Product Manager: Product must be fun to use

Fun is not the first thing that a product manager thinks about when designing a product.  Especially those of us in enterprise software market.  People think that making something fun would only apply to companies like Zynga, Electronic Arts, etc.  But I think we all want a fun product as consumers, and we are all underestimating the effect of having fun when we use the product.

A classic example of a fun product is computer games.  It is purposefully created to deliver 'fun' to users.  So if we analyse what games deliver to their players, we must be getting closer to definition of 'fun'.

There are many wonderful talks available on YouTube about introducing game mechanics to your product, so called gamification.  I recommend talks by Amy Jo Kim, Gabe Zichermann, and Jane McGonigal.

Let me put them in my own words.  A fun product does following things:

Crash of social IPOs

Facebook is trading at 18.03.  Compared to its initial price of $38, it's at less than half of its original value.  Zynga, social gaming powerhouse, is also trading at its fraction of IPO price.  Today Zynga ended at 2.80.  It has dropped about 70% from its original value.

Facebook ended its day at 18.06.
Facebook needs to focus on its customers,
and that means mobile and marketers

Danger of banking on fast growing user base

The sensation of mobile gaming industry, Draw Something, has been losing its steam.  Its daily active users has been steadily trending down since 4/3.  Coincidentally it was shortly after OMGPOP got acquired by Zynga.  What was supposed to be the next Angry Bird franchise is showing a sign of slowing down, or even contracting significantly.  What might be causing this downward trend?

OMG, it popped, but now it's falling;
time to innovate before it turns into a pumpkin

There are lot of speculations out there.  Some say it is Zynga's acquisition that turned off most of early users to stop playing.  Some speculate that it could have been OMGPOP losing their own creative independence to innovate the product fast enough to sustain the level of growth.  Whatever it might have been, it is very strange that the drop started to happen right after Zynga's acquisition.

I don't think anyone knows the answer for sure.  But what is clear is that keeping users engaged does not happen on its own.  It takes constant tweaking of product, enhancements, bugfixes to keep users engaged and come back the next day for more.  Just as fast as users started using a product, users can  just as easily move on to the next new thing once they get bored with the old.  The half life of product is getting shorter.

Social media can be so effective it could create appearance of mass adoption literally over night.  But having a dedicated fan base and serving them to build a greater adoption are different from just getting bigger faster.

When we look at unbelievably successful launch of Kony 2012, we see the similar story.  After unprecedented viewership and interest within its first week of YouTube video launch, its Cover the Night protest turned out to be a whimper at best.

Number of times 'kony' was searched on Google

Perhaps getting big too fast is not such a good thing.  If we learned anything from two economic bubbles in the past decade, we should have healthy dose of skepticism on anything that's too good to be true.  After all what goes up fast must slow down and fall.

Zynga's own social platform

Yesterday Zynga announced that they will start offering games on Zynga.com.  Announcement included that Zynga will provide popular games, such as Cityvill, Farmville and Words with Friends on their website with social elements.  You'll be able to play with no only your friends but also other social gamers who are looking for quick and easy social game play.

Zynga.com will let people play with other gamers

From Zynga's perspective this is an important step to gain an independent platform that they control.  Zynga has built their fortune on top of Facebook social platform, and Facebook has also enormously benefited from Zynga's huge success.  Now that Zynga is getting traded publicly and needs to control its own destiny, creating a social gaming platform of its own makes good sense.

Interesting thing is to see how Zynga.com will be received by current and future gamers.  Because most of users are on Facebook, it makes little sense for Zynga to launch exclusive games for Zynga.com platform.  At the same time, Zynga must think of a way to draw people into their Zynga.com platform and make it sticky for those gamers to come back to play at their site if this launch were to be meaningful.

From Facebook we've seen that personal relationship and social graph were the main drivers for explosive growth.  Without personal relationship aspect, Zynga may have difficult time to build the user base on Zynga.com.  But then you can also argue Zynga has fueled the initial ramp up at Facebook by attracting users to play simple and easy social games.  Whatever happens, it's clear that Facebook and Zynga are trying to become more independent of each other.