Creating a truly engaging social media application, particularly one based around a brand, is quite a challenge.
Over the past six months at Mediatonic, we've dived into the social space and built several high-profile social apps. In the process we've studied a wide range of research on the subject and analysed a huge number of existing social games to build a firm design methodology.
The difference in building a social application as opposed to a standalone game is dramatic. Design for social media comes with a completely new set of rules - users engage in a completely different way and when building new social media applications, it's critical to bear some key areas in mind in order to maximise your potential for success in the social space.
Personalisation
A good social application should be personalised to every single user who interacts with it. On most platforms (such as Facebook), applications can draw from a wide pool of useful information. The user’s age, sex and location are obvious metrics, but their friends, photographs and preferences are also available for use. All of these can be mined to present a tailored experience to the user.
It's possible to use this social information in creative ways so that even if the application is a solo experience, users still feel like they are connected to their friends through the game.
A great example is 'Restaurant City' on Facebook. Players run a small restaurant which they decorate and maintain. While playing the game, they may see an actual friend, in the form of a highlighted avatar, come into the room. The avatar even has their friend’s profile photo above its head as it sits down to eat a meal.
In this example, the player’s friend does not have to install the game or even be aware of its existence - the game is using the information it has drawn from the user’s data to give them a personal experience inside the application.
In addition to automatically changing the application based on the social network of the player, it's key to allow users to customise certain elements of the application themselves. Elements might include an Avatar, message Wall or Badge or even a secondary profile within the application.
Personalisation is so compelling in social media because you can instantly show all of your friends what you have created and relate stories about play that involve your choices and connections. You can look at how your friends have personalised their space and make yours look the same, or completely different.
This sense of integration and sharing helps link the application to the real world and the player’s real friends - they can also make connections or links in the social networking world that benefit them in their life outside the application.
Interaction
A strong social application will give users a limited amount of interactions they can perform in a single session.
Unlike a traditional online application or game, which a player can keep hammering until they are eventually finished or bored, good social applications are designed to be played for a much shorter period of time (around 5 minutes per session), but with a higher per-game play frequency, extended over a much longer period.
This is a very important point to bear in mind when thinking about the best way to design your social application. Ask questions such as:
- What is going to keep users coming back on a regular basis?
- In a single session, how long will it take a user to exhaust all their options?
- How do user interactions change over time?
- After a few weeks, will the application still be fun to use?
Social media needs to be designed to be consumed on a casual basis. It should be light, easy to use and frequently reward users who frequently visit. This extended usage has other implications on how the application is to be supported and maintained. Many of the most successful applications are dynamic – they’re constantly evolving by adding new features and new elements to maintain audience and attract newcomers.
Users may expect an open dialogue and have direct communication with you, expecting you to respond promptly to new bugs and exploits that are uncovered and, critically, demand that you run a stable service. This is an extremely important point - social media is much more a service than a product. If you're considering getting into the space, it's vital to think and budget carefully for maintaining your application after release.
Virality
Unless each user on your application invites at least one friend to participate during their lifetime on the app, the application is going to struggle in the long term. Designing viral elements into your app can keep fresh players coming in and make your marketing spend go much further.
It's very important to consider what will make your application viral right at the start of development and build mechanics into the game that will give users a benefit for inviting friends into the application. Some social networks (such as Facebook) forbid direct game incentives for friend invites but it's possible to do this through many other methods such as:
- Unlocking application content based on friend number
- Giving the player daily bonuses or awards based on friend number
- Allowing players to visit friends’ in-game profile or pages and earn benefits from it
- Making having friends in the app integral to attaining a high ‘level’ within the application
In partnership with the way friends work together inside the application, it's also crucial to consider how your application broadcasts data to the social network and the rest of the player’s world.
At Mediatonic we often draw up a large spreadsheet with all possible channels of communication in the social network, cross-referenced with how our application will use them. This can often inspire new thoughts, design elements and features, so it's incredibly valuable to do this early on in the process.
Overall, the most important point is that considering viral elements at the design stage will lead to them being tightly integrated in the overall experience, rather than being a retrospective consideration that will look artificial and ‘tacked-on’.
Branding
Many of the top social applications are original IP. At present there is only one game in the top 25 on Facebook or MySpace that is based on an existing property: Bejeweled.
It is possible to create a successful application that promotes and gains benefits from brand association, but only if it's approached in the right way.
If your application is designed to promote another product or service, minimise the amount of overt selling and avoid constant ‘calls to action’. As opposed to a banner ad or Flash game where you may only get one shot at impressing the player, social games take place over time - so take things slowly. It's easy to kill an application with too much promotion or branding.
When approaching a social game with an existing property in mind (particularly with games) it's important to take the theme or core idea of the property and start again on the design. Standard game or application design does not apply to the social space and any attempts made at porting a game will ultimately not reach their full potential.
We created a Fast & Furious game for the Facebook platform. Although the fast-paced theme of the films lent itself very well to making an action-oriented racing game where players could race against each other, we ultimately decided that this would not be the right fit for a social network. We opted for a much more passive, text based experience that retained the brand messaging without demanding a change in the overall usage pattern that a typical Facebook session has.
Conclusion
In conclusion, think very carefully about what type of content is appropriate for the space when you approach a social media application. They are built on an entirely different set of design principles and it can be a challenge to break old habits. However when the right mix is found, the results can be truly can be staggering.
Author: Paul Croft Creative Director, Mediatonic