The Boneyard Principle: Why the Next Big Thing will Emerge from a Failed Idea

The Boneyard Principle: Why the Next Big Thing will Emerge from a Failed Idea

The more opinionated an app is about how it should be used, the easier it is for users to act without fear of rejection. Why do some consumer social products finally make it big after a series of misses? Part of the magic often hides within UX details that help people make fewer decisions and take fewer risks.

Video didn’t kill the video star (UX did).

TikTok’s breakthrough UX approach transformed a category with multiple previous failures- short-form looping video-to create one of the largest successes of all time.

The winner (doesn’t) take it all

Marketing can make otherwise successful product formulas more visible, but it won’t independently drive success

Ideas that sound similar at the surface can have highly differentiated UXs that create room for multiple successes

Snap and Instagram: both are “social photos” apps, but their UX differences support entirely different behaviors

When Tinder launched in 2012, Skout (2008), the Match.com app (2009), Hotnornot.com (2000), and other dating products had already launched with moderate success, others in the boneyard.

TikTok integrated the explore-exploit process into one tab. You never had to decide which tab to view-you just had to swipe to the next video when you were done with the current one.

If you’re building a consumer social product, by now, you understand that your product’s success depends on making the right UX choices

At each step of onboarding and consumption, ask yourself: am I asking the user to make a choice? Is that cognitive load necessary?

BeReal is a photo-sharing app for friends that launched in 2020

It shares the same media format as the once-popular FrontBack, but doesn’t change its core UX enough to create a corresponding new behavior

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