Blog

Eventbrite tracked anger and delight in UX
In the last post, we covered how Rachael Neumann’s role at Eventbrite’s Customer Experience/Success saved building the wrong feature. In the same talk the idea of assessing a customer’s anger through a journey is a fascinating and fresh lens to review your design.

The normal process is to map the user journey with flow charts or post-it notes and treat things very functionally.
Instead, Rachael prefers to review each step in the process through an emotional or psychological lens.
Specifically ask the questions:
- what is the emotional state of the user at each stage?
- What is the potential to delight and potential to anger?
- have you built up good will?
- there are moments in the journey where there is a high tolerance for stuff going wrong.
- The idea is to maps steps in your user’s journey on a 2D axis like this.
This kind of empathy for the customer’s emotional state was quite revolutionary to me and is valuable coming from [effectively] the “customers champion” – whereas inward-facing Product Managers might just map this as binary pass-fail states.

Its a great lesson for Product Managers to take note of and to learn more from their Customer Success, Customer Support teams.

“Not all moments are created equal”

Check out the video for the full context and more great advice.

Other gems of wisdom

Aligned with the points made above were some gems:
1. “delightful things don’t matter if you don’t solve the critical moment are a terrible experience”.
2. Customers make terrible product designers.
  - Get as much feedback as possible from customer BUT you cannot take at face value.
  - The customer’s job is to show you their pain. Your job is to translate into meaningful product solutions.
3. You need a champion of the customer
“Customer-Driven Product/Design Loop”

If you’ve read “Lean Startup” you understand the principle but it was great to hear that Eventbrite actually treated this as a “muscle” to be developed. To be high velocity in:
- method to measure the temperature of a particular “moment”
- what are my hypothesis about the things I can change
- implement the change
- measure again and see how you did
May 24, 2019
Canva: Product Management Process and Stack
Canva is one of the fastest growing companies around and now has 500 staff. I recently interviewed Robert Kawalsky who’s startup Zeetings, was acquired by Canva in April 2018. Robert soon took the lead for both Zeetings and Canva Presentations groups which represents a huge opportunity in Enterprise, SME and also Education.

Our the interview (a fireside at Fishburners) covered a lot of topics – I’ve selected 5 minutes where I asked what he’s learned about Product Management processes, tools, stack inside Canva.

https://vimeo.com/pointzi/review/335333108/b45df2b0de

From Chaos to Clarity

A few times in the talk, Robert referred to Canva’s method of wrangling ideas into features, he called this “Chaos to Clarity” – its a great description of the a product feature’s journey. The “Chaos to Clarity” process is:
1. Initial Visual Lo-Fi designs – at Canva they are very visual about the way something would appear to a user. This is done in Canva. Sketches, Wireframes, Mockups.
2. Pitch Deck for that Product/Feature – also done in Canva.
3. Press Release for that Product/Feature – typically done in Google Docs.
4. Strategy Document – a long form description that outlines the problem, user stories, dependencies with other products
5. Design Document – this is the handoff from Product Team to Design/Engineering
6. Prototype – this is typically used for putting on usertesting.com so they can verify user understanding and response.
7. Technical Design Doc – where engineering consider the implementation requirements.
Canva’s Product Management stack is: Canva (surprise!), Google Docs, Usertesting.com, Jira, Trello, Mode and Amplitude for analytics.

Ideas are the lifeblood of startups and agility can easily degrade into chaos. Too much order and you have stultifying bureaucracy – the Canva process strikes a good balance of balance.

The Full Fireside

For those interested in Roberts’ broader journey and a success story of an acquisition of a small startup into a powerhouse unicorn, here is the full video. (its missing a few minutes from the start).

Are you looking to get more users to love your mobile and web apps? Click on the buttons below to get your 14 day free trial or contact us for a demo!

Get Started

Get a Demo

Contact Us
May 13, 2019
How LinkedIn launches a feature
I wouldn’t be alone grumbling about LinkedIn on a daily basis, but its worth mentioning what an elegent, simple job they’ve done rolling out a new feature:

“Reactions”

It would be easy to underestimate the genius of this Feature Announcement. The 2 screenshots above tell the story of “my first try”.

Screenshot 1: Contextual Tip with Cutout.

So LinkedIn don’t spam me with a new feature either by carousel or popup, they don’t want to interrupt my usage flow. But on the other hand, we are so conditioned to just tap the “Like” that we’d never know the Reaction is just a long-press away.

So when I’m looking at an article, they show me, teach me with just a simple tip and a few words how to express myself better than just a “Like”. Notice how little screen real-estate is taken to communicate this powerful new feature. They even give me an “X” dismiss if I don’t like it.

Screenshot 2: Mission Accomplished.

I’ve held down the like and selected the “Celebrate” icon because the article deserves some applause. That was super-easy but:

a) I would never have known I could do that without the tip.

b) The instructions were simple, clear, contextual for me to try it practically. I didn’t have to read a blog post or watch a video.

Sleeper Feature?

LinkedIn released the new feature on the 11th April 2019. For their Product Manager and the team working on it – it would have been a huge deal. Here is a shot of their office on release day.

It was such a big deal, LinkedIn did 3 posts about it, here, here and here.

It was even covered on Techcrunch! (you can’t buy publicity like that).

I wonder what the uptake was?

I use LinkedIn most days and never noticed the new “Reactions” in conversations in my Feed.

Most Apps have experienced this anti-climax:
- you slave for months,
- QA it,
- system test it,
- internal test it,
- focus group test it,
- release it…
- …..fizzle
- nothing happens.
That’s why you need Feature Announcements or Feature Discovery.

Analytics and Targeting

You can guarantee that LI measures every click and nuanced gesture. I’m not sure if they have something as elegant as Contextual A/B tests 🙂

But on review they must have acknowledged that they needed to nudge users to stop “Liking” and teach them how to “React”.

I received my “nudge” tip on the 4th May 2019, so eventually I was targeted to be taught about this new feature. They converted me immediately and I’ve used the feature since.

So analytics and targeting around uplift of a feature is an essential component of rolling out an engagement layer – you need to know your adoption based on education.

Great job LinkedIn!

Kindle and Youtube examples

To round out the post, here are two similar examples from big companies. Amazon Kindle and Youtube have massive teams and their ability to roll out these simple but effective tips would cost them millions per year in engineers, product managers, QA, analytics staff.

With Contextual as an Engagement Layer platform, Apps with much smaller teams can design feature announcements, target, deploy and measure uplift at a fraction of the price.
May 9, 2019
Comprehensive cross-platform support
Cordova, Phonegap, Ionic, ReactNative, Mobile Web, Desktop Web are now available to add to our Native IOS and Android platform. This gives us terrific coverage of more than 90% of Apps in the Play and Appstore.

Its difficult to predict winners in development platforms and here is 3 examples:
- Ionic [not an environment but a framework for mobile elements in a HTML/JS development environment – typically Cordova or Phonegap
- ReactNative
- Flutter
- Xamarin [now owned by Microsoft]
Ionic had huge popularity from 2015-2017 and is still popular but is under a lot of pressure from ReactNative and Flutter. Ionic was a huge improvement screen elements that made a much better user experience but performance on-screen is an ongoing challenge. ReactNative solved the performance and native component problems.

ReactNative got a huge amount of traction in the startup community because it was invented inside Facebook. It then hit a few roadbumps with their licensing [because it was invented inside Facebook – LOL], fixed it and enjoys good performance and native screen appearance. We find a lot of agencies like it because of the HTML/JS implementation – its main challenge has been some big changes over time – a lot of their sample apps are based on earlier versions so things get confusing at times.

Flutter – Contextual currently does not support and its probably going to have similar teething problems to ReactNative. Introduced by Google in 2017 it has great UI performance because it uses reactive programming method and UI elements are widgets which creates an abstraction from the native elements. We’d expect startups to pick this up but because it uses a new language “Dart” it will be slower to be picked up by agencies and enterprise. The benefits are immediate cross-platform support for iOS, Android and Google Fuchsia [Google’s upcoming OS]. It does NOT support HTML/WebApps.

We are pretty excited about Flutter but will wait for commercial demand.

Xamarin breaks my heart regularly, we have supported it in the past on Android and could support it again – we’ve currently withdrawn support. We just don’t get support from Microsoft. There is huge potential for Xamarin in the enterprise given the amount of C# developers already building enterprise apps but its not translating to momentum.

With the re-tooling in the enterprise from Windows desktops to Surface or ruggedized Androids, Xamarin should be perfectly placed – it just seems that mobile developers want to build their own careers on the better supported development environments. We can support Xamarin again if there is a strong commercial driver.

Contextual is far and away the leader in tips, popups, tours, feedback, surveys and other engagement layer items across all platforms – we had a unified vision that end users will jump from web, to App, to mobile Web and App developers want one platform to target, engage and track – other solutions like Walkme and Pendo have made acquisitions of companies to add these features but only Contextual has a unified vision and cloud solution.
May 2, 2019
Feature Prioritization and roadmapping
Previous posts have discussed roadmap prioritization, delusions/biases and methods like RICE to reduce bias when deciding what features to add to your Product.

With that in mind, I was browsing a Y-Combinator interview with Brian Donohue, the President of Instapaper, acquired by Pinterest. I thought it was worth sharing.

Brian provided a simplified prioritization technique WITH 2 super-important axes that Product Managers commonly forget because they are “in the weeds”.

Brian would build a table with the following:
1. Did users request it
2. Does it give us a competitive advantage
3. Can we build it into the business model
The first is a no-brainer** if you have a good user-base and repeated asks***.

Second and Third are harder for the Product Manager because often the backlog is so large and detailed its easily to forget to challenge your decisions with a more commercial hat on.

So Brian’s method offers a very pragmatic top-down approach to getting a feature on the roadmap. One way we are trying to do this at Contextual is to map from quarterly OKRs to sprint planning.

Typically we go from:
1. Trello Board
2. Challenge against quarterly team and company OKRs
3. Sprint Plan
4. Implementation
Its a work-in-progress and still subject to bias but you might like to try adding Brian’s dimensions to your method.

BTW: my good friend Scott Middleton CEO of Jirio/Strategos and Founder of Terem created an Epic List of Every Product Prioritization Frameworks

** if you are not Steve Jobs.

*** we’re also experimenting as an “ideas-driven organization” as inspired by the book titled The Idea-Driven Organization: Unlocking the Power in Bottom-Up Ideas by Robinson & Schroeder.

Here is interview with Brian.
April 21, 2019