读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part II

As to the stuff itself, Gladwell summarized it as - the Stickiness Factor(附着力法则): "The quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea."

To get user stuck, Gladwell suggested the followings:
1.Simple and Intuitive UI. Don't make the user think, no more effort is needed to use it.
2.Make it Practical and Personal: user can complete the operations easily, and let user feel the view is specific to him/her.
3.Interactive with User: Let user feel involved, let user feel being part of the whole system.

Let's use the Internet industry as study case. In web design community, there is a popular book named "Don't Make Me Think". The main idea is the same as Gladwell pointed: simple and intuitive user interface, then there will be little cost for the user to try the features you provide.

Personalized view is another core value of modern web applications. In past time, there were many portal web sites, like yahoo, cnn, msn etc. When people visit these sites, every one get the same thing, nothing different. But people are different, they have various interests and personal preferences, they wish to own their personalized view of these information. As web information keep on exploding, the need for customization keep on rising. Many pioneer content provider now exploit these results, they provide personalized view of their content. For example, Yahoo provide myYahoo, and CNN provide rss feed that user can subscribe, both enable the personalized view of the whole content.

As to the "Interactive with user" principle, I think this is the most important character that makes web 2.0 differ from conventional web 1.0. In web 1.0 age, the web site owner is the creator of all the content, they determine what the site looks like, what user will get. While in web 2.0 ages, the user of the web site created the content, they have control on the finally view of the whole system. For example, in Digg, Slashdot, there is no such positions as editor, every user is author and editor. You can submit news to the site, you can rank/comment it, which will affect the finally popularity of this news.

Another observation is from modern search engines. Nowadays, both Google and Yahoo provide login/personalized search. These search engines will record your search history and will use these information to customize/tune your search result, which will form a good feedback loop to improve the search quality. This feature exploits both "Personalized view" and "Interactive with user", although there were some privacy risks.

When you interactive with the web application, when you submit content and when you got personalized view of the content, you feel like becoming part of the whole system. You will never think of leaving out of it, because you lose too much if you do so.

Thus, the web site get you stuck to it successfully, which forms another important factor of making something get popular as Gladwell pointed out in this book.
[To be continue]