about toilet paper is … frankly, disgusting and ridiculous.
Do you really think women will watch this commercial and think… “Oh yeah… I totally relate to these women. Because I hate it when my toilet paper breaks when I wipe. This is a serious situation. This is something that must be addressed. I have favorable feelings towards Quilted Northern because they understand my problems.”
Like I said. It’s not the insight that’s bad, it’s the execution of that insight. There is no escaping the fact that this is a funny subject. There is no denying that. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 9 year old, a 67 year old man, or a married 34 year old woman with 2.5 kids – it is funny. So why not use light-heartedness or humor to get it across? Do married women with 2.5 kids not laugh? Can they only talk serious about toilet paper?
What the brand marketers at Georgia-Pacific probably didn’t remember about those focus groups was how much the women probably laughed through the conversation. I can’t imagine a scenario in which the women sat there and talked about toilet paper breakthrough with a straight face.
Powerful insights come from key product differentiating findings, but it also comes from a general understanding of your consumer and the context of your product. Without all parts, your output can end up being quite irregular.
I’ve been using Hulu Plus for Roku for a month and a half, and it is one of the most frustrating user interface I have ever seen. The biggest problem? I can’t really see anything.
Here’s what it looks like from my couch.
You think this is a dramatization of the situation. But it’s not. Because sometimes, I sit down to watch TV without my eyeglasses. (I know, bad habit, but that’s my behavior). So this is exactly what I see. So, I have to get up off the couch and find my glasses.
Alright now. Let’s go a little closer so you can see what’s going on here.
Better? …
Hulu Plus did not put themselves in the shoes of their users with this one. Here are a few key areas clearly forgotten with this user experience:
Design for the platform’s context. Hulu forgot that a person watching TV is sitting anywhere from 5 feet to 10 feet away from the TV. And yes, I know I live in the dinosaur age with my analog TV, but digital TVs are not going to make magic out of small white lettering on a black background.
Relevance First, Discovery Second. When I log in to Hulu Plus, I want to see what’s new in my queue/subscriptions. I bookmarked them for a reason – because I’d like to see new episodes of the show. It takes me 3 clicks before getting to my queue. The 3 clicks itself wouldn’t be so horrible, if the queue/subscribe experience wasn’t also completely frustrating. Which takes us to..
Assume your user knows nothing. I was not an experienced Hulu user when I subscribed to Hulu Plus. It’s been a month and a half, and I still haven’t figured out the difference between a queue and a subscription.For both queue and subscriptions, I have to click into each show, then use the sub-menu to go to an episode, then, I have to remember which episode I have watched, and click on the correct episode.
Imagine when I have more than 11 shows in my queue...
Hulu, here’s something you can assume: If I’ve watched it, I don’t want to watch it again.
Also, the menu item - “Recently Added”. The first few times I logged in, I assumed these were the shows *I* recently added. Don’t forget that customers are narcissists. They don’t care that you slaved to get “21 Jumpstreet” added to the Hulu content library. In fact, the assumption should be, (if your marketers did their job right), that the whole entire world’s library of tv shows are available on Hulu Plus.
Of course this is impossible, and so yes, perhaps customers do want to know if new shows have been added, but maybe “New to Hulu” ? …It’s even shorter.
What’s most shocking is that this is the experience for a monetizer. I am close to canceling my subscription, and it’s all because of this poor user experience. It’s almost unusable. The whole idea of Hulu Plus is that it makes watching TV easier. So then, why is it so hard to get to the shows I want to watch?
Starbucks is the chain you love to hate. Their coffee sucks. I hate how there’s one across the street from each other. And it’s so expensive! So then, why do I go there all the time? (Maybe because there’s one everywhere…)
Anyhow… I’d like to begrudgingly tip my hat to them for a piece of CI genius: Starbucks Petites
I bought one of these bad boys today: the chocolate cupcake with peanut butter frosting.
And you know what, I NEVER buy pastries from Starbucks. For one thing, the pastries are giant. I am already getting this 200 calorie drink, do I really also need a 350 calorie coffee cake?
It’s not like I don’t want one. When I go to Starbucks, I look at the pastries longingly. It’s like going window shoe shopping at Nieman Marcus or something. It’s like forbidden eye-candy. Buying one is so outside the realm of possibility that you block it out of your mind. It’s almost like they are not even for sale.
This is where Starbucks really understands their consumer. Because ladies, how many times have we thought “If I could just have one bite of that…” Just one bite.
Just one bite of a cupcake. Just one bite of a whoopie pie. Just one bite of a caramel turtle square. Just one bite of a lemon bar. Just one bite.
So you start to think. Well, it’s only $1.50. And it’s under 200 calories. Can I spare it? Yes I can!
And then a whole world has opened up. And so has my LTV as a Starbucks customer.
