10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps: #10 Playful

Fred Wilson is a successful venture capitalist. His investment firms have stakes in such technology companies as Twitter, Etsy, Boxee, Meetup, Foursquare, and Tumblr. In February 2010 he spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps conference.

Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps:

10. Playful

Last but not least, is playful…

… the ability to play in an application is really important. The game dynamic is what you can use to get users to do what you want. An example I like to use here is something that’s not even a web app [Weight Watchers does, in fact, offer a web app version of its service]. If you think about Weight Watchers, it’s a game. It has some really important game dynamics. You establish goals, measure yourself against those goals, and you report against those goals, and you get rewarded for meeting those goals. That game dynamic is the thing that ultimately makes Weight Watchers successful for some people.

That kind of approach should be, in some way, shape, or form, in every application. If you look at LinkedIn, when it first launched, I had friends who were manically trying to accumulate relationships in LinkedIn. You saw that with people trying to accumulate followers in Twitter, friends in Facebook, and that’s one kind of game dynamic. There are clearly other kinds of game dynamics out there.

Foursquare would be an example of taking very much game elements like status, badges, and things like that, and using that as a way to empower the development of what is, effectively, a local information service. You don’t have to be as blatant about it as Foursquare is, but I do think that applications need to be playful. It will make users have more fun using your application, and because you can incent the kind of behavior you want to create in your application.