Make Your Users Do the Work

As your users "do the work" they're also ideally creating atomic, shareable, and unique content that increases the value of your product.

Pinterest nails this with its "boards". The technical reality is that a user has simply identified a few links and images of interest, however it is a collection that uniquely represents their interests and personality.

Public content of this kind is especially powerful, it'll create some fresh content to feed to the SEO gods, but importantly is something that the user is attached to on some level, and will actively share and take an ongoing interest in (social referral + repeat engagement).

I think that the pattern of making software as easy to use as possible refers to the amount of work users need to put in _before_ they actually start doing what the product is intended for (e.g. entering personal information). However, the users should definitely be doing work when it comes to the content of the product, as the article states. I think that, for example, the amount of work people put into uploading and commenting on photos on Facebook was part of the reason the switch to Google+ wasn't as big as anticipated -- users had too much of an investment in FB already.