To make your Google Earth a success it is vital that you put the users needs first. This lesson has been learnt from studying the habits of people using web browsers, Google Earth is a 'geo-browser', used to browse web maps rather than web pages and is therefore very similar.

Many web pages have sprung up covering a huge variety of needs, unfortunately many are badly designed especially those early web pages launched in the 90s.  Web Pages That Suck is a website which teaches good web page design by examining bad web pages.  Here's a quote from there:

"Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is solving their problems. Now. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of these four problems:

1. They want/need information
2. They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
3. They want/need to be entertained.
4. They want/need to be part of a community.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand or to increase company sales by 15%. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems."

At the current moment we are in the early history of geo-browsers, users are not really accessing google earth projects with the aim of being in a community or making a purchase (problems 2 and 3 respectively) however, they are accessing Google Earth to access information (1), to make a donation (2) or to be entertained (3).  So we can draw the conclusion that just as with producing a web site, when producing a Google Earth project you need to strongly focus on solving your users problems.

Ignoring the needs of users has dramatic results, they have surprisingly short attention spans and the least annoyance causes them to leave your project. They are only ever two clicks away from something much more interesting on the web and the same goes for Using Google Earth. See the Futher reading section for more detail.

Further Reading

A post from my blog illustrating how quickly users leave a Google Earth project if it isn't meeting their needs.