Product Operation | How do stranger social products guide users?

Regarding stranger social products for the purpose of making friends, falling in love and dating, some people comment that “the user is the product”.

Indeed, no matter what kind of stranger dating product it is, it ultimately comes down to the exchange and communication between two people, and the chat atmosphere and feelings of the two people will greatly affect the user's experience of the product.

I divide the stages of chatting between two strangers into three parts: breaking the ice, warming up, and maintaining the conversation .

This basically completes the chat process between two people on a stranger dating product. If the two people make any further breakthroughs in the future, they will move to offline dating.

Although what can be done for social interaction between two strangers at the product level is very limited, it is not impossible. For example, most stranger dating products encourage users to use real-life photos and fill in basic information such as interests and hobbies. Therefore, this time I would like to use Soul as an example to discuss stranger dating products and what can be done at the product level in these three stages.

Special Notes:

• The stranger social products mentioned in this article refer to stranger social products that focus on making friends and dating, such as Tantan and Momo, and do not include broad stranger social products such as Jike and Douban.
• The reason why soul is used as the main example is because soul focuses on friendship matching based on the mind and world outlook, and I think it does a relatively good job in guiding chats.
• This article is more of a summary. If there are any errors, I hope we can discuss them together.

1. Breaking the Ice

I think there are two ways to break the ice between two strangers at the product level: stimulating interest and guiding interaction .

To stimulate interest means that two strangers discover their common points, or discover what they appreciate about each other to break the ice between them.

This method is indispensable in stranger dating products. Taking soul as an example, even if a user does not post any moments or photos, he must do the matching test that comes with soul - that is, the stranger dating product has already started doing this work at the matching level.

For example: If it is a stranger dating product that matches people based on geographic location and real photos, when a user finds that another user is very close to him or her, or sees his or her face, he or she will naturally become interested in chatting. Interactive guidance refers more to guiding users to break the ice for the first time at the product interaction level.

1. Spark interest

Figure 1.1Soul’s interest-stimulating guidance in the chat interface

As shown in Figure 1.1, there are three ways to stimulate interest in the chat interface of Soul:

The first aspect is: it is formed directly based on the product positioning of soul’s mind matching.

We can find that: the interface shows from top to bottom what type of planet the other person comes from. We can understand that this is a type of person that Soul summarizes for users through question tests; the second line shows the degree of match between the two people; the third line is a detailed report on the match between the two people. Clicking in can see the compatibility and incompatibility of the two people tested.

I personally think this way of stimulating interest is similar to astrology tests.

The second aspect is: Soul will directly show the three common places between two people.

For example: the user will be told that they were both born after 1995 and belong to the same zodiac sign, and Soul Intelligent will introduce key words to guide the user to start a topic. As shown in Figure 1, soul’s introduction is: Talk to him/her about your favorite things to do on rainy days.

The third aspect is: directly enter the other party’s personal space to view the moment, which is similar to viewing the WeChat Moments.

Among these three aspects, I think the best way to stimulate users' interest and break the ice is to stimulate them by checking the moments posted in the other party's personal space. Just like everyone comes to make friends hoping to make friends with interesting people, watching moments is similar to watching Moments of Friends, both of which allow you to get a preliminary idea of ​​whether the other person is the type of person you want to find through the other person's life.

However, this method requires constantly encouraging users to post more moments, so Momo and Jimu-type dating products will encourage users to post real photos, stimulate interest through appearance or directly stimulate users' desires.

In summary, stimulating interest is more about stimulating the user's subjective initiative and mobilizing the user's enthusiasm to break the ice.

2. Interactive Guidance

Figure 1.2 Soul’s guidance on the interactive level of the chat interface

Soul's icebreaking at the interactive level is guided from two aspects:

The first aspect is: when you enter the chat interface for the first time, Soul will automatically recommend greeting emoticons above the input bar.

There are two benefits to doing this: first, the cost for users to click on emoticons is very low, which can effectively encourage users to break the ice; on the other hand, for users who are greeted, emoticons are more interesting, easier to reply, and can inspire the two to communicate further.

The second is: users only need to click on the icon with the word hi above the emoticon package to enter the soul’s built-in manual help interface, and then continue to click on “how to start a chat topic”, and soul will continue to recommend various opening topics.

The reason why I also include this point in the guidance at the interactive level is that this method does not stimulate the user's independent enthusiasm, but is more of a detailed guidance.

At the interactive level, the role of the product should be to allow users to enter the chat topic faster and have a more convenient and quicker way of chatting. However, compared with the level of stimulating interest, this level has relatively little effect on breaking the ice between two users.

2. Heating

After the initial basic information exchange and ice-breaking, I define the subsequent stage as warming up .

This stage determines whether two users can upgrade their relationship after the initial ice-breaking or return to being strangers.

As for the core of this stage, I think it should be about interaction , that is, two people can have more interactivity beyond the exchange of basic information. Just like offline, two strangers may still be strangers after having a meal together, but if the two can interact and play games together, they may be able to upgrade their relationship from strangers.

Figure 2.1 The red heart on the soul chat interface and the soulmate on the message interface light up

In this regard, Soul has two ways to incentivize users:

The first one is: during the two days of being together, a red heart will be filled up continuously, and when 3 red hearts are filled up, a soulmate letter will light up. When all the letters are lit up, two people can open up a common space that belongs to them.

The advantage of this method is that it visualizes the upgrade of the relationship between two people and can be measured intuitively, thereby continuously encouraging the two users to interact and improve the relationship.

Figure 2.2Soul’s pia play function

The second way is: Soul launched a game function similar to role-playing. Soul will intelligently recommend a two-person script, and then the two users will play according to the content of the script.

Essentially, I think this way of building relationships is similar to playing games together. Further thinking, in addition to role-playing, you can also launch highly interactive small games such as "Truth or Dare", "Play King of Glory Together", "Play Landlord Together", etc., which can quickly enhance the relationship between two people.

3. Maintain

At this stage, I think the effect at the product level will be very weak. Soul’s incentive method at this stage is to open a common space for two people. Because the author has not discussed this aspect with anyone, he does not know what the interface of Soul is like for this function.

But I think that no matter how the chat reaches this stage, if you want to maintain the relationship and continue to heat up, it requires more collisions between the two users. No matter what efforts we make at the product level, it will not affect or change users. Boring people are still boring, and interesting people are still interesting.

IV. Conclusion

Obviously, the most critical part of stranger dating products is: how to help two users break the ice?

Therefore, whether it is to stimulate users' interest in chatting or to guide them at the interactive level, it is the core point of every stranger-to-friend product.

It is also worth mentioning that: I think the matching methods of stranger dating products are gradually changing, from the previous drifting bottles to photos to voice matching, the entry methods of stranger dating products are becoming more and more diversified. Moreover, I think that as Internet users become younger and younger, video matching and VR matching will be possible in the near future as long as safety is maintained.

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Author: Eleven Strokes

Source: 11strokes