Sparking a Crush: Attracting and Retaining New Users

For “people-powered” services, from Yahoo! Answers to MySpace, attracting and retaining a critical mass of active participants is essential. Unfortunately, the web has become saturated with social sites, and people’s attention is spread thinner than ever. If a service does not create a personal connection during sign-up and ramp-up, it will quickly be forgotten.

To create a new user experience that leaves users itching to go further, you must understand and appeal to people’s motivations. In this session, through examples from the Web 2.0 landscape and Adaptive Path’s work for MySpace, you’ll examine motivational design strategies used by successful sites to:

• Give people compelling and tailored reasons to join.
• Nudge new users to get established and stay active.
• Retain users by accelerating connection-making.

By blending concrete examples with people-centered principles, this session will not only leave you with a toolkit of patterns you can put to use immediately, it will give you the understanding you need to generate your own.

This is a designated Web2Open Hybrid session, with a follow up discussion scheduled in Web2Open at 3:50 pm.