z on life

In consumer web, how can you avoid the constant urges to build for yourself? One great way is to run through the thought experiment of building a product for someone as little like you as possible. Invade the unknown territory that is urban America, the economically challenged family, a youth age group, the opposite gender, or better yet, all of these at once.

So how would this go if I were doing it? I would describe myself as the following:

• 20 year old white male
• Socio-economically upper-middle class suburban upbringing
• Well-educated at the masters level from a top university
• Technology enthusiast, sports fan, avid reader
• Facebook versus MySpace? — Facebook

Knowing that, then, who would it be fun to build for?

• An urban demographic with low socio-economic standing
• Teenage girls who hate school
• Someone who thinks MySpace and YouTube are the entire Internet
• Anyone who didn’t go to college

Let’s say your building for any or all of these characteristics. How do you do it?

To approach this very hard problem, you need to be systematic. If you can’t immerse yourself in the culture, then you should at least talk to some people who are in it day-to-day. Listen to them talk about daily life. If you abstract away the unimportant details, it is likely that you are very much alike in the raw elements of life that provide happiness. The key is to find the analogies between your experience and their reality so you can come to terms with why they like the things they do. Pull out these analogies, understand the core elements of life that provide happiness, and surround them with a context that is agreeable to whoever you’re building for.

So let’s say I am building for an urban teen girl who has no plans to go to college, works at a fast food restaurant, and is a huge MySpace party girl. First of all, if you think most of America is far, far different than this, you’re way off base. To be mass market, this is precisely who you need to build for. So the question is, what should be built for this huge and actually very average audience? To start, consider what they might like: YouTube, party pictures, stating their BFFs, rap music, glitter text, flashy MySpace layouts, hot celebrity photos, scandalous personal photos, flirting online, phone wallpapers, pimped-out text with misspellings, music videos, Apple Bottom jeans, and so much more.

So right now you might be tempted to make a mash-up to ‘best’ hit this demographic, something like an embeddable photo slideshow player with background rap music sequences for MySpace that features a glittered border and pimped out subtitles that let’s users post shout-outs to each other. This is exactly how to get a horrible and contrived product that will fail miserably. Instead, try to understand what these ‘things they like’ are really telling you about the psychology that drives them.

YouTube and the music videos (and a lack of things like news articles) tell you that they like visual media way more than text-based media and will want a product that provides instant gratification in a rich way with little effort. The Apple Bottom jeans, and rap music are things that indicate a need to self-identify with a unique culture and specific icons, symbols, brands, and activities. The phone wallpaper, pimped text, flashy layouts, and glitter text represent self-expression and the ability to show uniqueness, creativity, and present themselves in an eye-catching way so they’re differentiated to those around them. The party photos are displays of social proof of popularity. The flirting and scandalous personal photos are all mechanisms of reaching out to sexuality and demonstrating personal value and power in a social way. Hot celebrity pictures are icons of future aspiration. Finally, prominently displaying BFFs shows a need for attention and the reciprocation of affection and relationship.

When you boil these things down you get the raw elements: entertainment, identity, expression, uniqueness, popularity, sexuality, power, aspiration, attention, affection, and relations. If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t want or need these things, I would be surprised. So, what we’ve shown is this demographic that at first seemed very mysterious is actually quite predictable in its desires when you break things down. So, getting back to product, the key is to think subtly about the ways each of these raw human levers are pulled in their lives. They certainly are not pulled in the same way for me as they are for the demographic we’ve been discussing. In fact, something I like might not resound at all with them, and vice versa. The devil is in the details. It’s not that the emotions themselves are different for different people, but the contexts around them certainly are.

Translating context can be as easy as changing ‘flirt’ to ‘holla at’, Zegna suits to Air Jordans, or the PGA to the NBA. It can be as hard, however, as having to completely rethink a communication medium because a certain demographic uses text messaging instead of email. Compare the demographic you’re building for to the one you’re most used to. What if the new demographic is less likely to care about friends’ recommendations of products? What if the social circles of the demographic are based on 100 looser relationships instead of 5 very close friendships? What if the demographic works on average 3 more hours in the day and has less time to spend on the computer? What if their interactions with others online are more direct and they won’t hesitate to send a bulletin to 300 people? What if they are more likely to give someone a virtual gift? Questions like these are the questions that need to be asked. They are extremely subtle. The raw emotions stay constant across demographics, but these minute details of context and process do not. They can shatter the success of a site that relies on an axiom of life that does not hold for the target audience.

So, if you understand the subtleties of the context, you can likely build a great product bottom up. Start with some strong emotional drivers, wrap them in appropriate context that fits the demographic, and tie them together with some core functionality that makes a user happy. I know this is easier said than done, but if you really understand you’re users and are good at evoking core emotion with products, you should have no problem. You just need to frame your attack to hit the right targets and use the right weapons.

So what is the actual product? I will leave that up to your creativity! The point of this wasn’t product. It was process. I get off easy this time :).