17 posts tagged with "product"

A common mistake many website builders make is creating a website like a product brochure. Website builders spare no efforts to provide the most detailed information for visitors. However, this kind of site cannot keep users.

That is because most people don’t want to spend much time learning how things work. Instead, they prefer to try and figure things out on their own simply by clicking around.

From the users’ perspective, a good website allows them to find what they need by playing around. Based on the book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited, we have summarized four guidelines for creating a website of good usability.

Start with clear navigation​

When a user lands on a website for the first time, he can hardly estimate the website’s scale. He will probably choose to opt-out for not knowing how the website is organized. That’s why a navigation bar is so necessary. On each page, the navigation should enable users to locate where they are, how they can get back to the homepage, where they can search for keywords and other extra information about how to use the website. Most of all, navigation must be simple and straightforward; otherwise, users may get confused and just click away.

Make an impressive home page​

The home page is likely to be the most frequently visited page of a website, and its importance is self-evident. Users’ first impression of a website is determined by their first impression of the home page. An impressive home page is a must.

Besides, we also need to make sure that we have delivered the most important message to visitors, which is the goal of our website. The book suggests an effective way to communicate with readers on the home page would be placing a tagline describing our mission next to the website logo.

Use visual hierarchies to present information​

When we visit a website, we don’t read the text line by line. Instead, we often scan the text to retrieve the information we need. If you want to convey a specific message to visitors, you should learn to make use of visual hierarchies. The rule is simple. Key messages should be highlighted. So users can understand where to focus on and click. Hiding important information will only annoy visitors.

Improve mobile loading speed​

A few years ago, being responsive was only a plus, but nowadays, it has become a must.

1. Due to the rapid development of mobile devices, users expect more from mobile websites and tend to spend much more time on mobile surfing.
2. Users easily get impatient if the loading speed is slow.
3. We need to enrich the content and interactivity on mobile pages. (tailoring contents for mobile devices.)

@[toc]

Intro​

What are habits? Do things just like doing no brainers. Businesses cultivating customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. This book proposes The Hook Model describing how to form a user habit with four steps:

1. Trigger
2. Action
3. Variable reward
4. Investment

The Habit Zone​

1. Benefits of Habits

   1. Increasing LTV
   2. Providing Pricing Flexibility. Warren Buffett: People are less sensitive to the price of products they formed routines around.
   3. Supercharging growth. ==More is more principle:== Linear decreasing of the Viral Cycle Time can speed up the user acquisition exponentially.
   4. Sharpening the competitive edge. 9x Effect: new product has to be 9x better than its existing competitor (which users have been familiar with) to win the market.

2. Successful companies build the mind monopoly.

3. How to identify the product's habit-forming potential?

   • Not all software usage could form a habit. As presented above, only a behavior happens with ==enough 1) frequency and 2) perceived utility==, a.k.a entering a habit zone, can help to make it a default behavior.

4. Habit-forming technologies often start as vitamins, but once the habit is formed, they become painkillers.

The Hook Model​

Trigger​

What cues people to take action? Triggers.

1. External triggers to attract users first
   1. Paid triggers
   2. Earned triggers
   3. Relationship triggers
   4. Owned triggers
2. Internal triggers
   1. Related to thoughts, emotions (particularly negative ones), or preexisting routines
   2. people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more.
3. The goal of a habit-forming product is to kill or relieve the user's pain.

Action​

How to initiate any behavior?

B = MAT (behavior = motivation + ability + trigger)

1. Motivation
   1. Three ==Core Motivators==. all humans are motivated
      1. to seek pleasure and avoid pain;
      2. to seek hope and avoid fear;
      3. and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.
   2. examples
      1. Barack Obama's Hope Poster
      2. Sex Sells
      3. Sports Ads
      4. Ads trigger negative emotions such as fear
2. Ability
   1. Easier task leads to the higher adoption rate
      • 
   2. Six elements of simplicity
      1. Time
      2. Money
      3. Physical effort
      4. Brain cycles
      5. Social deviance
      6. Non-routine
   3. examples
      1. Login with Facebook
      2. Share with twitter
      3. Search with Google
      4. Snap a picture with iPhone lock screen
      5. Pinterest infinite scroll
      6. Twitter uses the homepage to encourage certain behaviors
3. Daniel Kahneman: Four mental biases
   1. The Scarcity Effect: The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value
      • e.g. Amazon "Only 6 left in stock."
   2. The Framing Effect: The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.
      • e.g. Tasting the same wine, the higher the price, the more pleasure people will feel.
   3. The Anchoring Effect: People tend to anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
      • e.g. 30% off
   4. The Endowed Progress Effect: people are more motivated when they believe they are nearing a goal.
      • e.g. Linkedin Progress Bar near to finish to improve your profile strength.

Variable Reward​

1. Principles in our brains
   1. When do people feel happy about rewards?
      • People feel happy not when they receive the reward itself but when in anticipation of it.
   2. Same rewards do not work over time. Fondness = familiarity + novelty.
2. Three variable reward types
   1. The tribe: We seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.
   2. The hunt: We need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival.
   3. The self: We desire to gain a sense of competency.
3. Finding the proper variable rewards is not easy. Gamification is effective only when they really scratch the user's itch.
4. Maintain a sense of autonomy. Let the user choose what to do.
5. ==Finite variability== leads less engagement because they eventually become predictable. e.g. Zynga's FarmVille. People usually don't watch the Breaking Bad twice. Thus UGC is super valuable.

Investment​

1. The escalation of commitment: The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. Our labor leads to love.
   • e.g. The origami bidding game: those who made their own origami animals valued their creation five times higher than the second group's valuation and nearly as high as the expert-made origami values
   • e.g. IKEA effect is a kind of cognitive dissonance. The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.
   • E.g. social game mafia war
2. People tend to use the product again if it stores values, which are
   • Content
   • Data
   • Followers
   • Reputation
   • Skill
3. How to compound user retention? Loading the Next Trigger with virtuous loops.

Should I use the hook model?​

How to apply the hook model?​

1. Pros and cons analysis based on the model
2. Habit Testing
   1. Identify the user workflow
   2. Identify the habitual users' workflow
   3. Experiment with promoting the habitual users' workflow to more users.
3. Observe yourself
4. Find ==nascent behaviors== that can go popular in the future

What is "Change Aversion"?​

In general, "change aversion" refers to the unrest and opposition that arise among users whenever you alter something they frequently use in your product. This unrest is almost always present in every version of products like Gmail, YouTube, and the iPhone.

How to Mitigate or Even Avoid "Change Aversion"?​

1. Inform users in advance and provide understanding afterward. Notify users of significant changes in the new version beforehand and explain the reasons for these changes, then offer guidance on how to transition afterward.
2. Allow users to switch freely. Do not cut off users' ability to revert to the original version; do not leave them feeling isolated and helpless.
3. Continuously follow up on user feedback.

Don't Let "Change Aversion" Be an Excuse for Poor Execution​

Over time, whether changes to the product are good or bad will ultimately be revealed.

What is change aversion?​

By and large, anytime you change what people regularly use in a product, they will always throw an uproar. This happens to almost every release of products like Gmail, YouTube, iPhone, etc.

How to avoid or mitigate change aversion?​

1. Let users understand, in advance and afterward. Warn them about the significant changes early and communicate why those places changed. Provide transition instructions afterward.
2. Let users switch. Don’t shut the door and leave them alone in the helplessness.
3. Let users give feedbacks and follow through.

Change Aversion isn’t an Excuse​

The product changes may turn out to be good or bad ones.

How do you maximize your chances of building an enduring $1B+ non-transactional customer company?

By building enduring engagement, in three levels:

1. Growing engaged users: focus on growing users completing the ==core action==.

2. Retaining users: product should get better the more it’s used. Users have more to lose by leaving the product.

3. Self-perpetuating: As users engage, they create ==virtuous loops== in the product.

   • Pinterest did well with
     • network effect
     • new UGC re-engages users
     • viral referral
   • Evernote and Tinder fall short on this.

There are three types of product features

• MMRs: minimum market requirements; basic features that every customer expects and demands
• Neutralizers: mitigate competitive threat
• Differentiators: competitive advantage

Customers often provide feedbacks on MMRs and neutralizers. ==The product management team must take responsibility for reinforcing the startup’s differentiator.== Once the market recognizes the startup’s advantage, every competitor will race to replicate it. The startup must invest in that differentiation to sustain their market lead.

A key role of product management (PM), whether as the product-focused founder (CEO, CTO) or the PM leader, is making sure product development efforts are ==focused==.

• finite resources to market needs in the march towards product-market fit
• working furiously to maintain a competitive lead

Is process a bad thing? My guiding principle or golden rule of process is to never ask for something from someone that does not directly help them to get their own work done.

Product Roadmap in Telemetry​

Telemetry Framework​

When the tool overwhelms it isn’t used and so it doesn’t matter - e.g. a giant Gantt chart. The telemetry spreadsheet is more helpful.

This tool is the right level of complexity for projects from 10 to 5000 people in my experience.

benefits: it is a resources allocation guideline

• Any given person can look at their own work and know where they are and where it fits in
• At any time, one can see how much of the time (resource) overall is going to support a given project or goal
• Know which tasks are too far out, too big
• Know which resources are over-constrained