How to make your product interesting?

    Earlier last year I participated in a resource sharing product. The general concept of the product is to share a certain folder on your computer, and then others can go in and check it. This is a very simple idea, and many evil products have done this before. And the product we made only made a small change, turning the user’s display into a computer, as if you can see each computer in the local area network. Then after the product went online, we found some interesting things: 1. Some users are very worried that their computers will be insecure by using this tool (in fact, we are just sharing a folder); 2. Many users do not have download requirements. But I also like to refresh the list to find interesting things on other people’s computers. Because the product was too evil at the beginning, on Douban, there were also users who specially opened a “Share the downloads and sharing of people around you” activity, which had a miraculous effect on the promotion of the product at the beginning.

       At that time, I began to think that similar products have been available for a long time, why are there still users who are keen on this thing?

       Of course, the core experience of the product is to find various resources. However, the fun of interaction has accelerated the spread of the product and the acceptance of users. This fact to a large extent makes me think: When a user finds a product interesting, the product is half the success.

So I naturally had this thinking: what kind of products will make users find interesting?

       Maybe I should go and see what those successful products have done. So I started thinking about all kinds of products that made me have fun.

Maybe, the fun is just a different way.

       As the first Internet product that the post-85s came into contact with, it was QQ. I remember that when I was in junior high school, everyone would enjoy chatting on QQ. Recalling the scene of my first contact with QQ, I suddenly realized that at that time, I didn’t think QQ was such a “useful” thing in my first consciousness. I just thought it was very interesting: I could talk to a “stranger”. to chat with”. Then something you know happened. “Everyone is using it” is an irresistible reason to use it.

       And why do I find QQ interesting? I wonder if it was because at that time I could only do things through the phone (mobile phones were not popular), but I could actually do it in a “changed way”. Just like someone who likes to eat watermelon, you cut it for him and cut it in half for him to eat with a spoon. Often the latter will have more fun. So maybe you can open a restaurant near your company. It is stipulated that people who eat must hold it with their hands. No matter what the taste is, I believe it will be all the rage.

        Looking back at most of the popular products on the Internet, they often copy offline life on the Internet, because they give users a way that they don’t get and make them feel very interesting.

       So the first point of interesting products: changing the way of experience may make your product interesting.

    Of course, when I wrote the above point, I deeply felt that this may not be regarded as a summary. Copying offline life on the Internet seems more like an analysis of needs. We want to make friends, so With facebook, we want to chat, so with QQ, this is a universal demand. Another way of experience is, what is said is the same as what is not said? ——I think I should find something that is not so universal to explain why a different way of experience makes a product interesting.

    I suddenly thought of a product, his name is pinterest. Before the emergence of pinterest, the consumption of pictures has been proved to be valuable by many products, but the emergence of pinterest has made the consumption of pictures have a very strange response. He did not create demand, he just used an interesting way to let you Browsed the picture. So he became extremely successful. From the experience of pinterest, I seem to be able to infer that on the Internet, the more mature the experience, the more opportunities it represents. Perhaps in 5 years, a new way of browsing pictures will completely replace pinterest. An Internet product that everyone talks about. He didn’t do anything, just changed what you are used to.

    So, if you are designing a mature Internet product , you might as well try to change what users are accustomed to. Maybe, users will find it very interesting.

 Uncertain things may be more interesting

       The second product I thought of was WeChat. And I would think that WeChat is not about his voice chat (voice chat? What a boring idea^^), but the shaking of hundreds of millions of people a day. I think that is an “interesting” feature. Why should I shake him?

       A special 2b incident happened when I was in college. A friend told me that there was a game called “Name War”. What is it for? Enter two names, and then a battle of two people’s names appears on the screen. During the whole process, you only need to enter your own words, and then wait for it to be remembered. As a result, the buddies in the dormitory all got together to play this boring game very 2B. Why do everyone have so much fun to do such boring things?

    I think this thing is the same as buying lottery tickets. When you have a good expectation, you will see the results more clearly. In fact, everyone is looking forward to money for nothing and beautiful women who meet unexpectedly. Maybe I will get a beautiful woman who understands that I appreciate me, right?

        So the second point of interesting products: give the user an expectation, and then give him an unpredictable result, which may be quite interesting.

    For example, you can set up a website for promotion of small games, make a function to try your luck on the website, and place it in a certain position on the homepage. What does this function do? Users just need to point me to randomly recommend a game to you, don’t you like it? Change it when you order it, and I’ll change it for you. This feature is very costly. It only requires a small location and a small animation. Maybe it can increase the user time, or you can tell him after the random result, 250 2b youths also find this game very boring! ~Why? Because game users, you know, boredom, noobs + time are their biggest characteristics. (If the above functions are used by game websites, please give me creative fee! ^^)

If it makes me special, it might be interesting

    At about this time last year, a product called IFTtt appeared, and everyone in the industry should be aware of it. What product is this? In simple terms, he customizes your behavior. For example, you can define: when a girl you like sends a Weibo on Weibo and this Weibo has a geographic location, then your phone will receive this girl’s Weibo Content, and with her geographic location. What an interesting thing, I think I can definitely use him to do some more interesting things-although I don’t have a good plan now. Then I couldn’t wait to share this website with my friends around me. Although the facts later proved that the cumbersome operation really made me not enthusiastic to continue playing, I still think ifttt is a very interesting product. The feeling similar to this product happened in another APP that I downloaded recently. This application is called “Pimp My Hair”. What can it do? You only need to take a photo of yourself, and then he will give you various hairstyles, post them on your own head, and then you can share him on twitter or facebook. (Don’t tell me you think this is boring, I am on the download leaderboard!)

    You can find a lot of products with these displays, such as Talking XXX. I observe that these products occupy the position of this popular download for a long time. What are their commonalities? ——Perhaps, they only provide a way to make me special. Really, you don’t know why you can have such a lot of fun by making some changes in your voice, but it is actually what happened.

        So the third point of interesting products: Provide a feature that can make users special, and perhaps make the product more interesting .

    There are many product designs based on this principle, such as the graffiti function when chatting? For example, how about adding a voice changer function to your voice chat tool?

Will beautiful things be interesting?

    Recently, a new version of a product of the company was released. This version hardly does anything else, but replaces all the UI in the original product with a game-style design. You can understand that it is just like the theme in the mobile phone. It has been replaced. A theme. In the absence of any promotion, there are 30W users who go online every day. In fact, I am not surprised at this result, because when I saw this “theme”, I was also amazed by him. As a loyal player of World of Warcraft, I felt a sense of excitement when I saw the “theme”. I feel that if I were an ordinary user, I would also want to use it. Is visual pleasure considered fun? Whether you think it counts or not, I think it counts anyway. But this visual interest must come from the projection of the visual effects on the user’s emotions. For example, I think this game theme is very interesting, and your girlfriend may find him boring; for example, if you change your QQ to look like your college admission letter, you must feel very married, but I will think you are boring.

        So the fourth point of interesting products: a pleasant design that conforms to the user’s emotional projection, which may make users find it interesting.

    When I finished writing this point, I suddenly felt that it was not very convincing. Isn’t it like telling you that you should make a corresponding design for your target users? Who doesn’t know this? ——This is indeed the case, but when you look back at your project, have you found that how many times have you compromised the design that you are not satisfied with in terms of the priority of the requirements? In other words, when you are too busy, do you often neglect the design? So, maybe when your product comes out, you have already given up the opportunity to make users find it interesting.

More interesting?

    Another interesting product is 360. There are two things that impressed the most about 360:

    One is that when playing a 10-player dungeon in World of Warcraft, the leader suddenly said that the machine has a special card, and it needs to be restarted. After that, it will be offline and restart. We will wait in the dungeon. 10 minutes have passed, the leader still Not online, waiting for everyone’s mood to collapse when the leader is online. Then everyone started to complain. I don’t know who said something, did your 360 tell you that you defeated 0.001% of the computers in the country? (1000 words omitted here) A group of disasters talked from China to Japan on the issue of 360 boot prompt time (don’t ask me, I don’t know why such a boring topic can be talked so enthusiastically at that time.——#). But I did start from that time, and suddenly felt that the 360 ​​boot time prompt is an interesting design;

    The second thing happened on Weibo. A friend posted a 360 software assistant quiz on his Weibo, which roughly means “From the software you downloaded, you must be a browser. Product manager? Otherwise, who would be bored with so many browsers?” I immediately laughed when I saw this Weibo, because that friend is indeed a product manager and used to be a browser. So I immediately opened the software assistant on my computer and tested it. I forgot what it turned out. It was not what I expected anyway (for example, you are a XX product manager or something^^).

    Then think about the various reposts on Weibo again. It is not difficult to see that a large number of users are very keen on reposting what horoscope, and what drives them behind this keenness? I personally think that it is a kind of comparative psychology: it is better to be lucky than one of us, to have more peach blossoms than to one of us, and to be more unlucky than one of us. People are really weird. We say that we don’t love comparison, but in our hearts we are eager to gain a sense of spiritual superiority through comparison. For example, when boys are young, who must urinate farther than others?

So the fifth point of interesting products: It may be interesting to have “comparative” features.

    For example, if you want to design an app to check the horoscope on Renren.com, then you can tell the user that his current fortune is unexpected, and you can tell him in the result that you are better than A and B in terms of money fortune. Poor, the worst of your friends will be C! Hurry up to remind C! ——I think this is quite interesting.

In fact, we should all learn from games

    When I was sorting out the interesting features of various products, I suddenly found that if you want to find more interesting elements of this kind, you should go play the game. In all kinds of popular games, they are incisively and vividly showing you something. Such elements will be very interesting.

    Here I can share a few examples with you:

Make me jump up

    I think I played online games earlier, from the earliest Stone Age to Legend, Jin Yong, etc., but the longest one is World of Warcraft. During my university, I played other games for a while, but I always felt upset, but you must not know where I am upset-I am upset that my character can’t jump up, and I don’t know why I am so. I am keen to keep jumping in the game, and now I think about it, maybe he gave me another different way of walking.

Random skills

    There is another game I only recently played. For a week, I played every day, walking and sleeping. This game is called Devil Warriors, his play is very simple, create a character, fight monsters to upgrade, learn skills. It sounds nothing special. The key is that his way of fighting monsters is not like a PC game. You still need to operate. In this game, you don’t need to operate. Fighting is just a few very simple animations. The result of the battle is told by the system— —It’s boring. But there is a setting that is very obsessive to me. The skills he gives you characters appear randomly in 80 skills. You can get skills through provincial level or purchase props, and I just want to get more. Skills make myself awesome and struggle every day, almost costing RMB. –#

Beauty police

    This is a very popular game on iOS recently. It probably means that there is a sexy and beautiful policewoman trapped in the parking lot. You need to move the various cars in the parking lot and let the beautiful policeman leave. Of course, if the beautiful police officers are successfully allowed to leave, these beautiful police officers will satisfy some special wishes. ——Very evil game. After I downloaded it, I played it. It was a rather boring game. The reward for seemingly provocative is nothing more than the policewoman putting on all kinds of interesting clothes. But how popular is your funny game? ——The first place in IOS free games.

    The ambiguous settings, ambiguous game scenes, and ambiguous sounds have created a successful game.

Does the product have to be interesting?

    I think whether a product is interesting or not is not a question of whether 1+1 is necessarily equal to 2. It is just an empirical parameter, and the “interesting” function may not really affect the success of your product, but it can at least achieve the following Two very attractive effects:

    Interesting features can make users feel happy in the product, and increase users’ desire to explore the product, especially if your product is a product that requires a lot of user experience to feel cool.

    ——Such as WeChat’s easter eggs and Shake.

    Interesting features can increase the speed of product dissemination.

    – For example, I will share my finest creations in the sing. I don’t need to say how good viral marketing is, right?

Finally, a summary:

    I have always felt that many work theories of product managers are like physics and probability learned in college. First, it’s just sorting out some general rules and then just making sense; second, I can only say that if you do what I just said, 90% of your products will become interesting, but Really, but after you did that, someone said something boring, sorry, the remaining 10% has nothing to do with whether the theory is correct; third, if you want to be serious with me, you will lose~^^

Leave a Reply