Seven principles of creating good social products

The founders of well-known social networking site Ning talked about seven key principles of designing a social product. The following is compiled:

1. Make your product important in an oversupply world. People deal with dizzying people, websites, requests, and relationships every day. You like your social product because the benefits it brings to you are obvious. But if you and your team members are not able to clearly tell users how to get emotional rewards on your product in 15 minutes, and those rewards are not available to users on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, there's a lot more you have to do .

What is not about nauseating here. People do not care about your features, game mechanics, or how good your service is when you have millions of users. People have limited time and new things you launch attract only a few seconds to the user. To do this, you need to seamlessly bring together everything you can control to create a unique brand that has only one reason for existence. Give the product feelings. If your team can not associate all the decisions with the feelings users use when using your social products, the product is not well justified.

Only one thing to do the best in the world. Lululemon specializes in black yoga pants with an annual income of 450 million U.S. dollars. Twitter specializes in 140-character messages. Facebook focuses on getting you online with people you already know. All of these companies take the best of what they do best. When you focus on what your social product is best at, all you need is to let go of that, do not think about anything else.

Ask yourself and all team members every week, and you do the best in the world. It is best to be able to define this matter, reach agreement, print it out, promote it vigorously and attach it to the wall. Anyone should think about it when making any decision.

3. Find uniqueness. Now the mobile platform and services to meet people's sense of belonging. But equally important are the special things that make us feel special. People want scarce, unique things. This does not mean that your product is limited to a certain niche market. Built for the public taste, Frontierville still brings uniqueness to its social experience through features such as neighbors, cell customizations, and collections.

People always talk about game mechanics when it comes to uniqueness and scarcity, but you'll run into problems if the mechanics you use are the same as everyone else. Or above mentioned the issue of oversupply. There are points, medals, and upgrades on all social products, and you lose the opportunity to embody scarcity and uniqueness if you use them without thinking. A better way to find out what makes your product unique is that you can not find it on other social products. And then give priority to those who can enhance the user's emotional positioning function. In order to be unique, you have to lead, not follow.

Focus on the most important interactions. Once you define the key features, you usually find that there is one of the most important interactions. If this interaction is handled properly, people will come back and you will not be able to reach their full potential if not handled properly. Find this kind of interaction, then pay enough attention to it. This type of interaction is Twitter traffic for Twitter, a collection page for Polyvore, a news feed for Facebook, a video page for YouTube, and a live feed page for Dailybooth. This kind of interaction is a miracle place, so double attention, to make it a star.

5. Wording carefully. There is something that can be copied when creating a social product, but there are things you need to be unique. layout? Do your best, but be aware of what has worked so far. colour? Difficult to reflect the originality, but blue is a good choice. the term? Must take a good grasp. Wording is your primary way of expressing your opinion, not only to reflect the brand's emotional meaning, but also to tell people what kind of relationship people can make using your social product.

6. Create a ball, not a museum. Outstanding social products are clean, simple and fast. Successful social products are designed with few bright spots so that buddies, photos, videos, text and comments appear in the center of the homepage. The more colors, fonts, pictures you add, the less likely your social product looks like a ball, and the more it looks like a museum. Or a magazine. You want to make your social products into a lively ball, rather than in the surrounding filled with expensive furniture, people do not sit sit even sit.

7. Develop relationships, not functions. Currently we have multiple personalities and different kinds of relationships in the real world and the virtual world. If you're designing a new social product, photos, videos, events, and more are not enough, and you need to look at how your social product relationship relates to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. .

For a new social product, you need to think about how your product expands, deepens, and changes existing relationships in the real world and the virtual world. It is not easy to do this. Quora is a good example. Quora, which initially originated from Facebook's social scene but quickly came to the fore with the site's practice of showing you people you might care about because their reviews, experiences, and expertise are tied to topics that you think are important.

Gina Bianchini is the founder of Ning, a leading social networking site where organizers, activists and leaders around the world can create their own social experiences. At present, the number of independent visitors per month on the website is more than 80 million.

via TechCrunch with photos from PTC

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