Barriers to Exit

John Ludwig posted a link to a presentation by Amy Jo Kim at ShuffleBrain titled "Putting the Fun in Functional – Applying game mechanics to functional software". I'm not even sure why I clicked on it, I'm not a gamer, but I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

While the entire presentation is great, the best lesson of all, IMHO, comes on slides 46 & 47: "Customization creates investment and creates barriers to exit". This is huge and it was nice to see someone lay it out like that. We are always talking about lowering barriers to entry, but it is rare to see someone write about barriers to exit.

When building a product, it is difficult to constantly play "let's out-feature the competition". While you must always have new or updated features in the pipeline (ideally developed and ready to launch in a competitive response), the reality is a better product will always come along and people will want to switch (its human nature). Your user, I'm sorry to say, will sign-up for an account (if it's free), look around, go back to the service they currently use, and, if you've done your job, determine that it would simply be too much work to switch.

As much as I have issues with the current crop of social networks, the reality is, they have this down pat. The nature of a "social network" implies that I am actively connecting with other people, and therefore am making an implicit investment. The problem for non-social networks is that you have to work at building this type of user investment. Take the image hosting service Flickr. They have built in a number of features that, to take full advantage of the system, require investment. The user can look at other photo-sharing sites that come online, and probably will, but as soon as they look at the work it will take to move their images and the associated meta-data, this becomes quite daunting and they will stick with Flickr, thank you very much.

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