Your Community Site Fails!

This morning I have a snapshot of one of the more elusive moments in community site building: the point at which that site fails to snag a potential member. It's just my personal experience, of course, but I think there are lessons to be learned.



I was reading the blogs this morning and came across notice of MyGameMug, which positions itself as something of a dating service for gamers. They don't actually try to set you up with a date; instead they use the dating site model to come up with a profile of you by which they can match you with other gamers for online or local multiplayer matches. It's a pretty good idea, actually; unless you already have friends who are into the same games you enjoy, it's very difficult to find an agreeable person to play with online, given that most multiplayer arenas are filled with trash-talking, homophobic, racist kids and frat boys. If there were a legitimate service out there that would allow me to find nice people to game with, that would have some appeal for me.

So I go to the site and create a profile. The test takes about ten minutes, and spits out a judgment: I'm a casual gamer. Yeah, sort of -- at least in terms of the frequency of my gaming at home. It's not totally accurate, but it's close enough that I'm not going to feel insulted. With the questionaire complete, and now properly signed into the site, I'm asked to add a list of games I own so that the service can then match me with similar people who own the same games and gaming hardware. I click on the link.

404.

The page was not found. Whoops. I hit Back to try again, only now I'm asked to sign in again. Which I do, and then I go to my profile, but I can't figure out where I can add the games I own. I even find one page that tells me that I've added no games to my profile, but nowhere on that page is there a link or any other indication telling me how to add the games.

And that's pretty much where the experience ends, because without the matchmaking service, this site has nothing to offer me. MyGameMug had a few minutes of my time in which to convince me that I should bookmark the site and make it a part of my Internet universe. Sloppy design caused me to waste those few minutes running into a brick wall, and now -- already -- I have a poor opinion of the service. I'm very unlikely to come back to give the site a second chance.

Lesson learned: it's got to be dead easy to sign up for a community site, and the benefits of membership need to be front and center and obvious to everyone. If MyGameMug had put their site through user testing, they would have exposed this little problem in no time. But they didn't, and I'd be willing to bet a big bag of venture capital that I'm not the only potential member they're losing today. Remember that old dandruff shampoo commercial that warned, "You only have one chance to make a first impression?" That's never been so true as it is today, for those of us who make our living online. When you launch, everything needs to be right, because if it's not your first visitors will also be the first to leave and not come back.

Product-Centric or Community-Centric Design?

The link o' the day this time comes from Search Insider, via a very interesting article on companies that put the product first:

Thank God for Product-Centric Leaders

The full article is well worth a read, but in a nutshell, the author talks about companies -- Apple, Disney, Google -- that based their success on being obsessive about the product they developed. Steve Jobs didn't lead Apple in the development of the iPhone because market research indicated that there was an investment opportunity. He did it because his cell phone sucked and he wanted to design the phone that he wanted to use.

What makes this point interesting is it signals a way in which you can satisfy the customer without listening to him (or her). Basically, you just find your inner customer and design something that you want -- badly.

"The other thing about product-centric leaders is that they don’t have to do extensive customer research. They may, and many do, but they already have a gut instinct for what their customers want, because they are their own customer."

This insight relates very directly to something I've experienced again and again when developing websites: we always talk about building this or that for the customer, but we don't really know what the customer wants. We could bring in focus groups, but that's expensive and time-consuming and hard to justify to management, so it hardly ever happens (or if it does happen, it's too late in the cycle to make much of a difference). So we throw things at the wall and hope that something sticks, and as often as not we end up with a mess of half-baked ideas without any really powerful organizing theme.

What's forgotten in all of this is something that the article cited above really stresses: there's always a customer inside you. You know what you want in a website. So why not design it to scratch the itch that you personally feel? It's a simple question, but one that in my experience almost never gets asked. I have asked the question. I've been in design meetings and put the question to the people around me: "What do you look for in a website? What would make you visit ours?" And I tend to get blank looks. It's not a question people are used to asking, and not one they're ready to answer.

I think we should all take a play from the Steve Jobs playbook. Design sites that satisfy ourselves first and foremost. When you start planning, sit down and record the three to five things that it will take to turn you into a member of your own community. Build to that personal vision. If there's something on your web feature list that doesn't speak to you individually, ask yourself whether you might be better off without it.

I have a simple rule: sites that are designed in order to meet your company's needs tend to suck, and they fail. I used to say that sites that focus on the customer avoid that problem. But now I'm willing to allow that maybe sites that are designed to appeal solely to members of the core team have the potential to be best of all. They will be sites built around a focused vision, with no extra pieces. That's a pretty good recipe for success.