Editor’s Note: I’m almost embarrassed to say I actually had to play Frontierville and Farmville to write this post.  These games send notifications constantly and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all my friends knowing how my pigs were doing. Therefore, I had to go undercover and create a new FB account under my Indian alter ego: Amit Kumar

Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it’s inception in 2007. They’re absolutely crushing it with:

• 230 million active monthly users
• 8x user growth over the last 12 months (compared to Facebooks 2.5x growth over same time period)
• $450mil+ in estimated yearly revenues
• an absurd $5bln valuation

How did Zynga become such a profit generating, user acquiring, viral monster? Here’s a few strategies that worked for Zynga which you can apply to your business:

1. Build sharing as an integral part of the product

At every point Zynga prompts users to sign up for updates and send notifications (many times crossing the line) through: fan pages/likes, invites, shares, bookmarks, stream publishing, in game messaging, and email notifications. In fact they’re so darn good at notifying ”Facebook had to change their notification policies

Before you even get started playing you’re prompted to:

- Become a Fan/Like (so they can push updates through your news stream)

- Invite your friends (pro tip: make it look like it’s required)

- Share this page on your news stream

- They again remind you right at the start of the game:

Sharing is not an afterthought limited to an invite section, it’s an integral part of the experience.  In fact the more you share and interact with others, the more you are rewarded.

2. Create ways to elevate a users status/social capital

Zynga doesn’t want you to just invite your friends to play, they want to enable you to do favors for your friends.  Mark Pincus’  (Zynga’s CEO) describes his goal’s in Wired:

One way to think about social capital is we’re all in a certain bucket with each other, and the lowest bucket is maybe you’ll accept a friend request, and the highest bucket is you’ll come over and help me move, or pick me up at the airport,” Pincus told the Wired Business Conference Tuesday. “The question is, is there something we can do to help you move buckets?

While it’s cool (sort of) that I level’d up in Frontierville, I’m not gonna tell my friends about it, but… if I can share with them some of the points I’ve accumulated then that’s a lot more compelling.  It no longer feels like spam, but instead that I’m helping them:

Applying this to a web business don’t just give a discount to the user who invites 5 of her friends to the service, let her pass on the discount to her friends (that’s something you really wanna share).

3. Assume you are gonna get it wrong at first

Don’t assume that your product is “the one.”  Zynga does a great job of experimenting and making decisions based on data.  I love this video of Pincus speaking at Stanford:

Towards the end he is asked if he could go back and share a lesson with himself when he was CEO of Tribes what would it be.

If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one. Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration

This is echo’d by others at Zynga:

Analysis, analysis, analysis. It’s been like that. [In traditional development] It’s just like, “Oh, it’s going to be a great experience,” and this and that. We’ll spend two years down a ship cycle, and, “Oops, I was wrong!”

So now it’s like, “If we do this, I think we can measure that, and here’s how we’re going to measure and tweak it later down the road…” We are an incredibly analytical organization, so we track just about everything. It’s the secret sauce behind all that stuff. There’s a lot of mathematics that go into it

That’s the magic behind what we do. Certain things we do will work, and others won’t. You try new ones, and A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing constant. (Source)

Several hundred A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests going on daily… sweet bejeezus.

4. “Ghetto” test

You don’t actually have to build it to find out if it works.

In the last 5 minutes of the video above Pincus is asked what’s the best way to do market research. His answer – “Ghetto Test”. If someone wants to build, let’s say, a hospital simulator he creates an FB ad that says, “Ever wanted to run your own hospital?” which leads to a survey (or if it’s really ghetto a 404 page).

All Zynga has to do is track CTR and compare it to previous historical rates to get a pretty good idea of demand. I’ve heard a lot of people test demand for a product idea, and A/B test marketing copy using Adwords (you don’t care about the goal, just the intent).

The guys at Aardvark (another product I love) call this Wizard of Oz testing.

5. Kill products that aren’t performing

Focusing on products that don’t work funnels attention and energy away from ones that do.  Even if you’ve made substantial investments know when it’s time to let go.

We’ve actually made investments into some innovative games that were incredibly hardcore. If you look at Guild of Heroes, for example, we did roll that out. It was a version of Diablo built in Flash, and it wasn’t successful, and we didn’t support it any longer. (Source)

6. Create unexpected moments of delight

Surprise your users through game mechanics, humorous copy, badges, and easter eggs.  If you make them smile, they’ll tell they’re much more likely to come back and tell their friends.

One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the ‘Lonely Cow’ feature,” said Skaggs. “You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You’ll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That’s a ‘moment of delight,’ totally unexpected but cool (Source).

7. Leverage your size to cross promote like crazy

The best customer for one of your new products is an existing customer.  If you liked Farmville you’ll looooooooove Frontierville.

• “Zynga has integrated a special invite system that lets you immediately invite all of your FarmVille-playing friends to join you [on Frontierville].”
• They also have a banner at the top of their games calling out the rest of their properties:

Only by leveraging their existing user base were they able to get 100,000 users on Frontierville’s first day.

8. Maximize Trends

Pincus says the web is about repeatable formulas and once you find something that works, it doesn’t break for a long, long time.  Think of LOLcats, rickrolling and Google.  Nothing that Zynga does is new, but they’ve executed on it tremendously well. They’ve found a formula that works and are bangin’ out hits at an astouning rate.

Certainly Zynga has it’s flaws: their games are boring, repetitive, compulsive and shallow and they’ve made shady deals to generate revenue.  But it’s undeniable that they’ve experienced enormous success due to the viral nature of their products.  Anything else I’ve missed in terms of reasons for Zyngas growth?  Lemme know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
2. 2010 Mobile Web Research: India and the World
3. Want to be a billion dollar company? Get 28mil users

There are 13 articles including, Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation, How Micro-Interactions are Changing the Way We Communicate Online, How Tiny Applications are Remaking the Future of the Web, A Look at Games as Tools Not Toys, and Data Visualization for the Online Era. Below are some key takeaways – this is not meant to be a complete summary, just an excerpt to give you an idea of the contents.

Meet the Connected Consumer

• All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations… We’ve found that [consumers] don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution for their needs. Consumers prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world.
• We were most surprised to see widespread acceptance and frequent consumer usage of Web site widgets… This development reinforces our belief that distribution of content and services will trump destinations, as both consumers and Internet technologies continue to evolve. Additionally, it will provide significant challenges for publishers (primarily media and entertainment companies) who currently have no clear path towards monetizing content distribution across the Web.
• Digital Behavior Defies Age: We found today’s connected consumers equally distributed across all age ranges, with a slight skew to older segments. No longer are we seeing Internet technology adoption rates limited to only certain segments. Our study found widespread acceptance of these new service offering and finds older consumers much more likely to spend money online.

Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation

• What is happening is that the concept of social networking is evolving and morphing. It’s now about making the entire Web social instead of just creating a ghetto of destination sites where people have to go to socialize (a la Facebook Connect).
• People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it’s no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives.
• The most recent rapid expansion on the Facebook and MySpace sites came when they opened up their systems and allowed developers to make applications for their sites
• Design for multiple levels of participation
  • Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
  • Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
  • High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
  • Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s “economy”

Putting Jakob Back on the Shelf

• Stop launching your design activity around pages as the medium… We need to build frameworks that power both storytelling and answer-seeking to occur.
• Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions. The new experience might be a conversation; it might be a series of decisions made by the user; it might be an interactive storytelling session. Understand what the customer needs, and just design that.
• Let’s not limit our vision to effective Web editorial styles, properly ordered Cancel and Save buttons, and left aligned lists of mixed capitalization blue links. Let’s design customer experiences that start and end with, well, the customers’ goals and needs—and let’s start with a blank slate. Use storytelling and interaction building blocks—not the building blocks of desktop publishing.

How Micro-Interactions Are Changing the Way We Communicate Online

• At the heart of micro-interactions is the belief that immediacy, simplicity, voyeurism and constant communications matter. The success of the tools lend credence to the notion that quick, possibly frivolous, short bursts of communication are just as useful as more measured, reflective communications.
• Web experiences will need to support communication dynamics that allow users to engage in something and report back to their communities in a Twitter-like fashion. Because they have the portability of a social graph, these micro-interactions will take place anywhere on the Web as people interact with their friends in more locations.

How Tiny Applications Are Remaking the Future of the Web

• One could argue that we are seeing a third wave of software properties—propagated by RockYou—that is differentiated from previous waves based on customization, interactivity and viral distribution.
• We believe that widgets provide the purest glimpse into the new, improved networked future. It’s an interconnected world where people will select, personalize, share and consume Web services wherever and whenever they choose. Effortlessly.

A Look at Games as Tools, Not Toys

• Get to know the product by imagining it as a game… Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.
• People love instant feedback. It creates a sense of reward through a series of small, doable steps. In games, the steps to “winning” are visually represented and easily accessible. This may look like a coin-counting meter, a halo around your avatar or many other things. Mint.com’s dashboard provides instant feedback on your financial goals. It monitors how every swipe of your card affects your budget and net worth, and even how your spending compares to others in the same city.

Data Visualization for the Online Era

• The next time you are tasked with providing users with consumption or performance information, or a way of comparing the past, present and future, think of the questions the users are trying to resolve. Then get creative and provide the answers visually. Consider how quickly they can use the information to decide to buy, change, stop or reconsider. Ensure the style of the visuals reinforces a brand personality. The result? Users who will feel empowered, engaged and appreciative that you have saved them precious time and allowed them to make a decision with confidence.

In case this report isn’t enough reading for you can download last year’ report: Desigining for Constant Change.

Related posts:

1. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
2. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
3. An Intro to Social Data Portability

• Songza – Songza is a music search engine that allows you to find, store and stream music. I use this site pretty regularly to check out new music. The site was started by a usability consultancy called Humanized, these guys are good, and are trying new things. The interface is deceptively simple, search for a song, then clicking on it allows you to play, rate, share or add to playlist. I like how deceptively robust the site is making good use of just in time design (only show menus/controls when users ask for them). The hot keys (space plays/pauses, forward arrow goes to next song, etc…) and controls only appear on the bottom of the screen when you begin playing a song. Check out my profile to see what I’ve been listening to lately.
• Mint – Mint is a free personal finance site. When I first signed up it took me about 5 minutes to import all my bank account information, credit cards, investments and loans (which in itself is very impressive). From there it tells me how to save money by switching to credit cards with better rates, consolidating loans, etc… It shows you where your money is being spent and allows you to set budgets and alerts on seperate categories (food, entertainment, travel, etc…) This site is fast and easy to use and utilizes nice, visual representations of where your money is going. The UI is very clean and feels very web 2.0 (lots of icons, gradients, rounded corners) without being cliche.

What are your favorite sites (in terms of usability and UI?

Related posts:

1. Why free software usability tends to suck

Since becoming a Ubuntu user, I have been diving deeper into the open source world and generally agree with the overall themes of this article. Expanding on a few the author’s points:

• Usability is hard to measure – For a long time top executives didn’t understand the business value of good design. They wanted something that worked, and didn’t care about how intuitive it was. With Apple’s second coming (circa 2001 iPod), business leaders are beginning to recognize that good usability is a competitive advantage and core competancy which will positively impact your bottom line.
• Usability suggestions aren’t encouraged – While most open source projects have long lists of bugs and patches, none that I have seen have an obvious repository of pending design enhancements or usability suggestions.
• Developers aren’t necessarily designers – Although I’m sure it’s out there in some capacity, I have never seen any postings inviting UX/HCI to participate in open-source software (update: I searched for open source usability and came across this site). I also think psychologically, for a pet project, developers could potentially be less interested in working on a project if a UI solution has already been dictated. Part of the reason why people contribute to open-source projects is to work on the skills that they are lacking or enjoy but don’t do regularly (i.e. design).
• Too many cooks – Usability is a science (not) entirely separate from development. Design by committee almost never works (unless that committee is trained and educated in design).
• Leaving little things broken – Sometimes in a crunch, we tend to focus on getting the functionality completed knowing that there are bugs or boundary conditions which will break our app. While the likelihood of these events occurring are small, a lot of little bugs add up to a poor user experience.
• Too many options and features – Whether in life or software, people think more choices are better. Sometimes your path is much clearer when unnecessary choices are removed.

Check out the full list

Related posts:

1. Examples of Good, Usable Websites