 Hello and welcome to this presentation on social design patterns. I have to apologize first. I think the brief that we initially put up was a little fuzzy and people didn't really know what to expect. We kind of solidified it a little bit more. And what we're going to talk about is social design patterns specific to Android, not just general mobile social design patterns, and especially relating to how to make the app more popular and get more users and things like that. Small intro. My name is Tee Tee. I'm the co-founder of a company called Petroclane. We're a self-product startup. We're trying to bring social very deep into Android. That's about all I can say about it at this point. We're at a big prototype stage. We're about four people. My private experience is in enterprise CRM as software as a service. I work for Salesforce.com in Silicon Valley. I am on a recent US return in the province. Don't hold that against me. And I love social and mobile technology. So even when I was working in the enterprise world, I was really doing a lot of online communities and things like that and brought social media into the enterprise, which is why it's such a terrible miscarriage, I suppose. Okay, so to set the base stage, let's just understand how apps become popular. How do apps grow over time organically? And the model is really simple. And just to rub it in, I'm going to play it three times. So first you have a user who tries your app. They like the app, so they come back and they become a loyal user. The loyal user likes the app so much that they're going to invite their friends to come and try this app out. So that's the basic model. You have three stages. You can break it down into smaller segments like sign up, completion of sign up and things like that. But essentially there are three stages. And just to set the foundation really strong, I'm going to play that again three times. Three stages, trial, return, referral, means more users for you, right? Trial, returns, and referrals. So the presentation is going to be in three stages talking about these three steps and how you can engage your users by means of social UI design patterns to perform these three steps. And I have to put up a disclaimer upfront. I used to work in social gaming and some of these methods are honestly a little evil. So use them wisely. I mean, I know that it's cool to be evil these days, but really use them wisely. So trials are the first step. And again, honestly, this is Google's problem. Google should be driving Android trials. And right now, I know we're all hurting. Who here wants to get that app in the top list, right? And the problem is in order to get on the top list, you need to already be on the top list, right? You're not getting any trials simply because you are not in one of the top list. And your best bet right now is to try to be in one of the trending sections. So hopefully Google will fix this one of these days. And basically, there are two ways to fix it. One is to do recommendations based on what you already enjoyed. So if you already tried some apps out and you seem to be enjoying them, Google could recommend more apps to you based on that. So that way, you're not competing with the entire universe when you're trying to target your user who particularly cares about your little hobby, which might be hamsters or something. The other way is to try and make it based on what your friends like doing. And this is the Facebook way, right? Who loves getting their Facebook spam? Want to join me on formal? Nobody? Okay. So anyway, so that is the other way that apps get popular, which is you find out what your friends are using. And the main way that you try out apps based on things other than recommendations is to find out what your friends are using. And this we call social proof. Social proof is the idea that you will try pretty much anything if your friends are also doing it. And I know it sounds preposterous and most users deny it. In fact, right now we're running a survey where we're asking people, how did you choose your cell phone? And one of the reasons in there is my friends have the same cell phone. Almost nobody chooses that option. They all choose, I like the features. But when you dig down and ask them, how did you find out what features this phone has? Oh, my friend told me about it. Right? So we all like to deny to ourselves that we're influenced by other people. But simple fact of the matter is that we really want to know what other people are doing and we often try to do the same thing. How many of you have done something really stupid when you're young? Like go swimming in a fast river and then you're almost drowned. And somebody had to rescue you and your mother came around and said, if all your friends are going to jump off a mountain, are you going to follow them? The answer is yes. Because it looks like fun if a lot of people are doing it. And Android is trying to do something about it. So if you look at the marketplace right now, it tells you 50 million people have downloaded Angry Birds. That should mean something, right? Does it mean anything to anybody? I don't think so. It just tells us that this app is popular, but you might have already tried this app and you don't like it. But every time you go in there, you still have to see it. So this model is obviously not working and it's very likely that I think Google is going down the route of social recommendations because recently this started showing up in the Android marketplace. Anybody else notice this? So Google is starting to tell me what apps my friends are using, but only if I go to that app and try to see what's on there. The obvious next step, once it gets a little more traction and people actually start doing platforms more and ratings more, is to actually have a listing next to top free saying top friend apps or top apps my friends are using. And that's almost inevitable because the current scenario is not sustainable. So my advice to Google fixes this, and you can get a head start on this right now, start begging for plus points right now, because soon this is going to be the next ratings game, right? So one of the things that if you learn social network here, and this can put a few lectures, is that it's better to own a big chunk of a small subgroup, like say college students or meaningful students or something like that, than to own a small percentage of a very big chunk of people. So if you can own 30% of a sub market, that is much better than owning 1% of a really large, you know, 200 million people market, but they're all really widespread in this place. So some ways in which you can start begging, and this applies to ratings as well, just ask, you know, the first time you use the users you have after 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and a lot of this comes from, you know, Facebook social games. After 5 or 10 minutes they'll ask you, hey, do you want to like us on Facebook? No pressure, right? Just, it would be great if you did. So, and nagging, nagging works, it's not the best way to do it, don't piss the users off, but nagging is a good place to start. The next two are slightly EU. You could lock some things up that can only be unlocked by liking your app. Like I said, you know, some of these things are EU, use them judiciously. And this one is slightly less EU, make something work better if the user is like your app. So obviously, it's kind of like awarding people for liking your app. But you can also tell them beforehand that if they like it, that it's going to work better. So the next big challenge for a lot of apps is retention. And this used to be the challenge with websites, and used to be the challenge with software applications, but we're really starting to see this in mobile apps too, because people download a lot of apps. There's no bad way to entry. You just download it, and a lot of apps don't even get run once. I might download two or three things, and if it takes too long to download, I forget about it, and you go sit in my home screen, and then I never look at it again. So the first rule of getting retention is make something that doesn't suck, okay? I mean, you first have to have a good product. That's the basic. So make something that you just want to return to. There's some problems. Let's say you're making a calculator, a specialty calculator, like a scientific calculator. Users don't need it every day. Now that's a bad spot to be in. And honestly, I recommend people who are trying to make apps to sell them. So if people pay a little money, then they will definitely try to use it. But if you're giving it away for free and hoping to convert some users, the user has to be in a context where they need to use that app and they're going to use your app. And that's really hard. So one of the things that a lot of apps have used very successfully is to use timelines or fees. Does everybody understand what a timeline or a fee is? I don't have to explain that, right? Okay. So does anybody have any guesses of why these are such good ways of retaining users? Why? I want you to know what your friends are doing. Okay. Something new? Something new will be there always. Okay. Something new will be always. So none of the answers are what I'm looking for. So I'm going to give you a small clue and then I'm going to ask you again. Sorry? You don't have to initiate something. You don't have to initiate something. No, not again. Any Aerosmith fans here? Say again? Curiosity? Okay. So any more guesses? Temptation? No. Okay. I can see that. I think the core reason is actually fear. Don't want to miss a thing. Come on. Okay. So essentially people are afraid that they'll miss something. And that's why timelines work really well because people develop this obsessive behavior about checking the space, finding out what's going on, what's going on, every two minutes. How often do you guys check Facebook every day? Like every two minutes, right? Some of you are checking right now, right? I know. Okay. So people don't want to miss anything. So to take advantage of that. Okay. This is even term knowledge. Okay. So think about the things that happen in your app that other users are doing that just can't wait, right? So there are deals, there are sales, there are specific events that if you miss, you actually lose some money or you lose the opportunity to go to a cool gate, right? So these kinds of things are definitely great places to do, great things to introduce to timelines. Second is think of things that are socially expected that you would react immediately. Post a baby picture. You weren't expecting ooze and ass at that point. Puppies, right? Jokes. Think of ways of increasing the speed of the stream a little bit with that value. And I'll talk about, you know, some of those techniques now. And find something predictable that you can give users every day. Users need to know that every day or every afternoon there's going to be something new. They come back and nothing new happens. Then they would feel the fear that they're going to miss it, right? So again, remember that people eventually check streams because they're afraid that they will miss something. So find things that users care about missing and put those things into your stream. So when you try to do that, you run up against this big western fight between the chicken and the egg, right? So you need to have your users engaged in the app in the first place in order for them to create content and make other users be more engaged in your app. So it's a big chicken and egg problem and it has been studied for years by business schools as well as technology companies. And there are two simple rules. I've boiled it all down to two simple rules. This is all data from Jack and Nelson and interesting people like that who have gone there and done the research. And the first one is let's start with an example. 6% of Facebook users like something. Any guesses why? Why do people like something? Because they relate to it. Okay? Any other guesses? Just to show off. Okay? Anyone else? Everyone likes liking. No, see the answer is because it's easy. It's one click. Right? If you look at how many of you guys had a blog? As specific as they had because vlogging is dead. See the price of content creation used to be you had to write a book to convince the publisher to sell it then you had a blogging and all you had to do was do a sign up form and you would set up a blog. And then a lot of people started setting up blogs never posting, only commenting. So the value of participation has to be coming down until we have the likes. One click and it conveys something to the world. Like, you know, I like this cool thing and therefore you should train me on Reddit or something. I don't know. And why this 26% number is so amazing is I stole this chart from user.com, Jacob Nielsen's website. How many people know Jacob Nielsen? Usability group? Yeah? Okay. So as you can see from this chart Jacob Nielsen has obviously no sense of style. There are six font sizes in two charts. But more importantly only 1% of users contribute. I mean that's anecdotal, but you know he's actually seen it in his research. Only 1% of users contribute and 90% of course come from 1% of users. So reward the 1%. And very specifically don't tell them that they are going to get rewarded. Okay? So if you set up something like if you like us, we are going to send you an iPod Nano you will get exactly the wrong kind of behavior. So always reward fairly but reward small. Don't reward something big, right? If you want to look at reward systems definitely play some social games. I know it's kind of sucky with they really figured out this reward system. People like shiny things even if they are virtual. So these are the two rules by the way for retention. First thing is make participation really, really, really easy. If it's more than one click you are immediately cutting out 10% of the population. I mean 90% of your users will now participate anyways, okay? We are not going to be able to change these ratios that much which is why this 26% number is so amazing because this has been impossible in the history of social software before this. So lower the barriers to participation and reward the 1% of key contributors your and this applies like also the websites and all that and you probably know Wikipedia that a lot of pages, especially a lot of the curation is done by the top 1% of Wikipedia and rewarding can be things like organizing community events that keeps that core of people cohesive and in sync with each other things like that. Even those are rewards. So if you are a Wikipedia contributor you thrive on those attractions and those things and that's not going to cost you that much money but that's still very rewarding to the people who are at that 1% and really contributing a lot to your product's success. So there are some other things you can do for attention. Send reminders are this one if you can. If you have a reason for telling the user to come back then get the email get an SMS or just do push notifications like the user installs your app today and hasn't used it by tomorrow maybe a push notification is not such a bad idea. They might have just forgotten because your app took so long to download by the way, I downloaded it 5-4 2 days ago and it's bigger than Anvi Verge, it's like 31 Anvi and by the time I finished downloading I had forgotten what I had started downloading for which is probably go to a website which doesn't work with the Android browser. So sending people reminders is never a bad idea, just don't be too appreciative about it. Create reasons for coming back, social games get this very right, your props will be ready tomorrow or your profile will be verified by tomorrow or find a reason, something that takes a day and you can clearly tell the user to take a day to do this and you can come back and have a school you think that you can use that would be fantastic. In incentivize repeat usage, you can do things like if you come for 3 days in a row will increase your friend's circle to 5, like right now you can only have 3 friends, now you can add 5 friends or we give you a special badge like 4 squared us, so after you do a certain number of checkings, 4 squared automatically tells you you're a wanderer that's it right and if you're a utility app and like this is the scientific calculator context that I was talking about before if you're a utility app and you have specific context where you become useful try to plug into those context like for you for example there are some apps here which there's some apps which help people who are traveling some of the friends that I do phone they have this app which helps people traveling by train, use course location try to figure out if the user is traveling by train or something like that and then use that to drive some kind of notification so quick recap trials, start asking for plus once now retention will an app that doesn't suck, people want to come back to will a great feed or timeline something that people don't want to miss out on and remind users reward repeat users so those are the main things so far the last one is referrals and it's the key to vitality how you convince your user not only to just use your app so you so far if you're successful you convince users to try your app you convince users to come back to your app often so that they're developing a loyalty grid and third you want them to tell other people about your app so there's only one rule make friends easy to find I see too many apps that tell users share this app and then it pulls up this big dialogue which says you can send this by SMS or Gmail or this or that I don't have the time for that because the process that I have to go through in order to tell a friend I have to click share on your app then decide how I want to tell them then I would need to figure out which users I want to tell right so simple thing first start by telling users which of their friends are actually using the product if I know these three friends are using this product then I know oh that fourth guy would totally fit in with this group so I want to tell him too so you've just saved me a lot of work thinking about who else would find this app beneficial right simply knowing who else is using this app really helps me figure out okay so the other person would also probably like this app so again this ties in with the previous one where we talked about moving the bad loading the bad guys to engagement lower the barriers for people to share and these are all great examples like help people find their friends from Facebook who are using the same help people find their friend from the phone book who are using the same app so that's pretty much the only rule if you take away the decision for the user about who they should invite and who they should share with then you've taken away the biggest value to share in your app people actually want to share cool things with their friends as we know we see it on Facebook all the time people post really boring stuff too they want to share things with their friends you have to help them so some of the other things that you can do you can offer incentives for people who are sharing typical ways of doing it these two again are slightly evil lock content there are some things that become unlocked only if you have a certain number of users and try to make it so that this actually logically makes sense like for example your farm remains a small size unless you have a certain number of friends and you can logically make the case that unless you have this many friends you can't work a bigger farm you're going to need those friends to come in and help you with your stuff and things like that so in some ways you can make sense to the user that having more users on here that is going to be a good motivator for the user to bring their friends in so that's basically it so to recap again first Frios start asking for plus once now they're soon going to be very useful retention lower the lower the values to engagement see if you want to use a timeline or something but first make a really good product lower the values to engagement reward the 1% and then for referrals make it really easy to find friends so basically there are only 4 or 5 things that you need to really think about but think about really see how they apply to your app because there are lots of different kinds of apps games are a completely different body from apps and apps that are you know checking oriented or app review or restaurant review oriented are completely different from the scientific calculator or the trip calculator those kind of utility apps so think about how these 4 or 5 things really apply to your apps and that's it questions you said you tell your friends about applications and so on many of the applications have advertisements in them and they are free what do you feel how many people delete the app and they see ads and how many people buy the app and remove the ads how do you tackle that situation I think it's different ways on app if you have a utility app you have ads inside and you have a paid version where if you remove the app I think a lot of people go for it the conversion rate is going to be much higher and if you have a gain when you have ads and people find the ad gets in their way when they are playing and all that they are just going to delete the ad so context dependent I think but I definitely see lots of utility apps which succeed the feature that they add is the ads go away that's the only thing you get for paying and people seem to pay for that if they see utility value in your app, if it's entertainment value it doesn't make you that much do you think it would be a good way to introduce ads into a utility app right from the beginning rather than before the app getting very popular ads from the beginning or ads right from the inception itself correct I would say somewhere in the middle okay that's my evil answer when you start with you should probably not have ads but have a good strategy for capturing at least a small part of a small market correct so basically if it's a sub market that talks to each other a lot like if they are going to be active in the forums or active in the reviews and talk to each other a lot then it makes sense to not have ads in fact you could just reward your early users by not having ads you could just do that see if you could you could structure it almost as a reward for getting it early on your app that they won't have ads ever and then the people who get them later they have ads so that could serve both your purposes correctly the Android market does not allow something to post, upgrade you have to enforce an upgrade how do you do it I think that's a technical question no in terms of user experience oh okay how would the user experience how would the the app know that there is an upgrade available I guess that's the technical point yeah that's it so you ping a server and they let you know I see apps do a few things so one is they tell them about the new features that you are missing out on but if you look at it from the social perspective you could you could do things like so many users have already upgraded and are getting the benefit of these features it's not just that these features are new and you're missing out on them but you're missing out on these features that all these tons of other people are enjoying I think that is a better value proposition socially than just saying there are these new features so add social proof to it what you talked about mostly really well applies to apps that have some but there are like a whole bunch of apps out there just dedicated to just advertising or marketing or you know just managing a brand you know Pepsi comes out it's just trying to advertise itself it could be both social marketing aspect into an app so it depends on why are those apps produced I think some of those apps are produced in order to get a lot of users engaged with that brand right and in some ways those apps have an advantage because you already have a brand that people identify with and have certain values about so really your job is to make sure that the app really fits in with the brand and once you start with that then give people forms with it like for example if it's Pepsi it's a pretty generic brand let's say it's like a fitness brand it's Reebok or something like that obviously it's got to be a sports related app a lot of people to compare scores a lot of people to create a timeline of their physical activities and try something innovative if the innovation is part of the brand or try something traditional really you already have a population of users who care about the brand and your job basically needs to be how do I how do I advertise my brand to some other users how to share this brand good and it comes down to something that they can do that makes sense in that brand like sports is obvious example but even things like energy drinks at that point it's just really more of a creative thing because if your brand is say a movie like let's say you're doing a raw one game right which you did in state recently it's both like what is the brand doing for your app and what is your app doing for the brand and what your brand what the app is doing for the brand is just one more point of engagement for the brand in a brand like raw one that's all I think you can make a decision thanks everyone