It’s All About Fun

I took the time to watch the CommunityNext presentation from the Threadless founders. While the video has a lot of good things in there, there was one point that I thought was above and beyond the rest. An online community is all about fun. When dealing with consumers, if using and interacting with your website and community isn’t fun, then people won’t stick around.

Take a look at some of the most successful online communities. Myspace is a piece of shit, but users have fun making their profiles look like pink barf, posting wacky pictures, and setting Celine Dion as the music to play on their profile page. Facebook, students have fun stalking people, writing funny things on other peoples walls, and engaging in poking wars. Even wikipedia, the blandest of communities, have fun by posting details on things such as the “Five-Second Rule.”

This was even evident in the Yelp research I did a couple months ago when two of the top three reasons people used the site was to “waste time at work” and “socialize with others.” In other words, they found it fun (or at least more fun then work).

A site could be very useful, but if it isn’t fun then you can’t expect users to spend a lot of time using it. Think of it this way; going to class in college or high school is obviously very useful. But most people hated going because it usually wasn’t fun. Furthermore, most wouldn’t go if they didn’t really have to. BUT on those rare days when it was fun (i.e. Field Trip, some wild experiment, etc.) everyone would go to class. Same principle applies to consumer focused community internet sites.

Now I turn it to my readers…what are some ideas to make a site more fun for their users?

[tags]Social Networking, Social Networks, Online Community, Threadless, CommunityNext, Myspace, Facebook, Yelp, Wikipedia, Brian Balfour[/tags]