The two most important things we need on our web interface are direct opposites.
We need to be sticky & slippery – simultaneously.
Sticky – we need to keep our audience interested engaged and curious. We’ve got about one second to convince them of this when they arrive.
Slippery – we only grow when our audience feels confident enough to ‘pass it on’ and it’s easy to do.
What makes something do both of the above is different for every on line proposition and the principals change everyday.
[We found this out quickly with our facebook app for Rentoid.com which was blogged about here. It kind of sucks – it’s too boring, so it’s not slippery. We got it wrong and we’ll fix it quick. If we don’t we’ll miss out on the holiday season web surfing period!]
For all web sites and apps our challenge is not to let the technology to lead us to do something, just because we can. We should lead the technology to do something only because it makes us more ‘sticky or slippery’.
We are getting better at being sticky for our site. Before it was too general. Now it is more targeted with landing pages.
Good idea about slippery. We are not at the slippery stage yet. But we need an easy way to pass the site to friend. I guess we need ‘share this’ or something.