Kevin Hale: the subtleties of working with user experience (part 2)

Stanford course CS183B: How to start a startup . Started in 2012 under the leadership of Peter Thiel. In the fall of 2014, a new series of lectures by leading entrepreneurs and experts of Y Combinator took place:



Kevin Hale: Actually, we constantly conducted experiments on the support service in Wufoo, because we were literally "obsessed" with it. One of the experiments that we conducted was as follows: we heard someone talking about the lack of connection between the emotions that we have when we need help and the satisfaction and the reaction that we get from people when we help them.

Especially often this connection is absent on the network, since we simply do not see these non-verbal signals. So, in the opinion of the author of this idea, there will never be a relationship between us and users until face recognition appears on the network.



We thought: "We are not experts in the field of face recognition, but it seems to us that there is another way to discern empathy." Since we were creating form designers, we added a drop-down list called “What do you feel now?”. We thought that no one would use it and thought it would be a futile experiment, but decided to see what happens.



It turned out that this field was filled in 75.8% of cases. For comparison: the field with the drop-down list “Browser Type” was filled in 78.1% of cases. That is, in fact, people told us: “In the case of my problem, what I feel is as important as the technical features that you need to know to fix the bug.”

We did not prioritize the tasks based on the emotions of those who contacted us, so most clients could not “replay” the system in this way. We noticed that one of the interesting side effects of this experiment is that people began to treat us better. We returned to work and looked at the data, analyzed the text and realized that in written communication, for example, by e-mail, there are only three ways to express vivid emotions: exclamation points, curses, and capital letters. Definitely [according to the results of the experiment], each of these three indicators decreased when communicating with us through the support service. As soon as people had a way to express their emotions, they began to reason more rationally and as a result made our work more enjoyable.



Another surprisingly striking result was that this approach helps you create better software. And this is confirmed by a number of studies. Jared Spool, a user interface designer (one of the largest experts in his field) claims that there is a direct correlation between how much time we spend communicating with users directly and the quality of the resulting design.

He believes that the design process should go exactly that way. Communication should be open. Conclusions cannot be made solely on the basis of reports or graphs. You must interact with customers in real time. Such communication should take place at least every six weeks and last at least two hours; otherwise, your software will deteriorate over time. Our developers communicate directly with users for 4-8 hours every week. This changes our view on software development.



Jared Spool offers a different look at how we create products. Imagine that this spectrum [on the slide above] displays the entire amount of knowledge necessary to use the application. The extreme left meaning is the complete lack of knowledge, the extreme right is all the necessary knowledge. And these two transverse lines reflect the essence of your user interaction. The cross line on the left shows the current level of user knowledge, and the cross line on the right shows what level of knowledge you want to bring them to.

The gap between them, according to Spul, is called the “knowledge gap”. Interestingly, there are two ways to fix it. You either provide the user with more knowledge, or reduce the amount of knowledge required to use the application. And often we, as engineers, those who work on creating products, think: "Let's add new features." But new features only lead to widening this gap.



As for us, we have concentrated our efforts in a different direction. We used 30% of the time spent on development to create internal support tools for helpdesk. But often this time was spent on people helping themselves. For example, we created pages with frequently asked questions, tooltips, and made it so that by clicking on the Help link instead of going to a page with general help documentation, you would get to a specific page with information that is most relevant to what you are working on.



We again and again changed the design of our documentation, constantly conducted A / B testing. One of the iterations on working on the documentation page reduced the load on technical support by 30% per day. This is one of those cases when every day, everyone who works on a product suddenly has a 30% less load.



What happens if everyone continuously works in technical support? I said at the very beginning that development is a function that depends on conversion and turnover. This is the Wufoo growth curve over the first five years [slide above]. The interesting thing is that we did not pay for advertising and marketing; all this growth was provided by the subscribers themselves.

The difference between the number of new users and those unsubscribing from services is extremely small, and this is very important. Many still forget that there is practically no difference between a 1% increase in conversion and a 1% decrease in “turnover”; they affect your growth in exactly the same way; however, the latter, in reality, is much simpler and much cheaper to implement. And we very often neglect this until the difference becomes too big. Usually these tasks are not the most basic employees of companies.

This schedule, frankly, is not one of those that we especially follow at Wufoo, not even one of which I am proud. This is one of those that I am proud of [the slide below], because despite the fact that we have a good, wonderful growth curve, that’s what allowed us to scale, remaining a small company with an amazing culture. And this required us to perform many tasks aimed at realizing the needs of our users.



John Gottman noted that there is another kind of relationship behavior that leads to divorce. In fact, it turned out that there is a subgroup of people living together for 10-15 years, and then suddenly applying for a divorce. None of the indicators suggests that this will happen. Gottman looked through the data and realized: "Hmm, there is no passion between these people, there is no fire." Relations in a sense follow the second law of thermodynamics: in a closed power system, everything tends to collapse, so you constantly have to apply energy and effort to return it to its original state.



Many people think that showing people how “they are valuable to companies” is necessary by creating, for example, a blog or a newsletter. We evaluated our indicators, and it turned out that the percentage of active users, generally speaking, was small; and most of them had no idea about the amazing opportunities that we could provide them.



Therefore, we created a new function and called it the Wufoo Alert System. Wufoo Alert System]. It allowed us to mark in time each new function introduced for users, and each time they opened the application, we looked at the time difference between the moment of their authorization or the last connection and the moment of introducing new functions, after which users received a pop-up message: "Hello, while you were away, Wufoo had cool features."



Without a doubt, this innovation was the most talked about, and I heard about it every time I talked with users. They said something like: "I like this function" Hello, while you were gone ... ". Although I pay the same amount every month, you do something for me almost every week. It's just amazing, I just feel that I get the maximum benefit from the service. "

Besides the fact that everyone supported those who paid the bills, everyone also said “thank you”. And this happened mainly due to the fact that we put an equal sign between the variables "moderation" and "modesty." Every Friday we got together and wrote words of gratitude to our users on ordinary cards. I know that many would not be delighted if they were engaged in such things; it was our tradition, which played the largest role in creating a very close-knit team and in working on what is important to us. Everyone constantly remembered what our goal was and why we did what we did. These were simple cards: simple hand-written words, we still applied stickers with a picture of a dinosaur to them.



Interestingly, this practice has entrenched since the early days of Wufoo. Chris, Ryan, and I tried to figure out what we needed to do to show users how we value them during the Christmas holidays; This idea came to Chris’s head and he said: “Guys, a couple of years ago my mother made me write letters of thanks for Christmas presents to all my relatives, and I really didn’t like to do this, but next year I received very cool presents ... therefore I think we should try it out in our business and see what happens. ”

Thus, for that first year, we wrote Christmas cards by hand to all our users. The second year has come, and we had too many clients and only three founders. We thought: "We are at an impasse, we do not know what to do." And so, we read a book called "The Ultimate Question", and in it the author says that we need to focus on the users who bring the most profit; if you take care of them, then everything will work out. Then we thought: “It should work, we can do it.” And in fact, we wrote only to users who paid us more than others.

January came and one of our longtime dedicated users wrote to us. He wrote: “Hello everyone, I really liked that Christmas card that you sent me that year, and I just wanted you to know: I still have not received my second card and I look forward to it; I know that you have not forgotten about me. Many thanks". We were very discouraged by this. The best way to exceed expectations is to not give a reason to them from the very beginning, so that we are in a difficult position. After thinking carefully, we decided that we should stop doing this only once a year; this should happen every week. And even if we do not reach all our users, this habit itself will mean a lot.



I talked a lot about touching moments that developers do not like to think about too often, so in the end I will share more accurate data. There is an article [and also a book ] written by Michael Trisi and Fred Wirsema and published in the Harvard Business Review several years ago; In it, the authors talk about the focus of market leaders. They argue that there are only three ways to achieve market leadership, and depending on how you intend to achieve it, you should organize work in your company in a certain way: you should strive for the best price, creation of a better product or better overall solution.

For the best price, you focus on logistics like Wal-Mart and Amazon. If you want to release the best product, focus on research, the most striking example of this is Apple. A better overall solution means you have to be closer to the customer. You may notice that elite brands, as well as the hotel business, follow this path. What I like about this path to achieving market leadership is that the third is the only one that anyone can implement at any stage in the formation of his company. It almost does not require money to start. As a rule, it only requires a little moderation and good breeding. As a result, you can achieve success in your market, no matter who your competitors are. That's all for me, thanks for your attention.

Audience questions:

[ Continuation of Startup School at Megamind - translation of a lecture by Stanley Tang and Walker Williams ]