Notes from Joshua Porter's Webstock workshop on Social Design: from Strategy to Interface

Joshua Porter is the founder of Bokardo Design, an interface design and strategy shop focusing exclusively on social web applications. He recently wrote the book Designing for the Social Web. I was lucky enough to attend Josh's recent workshop at Webstock 'Social Design: From Strategy to Interface'. Here are my notes (all images grabbed from Josh's slides):

Strategy

Most businesses have strategy:

• Corporate Strategy: concerned with the overall purpose and scope of the business to meet stakeholder expectations
• Business unit strategy: concerned with how a business competes successfully within a speci!c market
• Operational strategy: concerned with how each part of the business is organized to deliver value to the rest of the company

In a nutshell: how to gain competitive advantage and make money easier/faster than others.

So, instead of this (where customers must first sign up before creating their own page):



Aim for this:

Characteristics of design strategy

• Long-term thinking: create value for people over time, and they’ll give you their business
• User experience first: the user’s experience is the most important thing of all, it drives all other decision making
• Optimize for use: instead of planning how to make money, plan for how to increase regular, positive use of design

In a nutshell: how to gain competitive advantage by making software/products that people love to use.

Signs that you have a strategy:

• The strategy doesn’t change much (target doesn’t move)
• You have a long-term plan for success.
• You know what not to do.
• You know what to focus on.
• You know why your design is different from your competitors.
• You know what success looks like.
• The strategy is the litmus test for everything you do; every activity supports the strategy.

Problems with strategies:

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

Classic Question: Who are your users?

Better Question: What are your users doing?

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

Examples:
1. Amazon
Primary Activity: Finding Good Products
Social design strategy: “through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge of the customer to accelerate their discovery process.”

2. Google
Primary Activity: Search
Social design strategy: By analyzing linking and behavioural patterns of web users, Google provides relevant search results (and relevant advertisements to display alongside)

3. Patients Like Me
Primary Activity: Treating disease
Social design strategy: By designing an application for people to catalog, monitor, & share their treatments and symptoms with each other, PatientsLikeMe can make living with and treating a disease easier.

4. Netflix
Primary Activity: Finding great movies
Social design strategy: By designing an application for people to record their movie watching preferences and aggregate them with others, Netflix provides a better way for people to find great movies.

5. Facebook
Primary Activity: Staying up to date/keeping in touch
Social design strategy: By designing an application where people can connect, record their activity, while seeing each other’s activity, Facebook provides an easy way for friends to stay up to date with one another

Define your social strategy - use The Commander's Intent (from Made to Stick: why some ideas survive and others die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

“if we do nothing else, we must...”
“the single, most important thing we must do is...”

and, importantly,

“no plan survives contact with the enemy”

Defining primary activity & describing social design strategy:

• What is the one thing that people need to do to make you successful?
• How are you leveraging the social interaction of your users?
• Do people have to change their behaviour much?

The AOF Method
Activities, Objects & Features

• What is your primary activity?
• What are the objects people use in that activity?
• What do people do with the objects? (what are the verbs?)

A social object influences social interaction - it changes the way people behave. Mediates ties between people eg iPhone, flickr for photos, youTube for video – commenting, favouriting etc

The term “social networking” makes little sense if we
leave out the objects that mediate the ties between
people. Think about the object as the reason why people
affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone.

Jyri Engeströ

Research methods

• Interviews: good to find out motivations and a general overview of what people do
• Usability testing: good for testing existing interfaces with real people
• Contextual Inquiry: good for diving deep into the details of activity, much of what you learn is unspoken
• Boards, feedback, etc: good for finding the current temperature of things, how your software is being used and liked/disliked
• Self observation: good for design in that you know a lot about what the issues are, but can be myopic at times

Find your verbs!


Social websites = Objects + Verbs
Social features = When the verbs involve more than one person eg share, invite, add etc

For example, on Amazon's Product page there are up to 16 social features:
Product ratings, Share Your own product images, Add to wish/registry lists, tell a friend, People who viewed this...buy this, Amazon sales rank (social proof), Submit a product manual, Customers who bought this also bought..., Help others find this item, Tag this item, Rate this item, Customer reviews, Customer discussions, Offsite reviews, Listmania, So you'd like to...

Questions to consider when designing your main application screen:

• What activities, objects, and verbs are you dealing with?
• What verbs make obvious features?
• What are you *not* going to support?
• Are there features that you think might be better added later?

Metrics
Optimising your strategy by measuring progress & success

90/9/1 Rule - study by Yahoo found approx 90% of users lurk, 9% participate, 1% are leaders (create groups, invite users etc)

The relevancy of advertising = Holy Grail eg Facebook connect – can use FB login for different sites allowing more targeted advertising

Do not make the assumption that people will use your site every day. What is the reasonable return time to site? How many per month?

Do your own metrics – cross-site comparisons can be unreasonable/unhelpful as the niche is different. Create your own baseline and work from there.

Unless we monitor how we are doing, we don’t know how we are doing – makes design decisions difficult – need to design so can get metrics



Metrics for Pirates (Dave McClure) - the AARRR model

Acquisition
How do you get people using your web application?
1. In-linking
2. SEO/SEM
3. Affiliate marketing (referral programs)
4. Mentions on blogs, in news articles
5. Social media/networks
6. Invites from passionate users (referral)
7. Emails to existing customers

Follow user behaviour – how many mentions in blogs/twitter etc, where do users come from?

Activation
What do people do the first time they use your app?
1. Sign-up/Register
2. Click on something!
3. Add/Invite friends
4. Respond to existing member
5. Watch tutorials/getting started content
6. Hopefully create something of value eg http://www.geni.com – signup process initiates family tree creation

Good example = freshbooks.com – signup is called ‘One Time Setup’, phone number visible on page

The drop off in users who register & never come back = HUGE

Retention
How do users come back?
1. Automated emails
2. RSS/news feeds
3. Bookmarklets/bookmarks
4. Desktop app/3rd party app integration

Cohort analysis = good tool ie how many users who sign up return after one month, two months etc

Referral
How do users refer others?

1. Email invite
2. Shared via Delicious/Digg/stumbleupon
3. Widget/embeds
4. Word of mouth

The viral loop - the loop of activity that happens between the time when a person becomes a new user and they invite others to join.
Methods:
· Word of mouth
· Embed a widget
· Mimic an action eg friends see new application added by a contact on facebook & try
· Forced Sign-up eg can’t see my pictures on myspace unless you register
· Direct invite

The final R is for Revenue, which we didn't cover.

Facebook white paper

Facebook have jsut released a white paper (not publicly available yet AFAIK - if you know where it is, please link in the comments) on the engagement of new users. They wanted to track all users who created an account on the same day. Highlighted that certain design elements increase behaviour & interaction.

How do people learn about new software? They came up with 4 hypotheses:

1. Social learning – observe what someone does & copy the behaviour
2. When people are singled out by their friends – eg when photos are uploaded – would people be more likely to upload their own photos if they had already been tagged?
3. Feedback – if feedback is given does it drive more usage?
4. Distribution – if a picture has wide distribution does it drive more usage?

Study found social learning had a positive effect on the early (those who uploaded photos within the first 2 days) & non-early uploaders

Singling out worked for the non-early uploaders

Feedback was a significant factor for early uploaders

Distribution was a significant factor for early uploaders


The Conversion Funnel

Conversion Funnel is general rate of user movement through a known sequence. These are hypothetical numbers but roughly true! For a free service, only approx 8% of users will become regular users.

Use this when there are discrete steps (eg registration form, landing page conversions, trials, sharing) in a known sequence, preferably within one session.

Tips for Improving the Funnel:

1. Create an engaging experience first!
2. Create a baseline from which to measure
3. Remove any unnecessary levels (screens)
4. Start at the top of the funnel
5. Go down the funnel level by level

Develop a one-page business model - pick a user type. What is that user's Activation, Retention and Revenue?



The problem with metrics is that you get what you optimize for.

Questions to consider when defining metrics & their priorities:

· What activities make you money (keep you in business)?
· Does one metric rest on another, more important one?
· What sources will be valuable for acquiring users?
· Are there different types of users? (lurkers, contributors, passionates?)

Reputation

Your reputation is equal to the sum of your past actions within (a) community.
- Bryce Glass, interaction design lead for Yahoo Reputation Platform

The profile must fit the domain ie different profiles between Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. Don’t ask for information irrelevant to your community

Have multiple indicators eg friends, reviews, fans, number of people who find reviews useful etc e.g yelp.com

Optimise for value-added behaviour – just sending an invite is NOT adding value to the system. Can promote competition initially but remove it when it gets too much.

Allow for reciprocity eg comment on user reviews at Amazon, x of x people found this review helpful.

Create a community-specific identity e.g. Amazon’s ‘Real Name’ for reviews carries more authority. On ebay – reputation is independent of identity & based on data mining (history of activity)

What can’t you do? i.e. on Amazon you can’t rate as profile from the user profile page , only when in context of the product page. Try & stop the ability to game the system.

Reputation is an evolutionary process. Your site will be somewhere on the competitive spectrum – how competitive will your users be, or is it just helping each other out?

Competitive Spectrum= Caring -> Collaboration -> Cordial ->Competitive -> Combative

Problems with reputation

Social problems don’t have technical solutions (trolling)
Cumulative reputation can annoy
‘Competitive’ cumulative reputation can be good in the beginning stages of a community, though after some time it will be impossible for newbies to reach the heights of original members => dissatisfaction. Often best to just stop e.g. Digg’s removal of Top Diggers, or recalculate e.g. Amazon vs Harriet Klausner

Questions to consider

- What makes for reputation within your community?
- How valuable is knowing the history of someone?
- Are there different levels of reputation?
- How do you accrue reputation?

Finally, an excellent resource for all kinds of design patterns & code is the Yahoo Design Pattern Library It's well worth a look!