Wayne Chang is the co-founder of startups. The companies he founded are worth more than $10 billion; he is also an investor and has invested in more than 50 companies. Recently, Wayne Chang made a suggestion to startup companies: When developing products, we should focus on the first-time experience, so that new users can fall in love with the product. How to do? He introduced some methods, let us read them.
If you want to make a good impression on users, you only have one chance.
People always talk about the development of MVP (Minimum Viable Product), but I think that MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) should be developed. I often talk about the difference between the two.
To be honest, I don’t trust MVP much.
——I firmly believe that we should develop an excellent product experience; the first is to develop an unforgettable first-use experience for new users.
The goal of MVP is to develop products that are almost unusable, launch them, and collect feedback from the market; MLP is different, it is very important to renew the user’s first use experience.
The first experience is the first time a new user sees your product, knows who you are for the first time, and knows what everything you represent. If they experience bare bones and are clumsy and difficult to use, then your product will leave a bad impression on them and they will remember it.
Don’t forget: the app lost 77% of daily active users on average in the first 3 days after installation.
——Users have limited time. If you want to compete for more time, you must first obtain privileges.
Most startups don’t think so.
Start-up companies believe that they only need to think about product features, know what the “value proposition” is, what is the worst thing, and what is the marketing strategy. As for whether the experience of the new user 30 seconds before using the product is good, that is something to be considered later.
What if Apple adopts such an approach? For example, putting a new iPhone in a carton, instead of in a pearl white vacuum container, is like putting expensive jewelry inside. Imagine again, when you turn on a new MacBook, you find that the battery is dead, or you can’t locate the WiFi signal, and you can’t easily connect to the Internet.
As a new user, you will definitely be frustrated, disappointed, not excited, happy, and don’t want to hurry up to play with the product.
——If you want to develop a product that users like, you must create an excellent first-use experience and tell an emotional story.
Let me give an example.
When developing Crashlytics, we found that the first-time experience of mobile developer tools is often terrible. Facebook’s tools are the essence of the essence. It is a long guide page with countless links. It takes 20-30 seconds to scroll to the bottom. There are also some products, like Wikis, which actually have 72 steps (for example, it will ask you: “Are you using a Mac? Just click here…” There are 26 steps… “Now go back and start again.” ) Some companies will put up a 10-minute video, in which a guy gave a monotonous voice command: “Now… drag this thing… here. Then… click… there.”
It’s terrifying to leave such a bad first impression on the user and mess up the relationship at the beginning.
——So, we decided to fix this problem.
We asked: “How can we make the first-time experience fun and enjoyable, and do things that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other companies obviously can’t do?”
We have developed a consumer-level installer (App). There is even an icon on it so that the developer knows to drag it. It seems easy. If you want to develop an installation program that runs on millions or even tens of millions of computers, and the developer will also modify the settings, customize the settings, it is not an easy task to do so.
In fact, we spend most of our time developing the first experience, which is more time than developing the core Crashlytics SDK code.
——Paying is rewarding, and the rewards are still great.
In the end, our first use experience was pretty good, something the developer hadn’t seen before. Developers post messages on Twitter about this experience, and they tell their friends to know. In the end, when Twitter acquired us, the product had already been installed on 300 million devices. Today, the number of monthly active devices of the program reaches 3 billion.
Is this success one-time and cannot be repeated? Let me give another example: because we value the first-time experience, we have become the dominant player in another field. This time the focus is on a niche area: mobile device crash reports.
-Next, we have to pick the “crown”-mobile analysis.
In 2014, we developed Answers, which is a mobile analytics product that is compatible with Crashlytics. We launched a product to compete with Google Analytics. Analytics is a “behemoth” in the field of analytics. We also have to compete with other products in the mobile analytics industry. . There are many opponents, such as Flurry, Localytics and Mixpanel.
The competition in this industry is fierce. Later, Flurry was acquired by Yahoo. It is said that the purchase price was US$300 million. At that time, its value ranked second. Both Localytics and Mixpanel have invested 100 million yuan in funds, occupying third and fourth places in the rankings.
When we first did research, we found that other companies’ products had problems when they started using them.
You register an account, add a code, then what? As a first-time user, it will give you a control panel, because no data has been collected yet, so the control panel is empty. There are only a bunch of zeros on the screen, and a bar graph with flat lines. There is nothing to deal with.
I checked the competitor’s newcomer training process, and we found that as a user, the first-time experience is not good.
The experience is highly mechanized: entering a name, entering an email address, inserting a code, looking at the empty control panel, we thought: “Such an analysis product is worth billions of dollars?”
——We don’t want our products to be like this. We hope that the first use experience of the product is exciting, and we hope that the experience is well-designed and well-made.
Regarding the “Novice Training Sequence” as another box, we check the box and develop the MVP. This is not our idea. We spent a lot of time researching the first touch point of new users.
We not only let new users use the product, but also let them fall in love with the product.
——We do this:
If you develop software products, there is often a tendency: to add more options. When solving a problem, this is the easiest and laziest option. “Should I show this kind of control panel or that kind of control panel first? Okay, let them choose.”
Design and develop products, which is the worst.
If you want the product decision tree to develop linearly, the “newcomer training process” is the only opportunity.
——We seize and take advantage of opportunities.
Our “newcomer training process” is itself a product experience. Our emphasis on the process is the same as the final product experience.
When the user registers, we will not give him a variety of choices, we will show the user the screen, there are many small pieces on it. If the information is presented in digestible fragments, people will prefer it. For this reason, we introduced this method in the “newcomer training process” to make users happy.
To make each screen easy to understand, only obtain the absolutely necessary information. In other words, if the information is not available now, it is unnecessary.
——The Golden Rule:
Some information if your product is not available now, don’t let others provide it. Otherwise it will cause friction, make people confused, and hurt the overall experience.
Our “Newcomer Training Process” focuses on participation. In other words, we will not give them an empty control panel.
As part of the newcomer process and first-time experience, we will ensure that the code installed by the user can be used. We will carefully ask users to launch their App and access our servers. Of course, in this way, we will have more engineering work to do. It is not just as simple as creating an account. We also need to add a lot of logic programs to check the status of user codes, check their apps, and display prompt messages. Other similar work.
——It is worthwhile to make more efforts.
Because it takes time to do these tasks, that is to say, we have to ensure that our code can run correctly in the user’s App. The user must experience the product in person and experience it immediately.
We will not give the user an empty control panel, we will create a dummy panel filled with charts, but the background is blurred. In the foreground, we will place a small screen with a rotating circle: inside the circle are animated blocks flying from the screen.
The animation blocks are continuously combined and gradually become clear, showing the user’s App.
Users love it. Compared with other products, our “newcomer” interface is obviously different. Users posted messages on Twitter complimenting our control panel, saying it was pleasant, fun, and extremely personal. Only then did we know that our experience was unforgettable.
——As a start-up company, why should the “newcomer training program” be so important and spend so much time without focusing on its core products? You must be curious.
Let the results speak for themselves.
In terms of mobile performance, Crashlytics ranks first, and its usage is more than all the platforms in the 2nd to 6th positions combined.
Answers is a mobile analytics product we developed, and it is the fastest growing mobile analytics product. We beat Flurry and Google Analytics and rose to No. 1 in less than 10 months after launch.
Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter just one year after its launch.
In 2017, after the launch of Answers, Google acquired Crashlytics and Answers from Twitter.
In order to become a leader in the mobile performance field and mobile analytics market, we have also done many other things to do things right, but we pay great attention to the details of the user experience, so that the product is praised, and word of mouth.
We don’t need marketing, we don’t need to invest a lot of money in the marketing department, which is not the case for other companies.
Once loved, the product will speak for itself.
——How can I create an unforgettable first-use experience?
The focus is on “time perception”.
New users are impatient. They don’t trust you, they don’t know what to expect, they will make a decision (as fast as possible) to see if you can make their life easier, increase speed, increase efficiency, or make The speed slows down and makes you bored.
I often compare product design with video games. Among all industries, the game industry places the most emphasis on “time perception”. The game makes you feel that time is flying by, the faster it flies, the more successful the game; the more you are willing to invest more time and stay in the game world for an hour. In terms of first-time user experience, no industry has done better than the game industry. When you start a new game, either immerse yourself in it or leave.
“Overwatch” is a multiplayer game developed by Activision Blizzard. When we waited while staring at the screen, Blizzard showed some interesting things. I think this is a perfect case. Blizzard has created a lovely product that respects users’ time. If you design it in the traditional way, when you play a multi-player game online, you must wait for other players to join before starting the matching process. If the game is in 6V6 mode, 12 players are required, and many players will run away while waiting: players have to wait for others to join, fill up, and look for servers.
Blizzard “Overwatch” is smarter. Instead of forcing players to wait, it invites players to play some mini-games. There are no goals, no rules. You just pass the time in a casual way, interacting with other people in the game world. Blizzard will not let players run around, nor will players attack each other. Other games tend to do this. In Overwatch, players will do some other things. Under normal circumstances, they will not do it, such as to other people. Wave, collaborate, etc. Although it is the same game, the experience is brand new, and the experience is also waiting for the screen.
-When startups turn their products into a visual form, they can easily forget the moment when users are waiting.
They draw models of each screen of the product, fill in charts, data, and various data sets, but forget one thing: new users have nothing when they start using it. Without data, it will not be used for a long time.
What did the user see on the control panel the first time they used it? When using it for the first time, what will the user see in the “Friend List” and the message box?
There is nothing but nothing.
Your job is to check a special time point and ask yourself: “What should we do to incorporate the user’s feelings? If we can form a feeling for users, it seems that they are not waiting for something to happen, because it has already happened. ?”
——When many start-up companies develop products, they only develop from an engineering perspective, without considering people as the central point.
People are highly sensitive to time: how much time is spent, how much time things take up, and the relationship between time invested and rewards. People’s perception of time is very subjective.
If you can divert the user’s attention to other places, time will pass quickly. Waiting is boring. After the transfer, you will feel that time passes quickly, which will increase user engagement and make users more willing to stay.
——How to make users feel that time passes faster than it actually is? Here are some methods:
Generally speaking, we classify methods in the form of “Progress Indicators”:
Product Tips: When users enter the product for the first time, it helps a lot if they give some hints to tell them where things are and how they work. As time goes by, users continue to use the product, and prompts can continue to entice them to participate. One thing to note: The prompt must be strategic and must not interfere with the user.
Did you know: Some things are highly related to the product, these things are very interesting, and there are use case scenarios, if you put these things on the loading screen, it would be more appropriate.
Quote: Slack does just that. As you wait for the Slack channel to load, some weird quotes will appear on the screen. The introduction can divert your attention from the facts and make you more willing to wait.
Animation: Put some loading animations, users will find it easier to spend time, they will see creative works, see unique things, and will not have a long wait.
Follow-up sequence: When users leave your product, don’t forget them. For example, you can send users a beautifully designed email, add some dynamic information, and tell them something, such as: “Your App has not crashed 98% of the time this week.” This information will make users feel better. , So that they are more willing to come back and continue to use the product.
——If you are going to develop a product that allows multiple users of the same team to log in, what should you do? How do you ensure that everyone has the same memorable first-time experience?
We encountered this problem when developing Crashlytics.
Many people have asked us, why can our products become popular in the analysis community at such a rapid rate and be used by so many people?
We spent a lot of time thinking about a problem: how to integrate products into the natural workflow of everyday users. In theory, the products developed by many startups are great, but the products conflict with the natural rhythm and natural workflow of the target group.
One thing is worth noting: Many companies develop products that allow users to register an account, use the control panel, and then share the account and password with 10 other people on the team and use it together.
——This is a people-centered growth strategy, and it spreads like wildfire.
When we develop products, we pay attention to the natural workflow of developers. We realize that they have a job to do every day: either check it every few hours or check it every day.
So we create a user experience. When the company’s second user downloads it, or when he synchronizes the latest code with the company’s App, a window will pop up with the file photo of the first developer on it, and There is a message saying: “Hello, John wants to verify your identity to see if you are a member of the team. Please enter your email address.”
They may enter an email address so that he is a Crashlytics user: they will receive the same notifications and emails, and the information will be constantly instilled to make them like the product more.
Every App company that opens a Crashlytics account will be slightly different for each App. Every developer in the company has its own Crashlytics account.
——Some people want to develop an unforgettable first-use experience, I will give one last suggestion:
Most entrepreneurs dream of a product that will flourish. They dream of millions or even tens of millions of people using it, being able to collect massive amounts of data, and users are extremely active.
This is what I call the “Day 40” vision. We make models to show this vision. In the eyes of investors, these models are great, but otherwise they are of no value. Only a handful of startups pay attention to Day O, then Day 1, and keep going.
Before Day 40, most users slowly fell asleep. They must watch, feel, and prove value. Otherwise, they will enter an empty App, a stale product, and they cannot find too many reasons to continue using it.
Because of this, I say that it is important to develop the first experience, transfer value, and tell users what they will see when they continue to use it.
Unfortunately, most startups do not value the first-time experience, and they suffer as a result. For this reason, only a very small number of users persisted until Day 40, and only a few companies persisted until the first round of financing.
I am an investor, as well as a consultant and mentor. I tell others how to formulate a reasonable “newcomer process”. When discussing with the company, there is a question that almost every company will ask: “How do you prepare for the next day? Interact with the company?”
If you want to make a good impression, you have only one chance. The “first-use experience” is vital to the success of the product, as important as other functions of the product, and sometimes the first-time experience is even more important, because it is the first stop for user product interaction.
