Social products are an interesting bird. For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what’s important, things may not be so clear.
The only magic I’ve found in designing compelling social products that have the best shot at breaking through the noise and capturing people’s time and money is in being extremely clear on how your social product meets a few key design principles.
1. Design your product to matter in a world of infinite supply. In 2010, people are inundated with an overwhelming number of people, applications, requests, alerts, relationships, and demands on their time. You love your product. The benefits of it are totally obvious to you. However, if you and every member of your team can’t crisply articulate what emotional benefit someone will get from spending 15 minutes on your social product that they can’t get on Facebook, LinkedIN, or Twitter, you’ve got work to do.
This isn’t touchy feely stuff. Neither I nor the prospective people who may use your social product care about your features, your game mechanics, or how amazing your application will be when there are millions of people on it. I’m selfish with my time and you’ve got seconds to hook me in with something new. And I’m not alone.
To successfully use the fleeting moments you have, you need to orchestrate everything under your control to work together seamlessly under a single brand with a single reason for existence. Make it emotional. If your team can’t tie back every decision they are making to the emotion you want people to feel when they are using your social product, then your reason for existence isn’t strong enough to serve its role, which is to guide your team and the product decisions you are making.
2. Be the best in the world at one thing. To put an even finer point on the focus required of any social upstart, you need to be best in the world at one thing. For Lululemon, they’ve built a $450 million annual revenue business by focusing on the black yoga pant. For Twitter, it’s the 140 character message. For Facebook, it is connecting you to the people you already know. Everything these companies do ties back to a specific thing they are going to be best in the world at doing.
It’s not always obvious upfront what should be your best in the world focus and enshrining the wrong thing can be a problem. However, it is much worse to build a social product without guiding principles. When you are focused on the one thing your social product is going to do better than everyone else, all you need to launch is your one thing and no more.
Ask yourself and every member of your team what you are best in the world at every week. Even better, define it, agree on it, print it out, blow it up, and put it on the wall. This should be the filter by which everyone is making product decisions.
3. Seek out uniqueness. Today’s social platforms and applications are fantastic at meeting people’s need to belong. But equally important – especially in a world of infinite supply – is what makes us feel different and special. People want scarcity. People want exclusivity. This doesn’t mean your social product should be limited to a niche. Frontierville was built for mass appeal – so that I could play with ALL of my friends – but it still finds ways to bring uniqueness into its social experience via neighbors, customization of your plot, and collections.
When people talk about exclusivity and scarcity these days, discussions of game mechanics are never far behind. I love game mechanics as much as the next person. However, if you are implementing game mechanics in the exact same way as everyone else, you’ve got a problem. It goes back to the issue of infinite supply. If there is an infinite supply of points, badges, and levels because they exist on every single social product out there, the minute you use them without being thoughtful, you are losing your shot at exclusivity and scarcity. A better approach is to figure out what makes people feel unique and special on your service independent of any specific game tactic. Then, selectively cherry pick the features that reinforce your emotional reason for existence for people. For uniqueness to work, you have to lead, not follow.
4. Focus on your most important interaction until you have it right. Once you have the critical features defined, there is typically one interaction that is clearly the most important to get right. It’s the interaction that if you get right means someone comes back and, if you don’t get it right, you can’t realize your full potential. Take this interaction and be maniacal about it. For Twitter, this is the Twitter stream. For Polyvore, this is the set page. For Facebook, this is the news feed. For YouTube, it’s the video page. For Dailybooth, it’s the live feed page. It’s the interaction where your magic happens, so give it the care and feeding needed to make it a star.
5. Choose your words carefully. The earlier you are as a social product, the more your word choice should be different and distinct from everything else out there. Early on is the time to have something important and different to say. In fact, all the great brands of the past 30 years have started out appealing to the passionate and rebellious first. Virgin? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Apple? The 1984 commercial. Nike? The subculture of intense runners sporting moustaches. Facebook? A few still remember the original Scarface logo.
There are things to copy from other services and there are things to make uniquely your own in social products. Layouts? Do your best but pay attention to what is already working. Colors? Hard to be original here, but blue is pretty played out. Icons? A toss up. Terminology? Own it. Your word choice is the primary place for you to have a point-of-view and present not only what you want your brand to emotionally mean to the people using it but the kinds of relationships you want people to have as a result of using your social product.
6. Create a party, not a museum. Great social products are clean, simple, and fast. The successful ones have little design flare, so that the people, photos, videos, text, and comments are front and center. The more design you add from colors to treatments, non-web-fonts, and graphics, the less your social application will feel like a party and the more it will feel like a museum. Or a magazine. Neither are a great goal. You want your social product to feel like it is a living and breathing party, not expensive furniture you’re not supposed to sit on.
7. Develop relationships, not features. Today, we have multiple personalities and different types of relationships with people in the real and virtual worlds. If you are going to design a new social product, it’s not enough to just offer a feature, like photos, videos, or events. You need to look at how the relationships on your social product will be important and different from the relationships you and others have already on Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter.
Most people will say that Facebook Connect handle the whole “people” thing for any new social product. I would argue that Facebook Connect is a start but if you can’t quickly show someone a new relationship dynamic or similar people in your social product in a way that is unique to your application, the value of people interacting in your new product will accrue back to Facebook and not you.
For example, I’ve found that on most new social applications I join I have the same 10 Facebook friends – typically my most prolific friends on Facebook already – on this new service too. In most cases, because these new social applications are just an extension of the things I’m already following them do on Facebook, such as sharing photos, events, lists, and videos, I don’t have a reason to come back to this new application a second time.
For a new social product, you need to think about how your social product expands, deepens, and changes the relationships people have today online and in the real world. This isn’t easy to achieve. The best example of a social product doing this well is Quora. Originally seeded with Facebook’s social graph, it has quickly differentiated itself by showing you people you may care about because of their thoughtful commentary, experience, and expertise displayed on topics that are important to you.
It takes alot for people to care about new people in the context of a new social product. Spending your time and energy on what constitutes similarity or what new relationships you want people to have as a result of your application is time worth spent.
As I think about what’s going to be created, discovered, invented, and re-imagined with social software in the next six months let alone the next five years, I can’t help but be excited. These principles shine a light on the first few feet in front of us, but, with every new social product success there will be new ones. As Alan Kay timelessly put it, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next.
Gina Bianchini is the founder of Ning, the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create their own social experiences with over 80 million unique users each month.
I’ve had a checkered relationship with OpenTable. Initially, I loved it as a user, then was let down as the service evolved. For instance I found the eat-at-100-restaurants-and-get-a-measly-$20-check rewards system slightly better than a punch in the face and was annoyed that restaurants still required me to call to verify a reservation. If I had time to make a phone call, I wouldn’t have used OpenTable. Duh.
I’ve vocally accused the site of tailoring its service too much to the restaurants’ needs– who after all pay the bills– and ignoring a better customer experience. (Once a customer service rep for OpenTable actually told me they only cared if the restaurants were happy.) Then, the company addressed a lot of my issues, for instance offering easy ways to get larger numbers of dining points, and the CEO Jeff Jordan and I sat down and hashed it out in a video interview and I came away more impressed with him and the company’s management generally.
Lately, a diner like me isn’t the one doing the bitching–it’s restaurants. Something strange has been happening in San Francisco, which is OpenTable’s home market and oldest market. I dismissed it all for a while as purely anecdotal: The half-dozen or so new hot restaurants in my neighborhood that didn’t use OpenTable, the scattered emails from restauranteurs asking my opinion on whether the service was worth the money, based on how vocal I’d been about it in the past. Then yesterday we got this in the TechCrunch Tip jar: A reasonably-articulated, scathing rebuke of why a local restauranteur named Mark Pastore doesn’t use OpenTable, and how he thinks the service’s success has robbed restaurants of their most valuable asset, the relationship with diners, and charged way too much for the privilege. Even if he’s a lone squeaky wheel, it’s worth a read if you’re a regular OpenTable diner, investor or would-be competitor.
At the core of his argument is the belief that OpenTable’s $1.5 billion market capitalization isn’t a result of creating that much value for the market as a whole; it’s largely taken it from thousands of mom and pop restaurants. Pastore did a survey of his friends who were also restaurant owners and only one said that he felt OpenTable actually increased the value of his business. Tellingly, most of the others use it and don’t plan on quitting– but not because they love the service, because they are terrified of disrupting how diners are accustomed to making reservations. It turns out OpenTable is an astoundingly sticky business. It’s billed as a modern pay-only-as-long-as-you-love-it cloud subscription business, but Pastore’s description sounds like what most on-premise enterprise software customers would say. (Paging Ben Horowitz…) This puts a whole new spin on why OpenTable was growing as restaurants over all were losing money.
The most devastating blow is Pastore’s economic break down of what OpenTable costs restaurants:
“The access fees can be substantial, particularly for restaurants operating on thin margins. One independent study estimates that OpenTable’s fees (comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees) translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each “incremental” 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).”
Most restaurants suck up the cost to have the competitive edge of easy bookings. But with so many restaurants all using the same system– is it really much of a competitive edge or is it just table stakes? Pastore cites one 3.5 star restaurant in San Francisco where the owner has spent years paying OpenTable substantially more than he pays himself for 80-plus hour workweeks. When the economics are that lopsided, one would have to start wondering exactly how many diners wouldn’t book directly on a restaurant’s site if that were the only option.
Here’s the stunning thing this post made me realize for the first time: Unlike most large Web companies that built their businesses on cutting costs out of an industry and eliminating middlemen, OpenTable has managed to do the exact opposite. It has created a new middleman. So is there room for this new middleman to be disrupted?
It’s not going to be easy, as Pastore’s own survey shows. Restaurants are terrified of getting rid of OpenTable and sending diners to another restaurant that still uses the site. And this is a hard, pounding-the-pavement business to build. It took OpenTable a decade to get to any kind of critical mass and it still provides software for less than 15,000 restaurants network-wide.
But there are ways to disrupt some of what has made OpenTable powerful. As Pastore argues and I’ve seen increasingly in San Francisco, a lot of new restaurants try their own online booking systems first. They mimic the convenience that OpenTable proved customers want, while keeping control of the relationship with the diner. It’s similar to what you saw in the travel industry: Early online travel agents proved people wanted convenience to book online and airline and hotel companies didn’t want the headache of building a site. But increasingly, they’ve all been trying to send customers to their own sites, either directly or through an aggregator like Kayak.
There’s also clearly a role that Yelp, FourSquare and Groupon could play as spoilers. As a diner, I usually go to OpenTable to browse what restaurants in a given neighborhood have availability. It’s less for the transaction of making a reservation itself. There’s definitely some overlap when it comes to on-the-spot browsing with Yelp’s mobile app, and there’s no reason FourSquare couldn’t use geotagging to push a list of restaurants with availability to you. (Yelp’s past partnership with OpenTable doesn’t necessarily preclude something like this.) If they don’t provide the back-end software, they will never have the same inventory that OpenTable has. But so what? They won’t charge restaurants as much either. That might be compelling enough.
Likewise, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some restaurants experiment with using Groupon to drive diners to them instead of paying OpenTable’s monthly fee. They get someone to come in the door once with a hefty discount, but it’s a one-time expense. You could even see Facebook Pages playing a role here. In general, the iPads, iPhones and Android platforms give would-be competitors powerful new tools to challenge OpenTable, which players like UrbanSpoon are counting on. Designing an app from the ground up to take advantage of how far the local game has come with location-aware smartphones is a world away from OpenTable’s DNA as a circa-2000 Web and back-end software company.
And really, all these players would have to do is erode OpenTable’s ability to sign new customers to have an impact. This earnings report was good, but the company’s shares have jumped a staggering 230% since its IPO 18 months ago, trading at a price-to-earnings ratio eight times higher than the Standard & Poors index. Bloomberg reports that short sells are increasing and some analysts call it the most overvalued stock in the sector.
When you’re priced beyond perfection, it doesn’t take much to stumble. Maybe OpenTable should listen to the squeaky wheels out there once again.
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