Long term user engagement - what you can learn from World of WarCraft

Posted on October 8, 2008
Filed Under Answers |

How do you make sure your users keep engaged for good? On user generated websites like forums, Q&A sites and message boards you will always have a rather low percentage of highly engaged users that provide the biggest benefit to your site. Just like in the graph below you will see that a relatively small amount of users will contribute the most to your community.

user contribution / number of users

They will provide good content, help to track down abuse and will act in a kind of supervisor role if the platform/software does support a system of administrators, moderators and so on - a multilevel user system that provides members with different rights on the site.

Now for a user on a social UGC platform you will see a couple of different phases they run through during a full life cycle.

A membership life cycle for online communities was proposed by Amy Jo Kim (2000). It states that members of virtual communities begin their life in a community as visitors. After breaking through a barrier, people become novices and participate in community life. After contributing for a sustained period of time they become regulars. If they break through another barrier they become leaders, and once they have contributed to the community for some time they become elders. This life cycle can be applied to many virtual communities, most obviously to bulletin boards, but also to blogs and wiki-based communities like Wikipedia and of course Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers.

membership life cycle for online communities

Peripheral (i.e. Lurker) – An outside, unstructured participation
Inbound (i.e. Novice) – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation
Insider (i.e. Regular) – Full committed community participant
Boundary (i.e. Leader) – A leader, sustains membership participation and brokers interactions
Outbound (i.e. Elder) – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

Now you have to focus on getting the Lurker to join and keep the good users - yes there are bad users as well - for as long as possible in the Regular, Leader part of the overall life cycle to ensure a stable and healthy community website.

There are loads of aspects to tackle to get there. Let me talk about one in specific that does occupy my mind since some years now.

In the 1970s when Pong was released it fascinated and engaged people because it was something new and because it is such an easy game to understand and to play. But after some time everybody felt bored as it is just to one dimensional to keep you engaged long term.

Pong

Then in the 80s with the legendary C64 (I love(d) this computer) the games got more and more complex up to an extent that at the end the entry barrier for a novice user just got to high and thus the target market did not grow as big as it could and even shrunk in some areas as people just did not want to spend hours reading manual before getting started.

Bards Tale - C64

If you look at this very specific area today you will see that the gaming industry has solved this problem and I’m stunned that their massively successful strategies are not yet used widely online to engage and grow the user bases of websites.

Take World of Warcraft for example. A highly engaging game that people all over the world are addicted to, uses a seemingly obvious method to generate these hordes of users willing to pay good money and loads amount of time every month to be part of the game.

World of WarCraft

Now what is this method? Well it’s the same technique you will use to train a dog. You will start with a very high frequency of very positive feedback.

You walk away from the dog call his name and when he follows you give positive feedback every step along the way.

In WOW scenario this means that at the very beginning you will get positive feedback for the simplest of tasks and the first training levels are designed to lure you into this world by “constantly telling you how brilliant you are”.

Later on you will see that the number of tasks you need to accomplish till you get positive feedback get more and more. But as you have invested so much (time) already the human mid goes into a state that is already so addicted to the positive feedback that it is willing to accept this without questioning it.

The real challenge obviously is to figure out what the best frequency of the positive feedback cycles are for your community. And what the best types of incentives. In WoW that might be another user level, an additional weapon or a better armor.

On a website this needs to be translated into positive feedback e-mails, a t-shirt, making someone a moderator and so on.

If you AB test different feedback frequencies you might be surprised how different the retention rate for the users will be based on the group they belong to.

Here is a great article about measuring user engagement.

I’ll leave it here for today but there is much more to say around this.

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