The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops

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The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops

If youâ€™re interested in what it takes to grow a business from 10 users to 10 million, you should check out this collection of Andrew Chenâ€™s most compelling writings on viral marketing. Youâ€™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 thereâ€™s a discussion by the original interaction designer for one of the first/best mobile OSes, PalmOS. He talks about the idea that usersâ€™ interaction with products follow a Power Law distribution- a small number of features are used constantly by users, and then thereâ€™s a long tail of features that most people donâ€™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, youâ€™d want to make â€œAdd contact to addressbookâ€ prominent but â€œRemove contactâ€ 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 â€œopenâ€ and a â€œplatformâ€ means that you want to make anything possible. This often comes with its own design risks, because features arenâ€™t shown to the user at the priority level associated with their usage. Thatâ€™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 support an infinite number of possibilities. A more curated experience means that the best experiences can be meticulously designed, but it becomes harder to make all the combinations possible. Constraints start to dominate, but if the constraints are picked well, the experience is better off.

Different POVs

You can read this post as a discussion of Apple versus Google versus Microsoft, or you can think of it as different design philosophies for how to build products. Both are great, and can lead to fantastic things, but open versus curated can lead to very different outcomes.

Country	USA
Author	Andrew Chen
Binding	Kindle Edition
Format	Kindle eBook
IsAdultProduct
Label	Hyperink - Andrew Chen on Viral Marketing
Manufacturer	Hyperink - Andrew Chen on Viral Marketing
NumberOfPages	155
PublicationDate	2013-01-13
Publisher	Hyperink - Andrew Chen on Viral Marketing
ReleaseDate	2013-01-13
Studio	Hyperink - Andrew Chen on Viral Marketing

The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops

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