Awaiting Critical Mass

Description
This pattern occurs when users are hesitant to use your service or site, because the number of users, or the number of friends to a user, is too low.

Examples
In Google+, the activity is much lower than on Facebook. People who use both services seem to use Facebook more, as the target group is larger there.

A user may not want to use a service for organizing events, unless most of the people the user targets is using the service as well.

Pros and Cons
This is an unwanted pattern, because it means the users hesitate to use the site or service.

To attract users, a site must build up a number of users. But user might not want to join if there aren't enough users there. Google+ gives the first impression of more people on the service than there are by suggesting friends from the user's Gmail account, even those who do not have a Google+ account. This might make a user more interesting in producing content.

Another way is allow non-user to see the content people produce, so that the users don't feel that they generate content no-one sees.

Relations
If there are too few other users, the user may not get enough feedback on its content, and the pattern therefor relates to Feedback and various other patterns related to feedback. For example, users relying on Attention Seeking might not be satisfied.

A way to try to get more users is to allow current users to Send Invitations.

Contributors
Created by Andreas Bjerkeholt from discussions.