When it comes to building a website, one of the key factors in establishing a sizable user base is your site’s ability to ‘go viral’. While there isn’t any magic secret to accomplishing this, there are a few things that can help – namely, making it as easy as possible for your users to sign up, and helping them invite their friends. But this is easier said than done, and determining exactly how to implement these seemingly obvious steps can play a huge role in a site’s success.
Product Planner, a new site that launched this week, is looking to help companies tackle this issue. The site has visually mapped out over 100 ‘flows’ that visually depict exactly how many of the web’s most popular services operate. For example, Gmail’s signup flow consists of inviting a vistitor to first click ‘Sign Up for Gmail’, followed by a form asking for information, and finally a confirmation button that says ’show me my account’. It may sound simple, but being able to see each of these side by side can be invaluable when it comes to actually building your site.
Flows are represented as a series of screenshots, arranged in either a circular or linear fashion, depending on how they work (hint: the key to going viral is to create a circular loop). And while many of these ‘flows’ are focused on the site’s all-important signup and invite processes, other flows are more site-specific, like Vimeo’s Video Embed Loop.
The site looks great, with an intutive interface and clean navigation. Users can grab embed codes for Flows that they’d like to share elsewhere, and can also submit their own, though the site already features many of the web’s most popular sites.
That said, the site isn’t perfect. My biggest issue with Product Planner is that there are really no explanations to speak of – you’d never know why one ‘flow’ was better than the others. Granted, you can always pay attention to flows from large companies like Google and Facebook with the expectation that they’ve put a lot of thought into these things, but it’s still tough to figure out exactly why something is working. There aren’t any comments either, which could have also helped users make sense of what they’re looking at (of course, there’s always the risk that people who don’t know what they’re talking about would leave incorrect information).
Product Planner is a product of KISSmetrics, an analytics service that will be launching later this year.
Disclosure: Neil Patel, one of the founders of KISSmetrics, does consulting for TechCrunch through Quick Sprout.
I’ve been using other KISSmetrics services for a while now, and I’ve been waiting for Product Planner for a while!
Product planner(and yes it’s a great product), has been out publicly for 5 months.
Daniel, do you have any invites to KISSmetrics?
This is totally and completely awesome. Really useful for those designing and spec’ing out products.
Wow.
This is awesome. What is the strategy for detailing additional sites flows though?
Very interesting product, especially for PMs. Would definitely be checking it out.
It is great to see, in the examples, that specific measurement metrics are called out for each step.
When Kissmetrics launches . . . they will offer “Keep It Simple Stupid” options for monitoring and measuring success at each step of of the process (creating actionable intelligence).
Who will be their top competitors in this space ?
Certainly looking forward to what they have to offer . . . if Neil is invovled . . . this definitely has the potential to be a real winner.
congrats to Hiten, Neil, & entire KISSmetrics team!
rock on
Product planner would be handy for PMs. I love the flows – the clean look and presentation. But would be better if it is more intuitive – hinting why and in what way one flow is better than the others.
Very nice for social network sites. How about sites that make real money – the flow is critical in understanding why they have succeeded.
I would like to see sites selling real products, like Amazon, http://www.Expedia.com as well as media sites (in travel, for example) – like http://www.fodor.com or
http://www.trip...City-Beach.html
The flow including sign up to purchase or ad clicks would be very good to understand. Why is bowling buddies interesting to these obviously very talented people???
Has anyone actually used this? The site is very buggy and the flash app only works about 10% of the time.
The app doesn’t support fairly basic steps like loops within loops or alternate flows.
But it does look cool and has nice potential. I wanted to like it but as it currently is, it’s rather useless for my software development tasks around web sites.
Weird, it works perfect for me. I use Firefox though.
Should be interesting for my colleagues in product management
Congrats Hiten. We’ve been using KissMetrics for all of our Facebook apps, and it is awesome.