May 14th
by Joshua Porter
The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.
Babycenter.com has a really great newsletter. Once you tell the site when you’re expecting, it sends you a weekly newsletter targeted at the specific stage of pregnancy you’re in. At 4.5 months, for example, it tells you that your baby weighs about 10.5 ounces and is 10 inches long. This information is timely and relevant…it knows exactly what stage you’re in and helps you deal with the stresses and questions at that point.
The key to babycenter’s ability to deliver a relevant newsletter is that they know your delivery date. Once they know that, they know *a lot* about what you’re going through, as pregnancy is a well-defined process that is mostly the same for everyone. Nine month cycle. Kid. Simple.
Can people designing products of all sorts take advantage of this lifecycle process? Yes, I think they can. One of the primary ideas in my new book, Designing for the Social Web is a similar kind of lifecycle, what I call the “Usage Lifecycle”. The usage lifecycle isn’t as clear cut as pregnancy is, but it recognizes that people go through a progression as they use software. They go from not knowing much at all (like parents early on in pregnancy) to feeling comfortable with the product (like, say, when parents become grandparents 
) to finally being passionate users.
The Stages of the Usage Lifecycle
The stages of the lifecycle are straightforward and simple. You can dive into lots more depth as your application warrants, and you can add stages, but for the most part these five stages apply to almost all software.
- Unaware This isn’t so much a stage as it is a starting point. Most people are in this stage: completely unaware of your product.
- Interested These people are interested in your product, but are not yet users. They have lots of questions about how it works and what value it provides.
- First-time Use These people are using your software for the first time, a crucial moment in their progression.
- Regular Use These people are those who use your software regularly and perhaps pay for the privilege.
- Passionate Use These people are the ultimate goal: passionate users who spread their passion and build a community around your software
Note that each of these stages describes people, as opposed to a product or a market. It describes the different types of relationships people have with your software product. Have they used it yet? Have they even heard about it? What questions do they have?
Each of the stages are separated by hurdles. The hurdle between the “unaware” stage and the “interested” stage is “awareness”. At this stage what you need to do is make people aware of your product. How do you get people aware of what you’re doing? How do you get them interested and wanting to know more? How do you begin the conversation of what you do and carry that over into a meaningful relationship?
The lifecycle is particularly relevant to web-based software because the product is inextricable from the service. The product is the service. If a person has a question about what your software does, for example, you can literally build that answer into the software itself. One of my favorite examples at the moment is Tripit.com. Tripit’s design is great at moving people from the “interested” stage to the “first-time use” stage, getting people over the hurdle of “sign-up”.
One of the ways that Tripit does this is by clearly explaining exactly what their service is and does. While this may seem like an easy thing to do, it’s actually quite hard. To boil the essence of your software down into a handy 3-pane “how it works” graphic seems like child’s-play. But only the resulting graphic is simple. Creating the simple thing is the difficult part.
Another way that Tripit helps people get over the hurdle of sign-up is to make it super easy to sign up in the first place. They have a great feature that lets you simply forward them an email from a recent flight or hotel booking. They take that booking email and auto-create an account for you. No sign-up page to create an account. All you do is send an email.
One of the problems I’ve seen over and over (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) is to recognize the stages while talking to people face to face, answering their questions, but then failing to bake that knowledge into the interface itself. By formalizing this conversation with the usage lifecycle, you can begin to set up a process of describing each stage in-depth, and then creating screens with that exact same information placed right on your web site. Just like Tripit does.
The usage lifecycle isn’t a new idea. It’s very similar to what a good salesman does when they target customers. They find out where the person is in the purchase lifecycle, and then tailor their message to get people moving along toward purchase. They answer the same questions over and over, point out the same features and benefits over and over. The lifecycle for any particular product or service is remarkably stable…it’s only a matter of identifying the lifecycle and designing for it. What babycenter has done with pregnancy, we should all be able to do with the usage lifecycle of our software.
So that’s an introduction to the usage lifecycle. I’ll be blogging more about the lifecycle as I work through the sections of my book: Designing for the Social Web.
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May 12th
by Joshua Porter
As anybody who has ever read anything knows, the most important part of a book are the quotes sprinkled throughout it. Yes, if you are able to pick the perfect quotes to start your chapters with, then you’ve done the majority of hard work in writing. The words that you write yourself, the other 50,000 or so marks on paper that fill in the spaces between the quotes, well, those are mostly there to give the sense that you did something on your own. But the quotes, the quotes, those are the show!
On that note, I thought I would start talking about my book Designing for the Social Web by sharing the first quote in it. It’s a quote from what is undoubtedly one of the top 5 pieces written by anybody on the subject of the Internet. It’s from Douglas Adams’ 1999 piece: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
“During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show “normal” mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’
“Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.”
“What was the Restoration again, please, miss?”
“The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.”
I put this quote at the beginning of the book because it completely rewires the way we think about the Web. It is a new technology, sure, but the primary power of it is to enable interactivity…a return to interactivity that we’ve been slowly eroding with other forms of technology. As we design web-based interactive systems, it’s nice to know that we’re not conjuring value out of thin air…we’re simply returning to tried and true forms of human communication.
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May 5th
by Joshua Porter
Bootstrapping your niche is easier if you leverage existing motivation.
How do you bootstrap your social site if you’re targeting a group that doesn’t yet use software (or doesn’t seem interested in using software)? While software designers can often see how useful their tool can be, normal users aren’t so prescient. How do you get them to see the value in your software?
Eric DeLabar brings up this question in response to my post on the power of niche social network sites last week:
“I’ve always had a problem wrapping my head around this exact topic. Having mainly technical friends getting my circle of friends to try out a new website is simple, especially if it’s of a technical nature. However, my next largest circle of friends are from our local community theatre. As a whole we could really use a niche site for communicating with other community theatre groups, however most of our members really aren’t all that interested in social networking or in most cases the web in general. I don’t know if this is localized or just community theatre in general, but I haven’t been able to find anything similar.
It seems like a perfect niche, but where do I find an audience to bootstrap it?”
Eric’s situation is a great example of what a lot of software designers are dealing with.
Leverage Existing Motivation
The key is to swim with the tide, not against it, by leveraging existing motivation.
Notice how Eric wrote that the theatre folks aren’t interested in “social networking”. This is normal…most people don’t have a social networking problem.
So where is the existing motivation? Well, the folks in your community theatre group *are* motivated to be better at theatre, to put on better shows, to run better productions. That’s where Eric needs to focus…on how the social software can make them better at theatre.
People don’t want to be good at software. They want to be good at fun things like acting, writing, and ultimate frisbee.
In other words, Eric needs to answer the question: “How does my software make them better at what they already love to do?”. Does it allow them to put on better shows? Does it allow them to get more people into the theatre by cross-promoting with other theatres? Does it put their show on more community calendars? Does it allow producers better access to shared resources? (I really have no idea what the real benefits would be, but the point is that Eric needs to know what these details are)
Once you identify the areas where the software can improve the theatre folks life, you’ll have a much easier time convincing them to give it a shot. So in their mind they won’t be using “social network software”, they’ll be using a tool to help them be a better theatre group.
This is an unfortunate side-effect of the social networking craze. We have new words that we’re using to communicate among those of us who design the software, but for the vast majority of folks who will actually use the software, the terms don’t mean very much. So while you may understand what I mean by “niche social network”, the people actually in the niche social network think of themselves as performers, actors, or what-have-you.
Kathy Sierra has a great post on this topic: Keeping users engaged. In this long post (definitely worth reading) she talks about how to make things interesting for people by engaging and challenging them on multiple levels. If what you’re building isn’t interesting in itself (Kathy uses the example of garbage bags), you need to create a challenging environment around that thing. (I don’t think theatre has this problem, but other niche sites might)
Anyway, there isn’t always a great answer to the question: “how does my software make people better at what they’re passionate about?” If you can’t answer this question, your software is facing an uphill battle for acceptance.
But most of the time there is existing motivation. Everybody wants to be better, even if they don’t articulate it as such. Bootstrapping niche social networks is about finding and leveraging that motivation, while speaking in terms people already understand.
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May 2nd
by Joshua Porter
The power of niche social sites isn’t just in connecting people, it’s in providing tools that allow people to do something better than they could before…or, the reason why PatientsLikeMe is an amazing web site.
Ravelry.com is a social network site for the “knit and crochet community”.
A site for knitters, you ask? What will they think of next…a site for dog owners?
The reason why Revelry.com and other niche sites seem so alien is because they support communities that we often don’t see because we don’t participate in them. My wife is a knitter, and I have often been struck at how often, when I visit a yarn shop with her, somewhere in the back there is a group of women (almost always women) sitting round a circle in rocking chairs chatting and knitting. While knitters and crocheters have likely always gotten together as a community, they usually do so in some quiet environment where non-knitters won’t bother them.
Knitting groups are a classic third place, just like the barbershop or pub.
The simple exposure of creating a web site dedicated to these communities comes across as odd or unecessary because to people outside the community it might be their first exposure to it. Knitters are a community?, we ask. That’s exactly the point of niche communities. They aren’t for everyone, and they are often focused on a very specific activity.
But to the people inside that community, niche social sites are as natural as any software (if software can be natural). So as software infects all parts of our lifestyles, so it will support our various activities, no matter how odd or niche they are.
A few months back Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote a bullish article on niche social networks in The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks and while the points Marshall makes are spot on, I think there is a bigger overarching opportunity for these sites.
Marshall says:
“What is a social network? Typically, it’s just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail.”
This is the generic view of a social network and it fits our perceptions of what they are. But for niche sites, the opportunity isn’t just connecting the people together, the opportunity is making them better at the activity they’re doing.
My favorite example is PatientsLikeMe.com, which was pointed out to me by Adam Darowski in response to an earlier post I wrote: Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks. PatientsLikeMe.com is a site that supports people with diseases such as ALS, AIDS/HIV, multiple schlerosis, and OCD.
Now, PatientsLikeMe is a great connecting tool, helping people communicate and support each other while living with the disease. But while that’s great, and is why forums and message boards are such amazing tools, the site’s value actually goes way beyond it, as it allows people to record their symptoms and match them with the medication they’re taking. Not only does this allow people to track what they’ve done, the site can help compare people’s experiences.
This is where PatientsLikeMe is redefining medicine. Imagine going to a doctor who doesn’t have a cure for your disease. He or she will try some number of medications to help alleviate your symptoms…they might increase your dose or try a new drug…but they’re basically throwing darts…they don’t know the best course of action. What PatientsLikeMe does is to help find what’s working best for everyone in the community…thereby treating the group’s experience as real research data.
So, patients are able to watch each other and see what the best course of action might be, or at least find out what seems to be working for others at the moment. This is incredibly powerful, as it allows the community to come up with better treatments than they had before!
If you haven’t read it, please read the fabulous New York Times piece on PatientsLikeMe: Practicing Patients.
PatientsLikeMe, Ravelry, and Dogster demonstrate the power of niche communities. It’s not just improved communication, it’s improved action. The value targeted, focused software can have is astounding…even as the novelty of the web has long since worn off.
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May 1st
by Joshua Porter
A bit of local news to share with you:
Boston Web Studio: Marc Amos, whom I met through local meetups, has taken the plunge and is now an independent web designer/developer specializing in creating attractive, modern, accessible web sites that appeal to the visitors your business needs to reach. Congrats, Marc! Best of luck with your new venture.
Social Media for Social Change: Michelle Riggen-Ransom (with whom I had a marathon argument at SXSW with about whether altruism exists) has also taken the plunge and started a blog on a topic near and dear to my heart: exploring how technology can promote good in the world. Looking forward to it, Michelle!
By the way, I must say that I think it’s great that Marc and Michelle have stepped out and done that thing they have been thinking about for the longest time. My guess is that there are lots of people who have a company they want to start, a blog they want to write, or some other project they’ve been thinking about but have, for one reason or another, not yet done. I know, I’ve been there myself. But there really is no time like the present, and if something isn’t worth doing right now it’s probably not worth doing at all.
So, just do that thing. No excuses. No regrets. It will lead somewhere interesting. I promise.
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