Hyperink: The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops (eBook / ePub)

Produktinformationen zu „Hyperink: The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops (eBook / ePub)“

If you're interested in what it takes to grow a business from 10 users to 10 million, you should check out this collection of Andrew Chen's most compelling writings on viral marketing. You'll learn how to conduct awesome A/B tests and how to find out exactly what your customers truly want from your product.


Excerpt


Product design fact: A small number of features are used a lot, and most features are never used.


This idea comes from one of my favorite books, Designing Interactions, where there's a discussion by the original interaction designer for one of the first/best mobile OSes, PalmOS. He talks about the idea that users' interaction with products follow a Power Law distribution- a small number of features are used constantly by users, and then there's a long tail of features that most people don't interact with at all. This is an important idea, because it helps define what good functional design should look like.


Good design


Good interaction design means giving features prominence based on their usage level- this means some features are basically hidden, whereas some should be in your face. Using Palm as the example, you'd want to make "Add contact to addressbook" prominent but "Remove contact" should be very subtle- possible, but almost hidden. This means users will be able to pick out what they want to do, most of the time, and occasionally can pick out the corner case.


Open design


On the other hand, designing your product to be "open" and a "platform" means that you want to make anything possible. This often comes with its own design risks, because features aren't shown to the user at the priority level associated with their usage. That's why I find that open systems like Android, Windows, and the Facebook platform can have very messy interactions as a result.


An open platform means that a lot more is possible, but the best experiences are watered down by its desire to