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Over six million subscribers spend over 22 hours per week playing World of Warcraft (WOW). I've been reading Nick Yee's research at Stanford on WOW game design elements that help explain its success. There are some interesting lessons from MMPOG games on how to architect community sites for the web:

1) Quick Payoffs - traditionally, MMPOG games drawing on the Dungeons and Dragons genre made players jump through numerous hoops before they conquered a level or upgraded their character. In contrast, WOW gives neophytes quick payoffs on their gameplay - within the first twelve hours. This progress hooks players, encouraging "amateurs" to keep playing.

2) Social Interdependence - fundamentally, MMPOG designers realize they are building a community, not just a game. The social relationships between players keep them in this virtual world. To encourage these ties, designers ensure that no single player can overcome a quest on their own. Individuals have to work together to succeed - they have no choice. Self-organizing into permanent guilds becomes inevitable - and adds to the peer pressure on players to play regularly.

3) Player Reputations - powerful artifacts help players overcome dangerous dungeons. Even more importantly, visible artifacts carried by avatars provide bragging rights that encourage their acquisition further.

Payoffs, inter-dependence, and reputations - these elements contribute to the formation of any community. On successful community sites with a loyal following - flickr, yelp, or even youtube - the reputational element seems most important in drawing in new users. The quicker your contributions get showcased and people start commenting on them, the more motivated you are to keep participating. The payoff on these sites is inextricably tied to your reputation, and the sooner you get one, the likelier you are to continue participating. Social interdependence grows over time as relationships develop with other users - and serves as a great retention tool when you care what others on the site think about you.

Keeping these design elements in mind explicitly should help in creating more addictive sites to draw in and retain users.

Digg | Reddit ]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060823-005938 Bob Carson has an interesting post on social media. The basic assertion (simplified) is that the average person is overwhelmed with social media, technology, and life in general. As such, it is hard to expect them to invest in social media.

While I agree with Bob's preamble, I disagree with his conclusion. Caterina Fake puts it nicely in this post: for user-generated content sites, a dedicated cadre of volunteers fuel the content that the rest of us voyeuristic, lazy, mass market thirty-somethings enjoy. Caterina says 1-10% of users upload content, but I've heard it's on the lower end of this range. Everyone else just consumes. Social networking sites such as facebook and myspace on the other hand require mass participation for any value - a much higher hurdle to achieve and require from your users.

Bob is right in pointing out that applications that address specific consumer issues are still hard to find. The "let's get all my friends online so we can interact in a new way" portion of the bubble is behind us. Going forward, razor-sharp applications that use social media as a tool to resolve consumer (or business) issues will be much more compelling. And I would argue that many (if not most) of these tools will be of the 2% participation variety - a small group of people will generate the content that makes life much easier or better for the rest of us, just like flickr.

So in my opinion, a more accurate restatement of Bob's argument would be that services requiring mass participation will be much harder to build than targeted applications that generate content from 1-10% of their users for everyone else.

Digg | Reddit ]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060821-154457 Lifehacker. Other bloggers then took up writing about the site as well, from Mike Yamamoto at CNET to The Gothamist and others.

The attention has been great - our traffic has obviously skyrocketed - but it also caught us a bit by surprise. In addition to inevitable scalability bugs (which have since been sorted out), we have several enhancements to the available restaurants as well as to the site itself that we plan on releasing in the coming weeks. So please be sure to check back in periodically as we continue to improve the service.]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060816-171339
1) Apple - rounded edges, but primarily gray, silver, and blacks
2) Gilmourish - another gray, black, and white combination
3) Bill Emory - just black and white
4) Texas Church Project - gray and white
5) Green - Flash site celebrating green
6) BSOD - very basic blue and white
7) Blue Screen - more sophisticated darker blue treatment
8) Zico - another really refreshing treatment of ocean blue
9) Out of the Blue - a blue Flash treatment
10) Louisiana Red - a gritty dark, tomato red
11) Pink World - stay away if you don't want to be overwhelmed by pink

While our design voice is still (very) undeveloped on our sites, we are trying to find inspiraitons that aren't pure derivatives of the current design craze. We've tried to make Gophernow gritty, deliberately using Ajax to smooth the user experience but not to polish the site and make it "slick." Trippert is still really rough, but the new design we're working on has a distint look/feel - not just another flickr clone - but slick in its own way.

Digg | Reddit | Delicious]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060814-205131

One of the craziest things I've seen in a while (and I have to say pretty disturbing also). A guy in Stockholm selling advertising space on his body for $1000 per square centimeter - everything but his face and hands. You know capitalism has become rampant when one of the more visible expressions of counter-culture becomes an advertising medium.

Next thing you know people will be making tattoos scannable with cell phones so that people can access real-time comparison shopping information. Or maybe nano RFID-chips embedded in tattos?]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060809-112217
Every moment of time becomes useful when you are constantly connected. Dodgeball and Small Planet introduced LBS and social networking concepts that they were not able to realize. Most know Dodgeball as a project by two NYU master's students who created a makeshift LBS service to track your friends using e-mail updates to get locations. Since Google bought the company, it isn't clear where it's service will go. Small Planet is still around and runs an application on phones that broadcasts personal identities locally using Bluetooth. Run across someone else with the service and in your circle of friends, and it'll let you know.

Newer companies such as Rave Wireless, Flipt, and Nathan Eagle's new venture Metrospark are also adding to what we will be doing on our phone with entirely new suites of LBS-enabled services. Crackberry addiction will become even worse when we have IM, our friends, and LBS social networking all staring at us from that little screen.

I'm not really convinced that just knowing where your friends are is a very compelling offering. There's got to be a deeper innovation on the UI and human needs side to figure out what people want to do with their friends once they can figure out exactly where they are. All of these companies are just starting to get a handle on this more important issue.]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060808-231521

What do pachinko and consumer applications have in common?

When manufacturers such as IGT design slot machines or pachinko games, they explicitly build in hooks that take advantage of the behavioral psychology that influences how we think at an unconscious level.

For example, the concept of the "near miss" is constantly exploited by these machines. When you pull the handle of a slot machine, the machine immediately knows whether you've won or lost. But it still goes through a song and dance. Lights flash, the reels spin, and you wait. One reel stops, then the next. They're the same. The third one stops - and you haven't won. But you were so close.

Video game designers have done a good job of designing games that exploit these psychological tendencies in humans. If you lose a game too dismally, you lose your motivation and don't want to play anymore. Win too easily, and it's boring. The trick is in making it just hard enough to be out of reach. You need to track down that one relic or guild member on Warcraft that will finally make it possible for you to get through a dungeon. Once you overcome one challenge, there's always another just out of reach.

Web application developers can exploit these tendencies in their applications. For example, at least part of the addictive fascination of eBay is hunting for that amazingly good deal. You put in the lowball bid and wait anxiously as the minutes tick away. If you lose, you always feel like you were really close. Next time you'll win the auction for sure.

The more we can implicitly take advantage of this "near miss" impulse in our applications, the greater the likelihood that consumers keep coming back for more. The lesson is obviously very relevant to games, online or mobile. But it's also true of most content or social networking sites. Figure out what your payoff is for users, trumpet it, but then make it a reasonable amount of work to get it - just out of reach but achievable. On MySpace, it's getting a lot of friends. On Match.com, it's getting dates. Achievable, but just out of reach for most...]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060803-191435
An exception, mentioned in the WSJ , is a conversation between Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-born Israeli blogger, and a Lebanese blogger who publishes in this political journal.

Global Voices Online also provides a forum for bloggers on both sides through threads on Israel and Lebanon. Unfortunately content is still quite thin on the site - at least so far.

Hopefully more dialogues in cyberspace will help us get beyond the violence currently consuming the region.]]> http://www.remaxlifestyles.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060726-231532 Stanford d.school and practitioners such as IDEO among others have used it to describe a prototyping-based approach to designing products, services, and experiences that balance desirability, feasibility, and viability. How can these concepts be applied to web applications and entrepreneurship?

Desirability refers to the consumer (or more accurately, user) desire for a product - whether active or latent. Desirability can be imputed by observing users and finding the gaps and workarounds – the unconscious and conscious methods – that consumers invent that suggest their demand for a better way of doing things. These insights can be refined through testing prototypes – which, on the web, can be particularly useful and cost effective.

Feasibility refers to the technical capabilities required to build a product – or in our case – interactive web and mobile services. Can a web service exist as an immersive environment? Not yet. More modestly, can a mobile location based service provide real value to the masses? In the US, not quite – but getting closer. From an entrepreneurial perspective, the trick is to pick something close enough to be achievable but far enough to matter.

Finally, viability refers to the ingredient that many start-ups during the Internet bubble forgot – can the product/service make money? It’s not to say that every aspect of a business model needs to be figured out. But there has to be a systematic plan to take a product to profitability, and figuring out how to do so through iteration.

The best example I’m aware of – and admire – of a company applying this concept to software in an entrepreneurial context is 37signals with their Campfire, Basecamp, and other applications.

We’re a small group creating new web applications on a dime utilizing design thinking. We’re not venture- or angel-backed – we’re bootstrapping our way with focused web apps “spiked” for extreme users not addressed by products geared for “average” users. In the process we're applying design thinking to the services we develop.

It all sounds a bit grandiose before we’ve really created anything – and that’s what this blog is for. It’s where we’re going to drop all our thoughts about design thinking, technical challenges, and everything else we discover and think about on the way (including our passions, interests, and rants). Which means that there will be a little bit of everything – but it all hopefully be anchored by our collective exploration. Enjoy - and let us know what you think.
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