Contextual

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  • Product Managers beware App Feature Complexity

    When it comes to adding features to your App, Mobile App Product Managers would be millionaires if they got paid each time as opinionated colleague or even the developers said:

    “how hard would it be…”

    and

    “can’t you just…”

    I was reading a post from Kris Gale, VP Engineering at Yammer, on the First Round Capital blog about “The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don’t Consider”. Kris was saying that Product Managers are the main culprit, but systemically the expectations are much broader, especially in small to medium size/maturity companies. I’ve been in teams of developers where the (awesome) “Product Manager” got the nickname of “Dr No” (punning on the James Bond villain) for fighting against “one more feature”.

    The problem for each new feature is the cumulative complexity of:

    1. Initial development and QA of the feature
    2. Decisions on targeting and visibility of the feature
    3. User education about the feature
    4. Measurement of uptake/engagement of the feature
    5. Fixing bugs and UI improvements for the feature
    6. Release management and announcing of bug fixes
    7. Skills transfer on staff turnover of developer and QA staff wrt this feature
    8. And if you are in an Enterprise:
      • Internal signoff and communication
      • Additional reporting, review for compliance, security
      • Lots of meetings!
      • Education and impact to customer support center
      • Probably greater staff turnover
    Ancient Product Manager grappling with the hydra of feature complexity
    Ancient Product Manager grappling with the hydra of feature complexity

    Contextual gives 3 great benefits to removing complexity:

    1. Completely REMOVE the complexity of adding user education to your App. By creating a layer of user communication without code, the Product Managers get autonomy to iterate and experiment without adding to complexity.
    2. Reduce the impact of #1, #2, #3, #4, #6 of actually implementing and managing new features.
    3. For Enterprises, radically reduce the meetings, reporting, signoff for getting user education done.

    So “Contextual” attacks the Progressive Onboarding challenge, not just for new features but deepening engagement for specific existing features that a segment of users have not engaged with.

    Here is a great quote from the FR post:

    Among the most dangerously unconsidered costs is what I’ve been calling complexity cost. Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.

    We believe the FR post makes important points from a development manager perspective but discusses one part of the problem: refactoring and engineering debt**. We’ve shown there are other related complexity resource drains that should be costed and solutions found.

    You can find the FR article here.

    ** there is a some UI comments that really can be summarized that Occam’s Razor should be applied go UI decisions.

  • “Google style” trackable carousels in Contextual

    Contextual Carousel – swipe intro to your app from Contextual – Mobile App Onboarding on Vimeo.

    I’ll admit we’ve been wrong about carousels and so we’ve now made available the ability to create rich carousels inside Contextual.

    The benefits are:

    1. graphical environment to author and preview before release
    2. Easy HTML authoring, no need to get mobile developers to hard-code specific native carousel code
    3. Tracking of user swipes – and analytics of performance against your success metrics
    4. A/B Test to test which carousels perform better
    5. Put a carousel anywhere you want – not just the home screen
    6. Easily update when you launch new releases


    Google Analytics Carousel Animated GIF

    So why did we change our mind? Simply…well…customers were asking for not just contextual tips, tours and modals but a way to catch user’s attention when they immediately open the app.

    This example on the right shows how Google combines:

    1. An initial carousel to tell some big messages
    2. A contextual coachmark to tell the user about the current screen the user has landed on.
    3. A message indicator to highlight there is news waiting.

    The positive impact of this approach is due to the famous Aristotelian “triptych” for speakers:

    • Tell them what you will tell them. (the Carousel)
    • Tell them. (the tip or Coachmark)
    • Tell them what you just told them. (this is called off-boarding, which is often referred to as “next-best-step” and I should cover in a future blog post).

    The great benefit of the Contextual carousel approach is our analytics will tell you the performance of the swipe-able carousel and you can followup with contextual tips to reinforce the message to drive usage.
    As we’ve stated elsewhere here, here and here often people just swipe through and can’t tell you what the carousel said.

  • Mobile App design and onboarding by SC Moatti

    A little while ago I interviewed SC Moatti who has worked with companies like AirBnB on mobile UX.

    You can find the recording on iTunes and SoundCloud.

    In this episode, SC who is the best selling author of “Mobilized” shares some design wins and fails based on 3 rules of fullfilling the needs of Body, Heart and Mind.

    Here are 3 rules:

    1. The best mobile products are physically and functionally beautiful. (Body)
    2. The best mobile products focus on what matters to us. (Heart)
    3. The best mobile products learn as we use them. (Mind)
    Mobilized Book

    Here is a quick TL;DR:

    • What Uber, theSkimm and WhatsApp do really well.
    • Where AirBnB could improve because its typically been task-oriented but is missing opportunities for serendipity.
    • How “bots” are in the “uncanny valley” where people are unsure how to relate to them if they are almost convincingly human but still not when it really matters.
    • How SC is now doing investments both in and out of the mobile space and how you can get in touch.

    Mobile Growth Score

    We score all our interview anecdotes based on the 3 axes of: acquisition, UX and retention.

    Acquisition User Experience Retention
    1/10 9/10 3/10

    Let us know on our Twitter account how you score it.

    If you want to read the transcript, head over to our StreetHawk site.

  • Onboarding is the secret sauce powering viral loops

    The accepted App funnel is:

    • Acquisition
    • Activation/Retention
    • Referral
    • Revenue

    In this post covers the relationship between onboarding and Referral.

    Onboarding generally is seen as the bridge from Acquisition to Activation and Retention. The goal is to get the user oriented in the App and get them to an “ah-ha” experience. In the past the prevailing wisdom was that the onboarding logic must be coded into the application.

    However Apps like Canva are growing incredibly fast and one of their secrets is the ability to adapt quickly and run experiments to measure uplift.

    …their growth experiments were built by their development team. This process took 4-6 weeks and included several more steps. Each experiment was prioritized into development sprint cycles, coded by front-end and back-end developers, QA’ed by another team, reviewed by a peer, then reviewed by another peer, before being deployed into their product.”

    So the hard reality is that companies experiencing fabulous growth radically use onboarding and experimentation tools to get the uplift. One of the key goals Canva tries to achieve is the “sharing your first design”. This is a viral (or Referral) moment in a user’s journey.

    Referral and Viral Loops

    You may associate viral loops with social games, where the whole concept of playability is hinged around the concept of invites and cooperation. However, you don’t have to go to that extreme to benefit from an understanding and implementation of viral loops.

    A viral loop is a self-fuelling cycle of users generating more users – it looks like this:

    Referral and Viral Loops

    First, your App is shared. People in the sharer”s network see this, click through and engage with the App. Through a series of optimised steps, these people go on to invite the next set of new users.

    Apps such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have all relied on viral loops to accelerate their dominance. However, this simple concept just evolves from the basic idea of personal recommendations.

    Your best customer acquisition is one that is recommended by a friend. Think about it, if a friend recommends a cafe or a website, you usually check it out. According to a study by Nielson, 90% of people surveyed places at least some degree of trust in a recommendation from people they know. This is much higher than the trust placed in information seen in traditional and online advertising.

    But with the ease of sharing these days, people are not only recommending things that they are absolutely addicted to. They just recommend something that is interesting or helpful and then they move on. So the trick is to have your App “Referred” (recommended or shared) before a user churns off.

    Placed Tips and Tours

    This checklist helps optimize your onboarding flow to get a user to this event:

    1. What task is meaningful in Activation for a user?
    2. Does your App design facilitate the user’s completion of that task?
    3. Can you segment these users in real-time. For example, platforms like Contextual know how the user is interacting”InApp”.
    4. Try a Placed Tip or guide to get the user to complete the task.
    5. Try some “off-boarding” that supports sharing:
      • Did the user completed the task?
      • Have they shared yet?
      • If not, use a Placed Tip or even a CTA modal to encourage Referral.

    Building in sharing or referral as part of the user’s onboarding process will get you growth – if your user has completed a task (a “Job To Be Done”) then

     

    Placed Tips and Tours

     

    Think of a viral loop as bonus return on investment for all your acquisition techniques.

    Why Referral Drives Hockeystick Growth

     Once every couple of new users, one successfully passes through the viral loop and invites someone that brings them on board.

    That user is like a bonus that you did not have to spend any money to acquire…Why Referral Drives Hockeystick Growth

    That user is like a bonus that you did not have to spend any money to acquire, allowing you to stretch your acquisition costs over more customers. Thus your CPA drops. You don”t need a completely viral product to benefit from viral loops.

    Let”s highlight the benefit more by looking at a numerical example. Say that one in every 5 new users successfully recommends the App to a friend.

    •  We start with an advertising campaign that brings in 400 users
    • These users will bring on another 80 users due to recommendations, based on the 1 in 5 rate
    • The 80 will then each bring on 16 users
    • And so on…
    •  Eventually, this will equal a total of 500 users that signed up because of this campaign, 100 more than those that were brought on directly.

    This 25% bonus to your customer acquisition is a great reason why viral loops are worth setting up right.

    At the same time, since this is compounding, an increase in virality (not virility or vitality!) makes a huge difference in the final outcome. If instead of 1 in 5 users successfully recommending to a friend, it was 1 in 2, the eventual outcome of the campaign that brought in 400 initial users would be an increase in 800 users instead of 500 users.

    Onboarding = Referral

    Investment in an agile approach to onboarding will pay dividends as the tools can be shared from the Product Managers out to the Growth or Marketing teams. I’m not saying it should be open-slather on people running experiments but it can allow rapid iteration around getting users to drive your viral engine of growth.

     

  • LinkedIn’s New Feature by targeted tip

    Mobile Tips are everywhere.

    Just this morning,  I had a flashback to the whole journey that started Contextual. I opened the LinkedIn App and there was an article about our good friend (and fellow 500Startups founder) Holly Cardew of PixC.

    LinkedIn Tip

    Holly has always been generous of her time, her advise and is a great entrepreneur – the Contextual team really value her support!

    I wanted to see the comments and touched the comment section. As you can see LinkedIn popped up a contextual tip right at the moment of commenting. This is perfect because:

    1. I previously had no idea I could add a picture
    2. LinkedIn told me about this new feature
    3. They targeted me as a regular commenter who had never posted pictures. Segmentation!
    4. LinkedIn have been doing this for a while and so you know their analytics are telling them that contextual, segmented tips deliver uplift.

    So what was the flashback???

    About a year ago, we were looking for a way to add an onboarding tour to the StreetHawk Dashboard. We’d built a powerful product with many features BUT….our session analytics and exit surveys were telling us people were getting confused.

    The onboarding solution we selected was open source built by LinkedIn called HopScotch. It lets you do web tips like this.

    So that seemed like a cool idea at the time BUT we failed in our deployment. We should have used something like Appcues that allowed us to iterate faster. Why did we fail with Hopscotch?

    1. You have still have to program the tips, tours. You need developers and our developers are busy with our product.
    2. Couldn’t iterate. By being locked into a code-based solution we’d need to roadmap small changes – even wording!
    3. Inflexible. Initially it seems like a simple set of javascript rules and you are up and running. Wrong. If you want to do something not exactly the Hopscotch way, you get into more complex coding – especially on multipage
    4. No segmentation. We were spamming all our users regardless of their familiarity with the product.
    5. No analytics. Why do a tour if you don’t know whether it improves performance? How far did a user get into a tour?
    6. No A/B splits. Just like analytics, we didn’t know if a tour/flow improved engagement metrics.

    So we failed to make a success of Hopscotch and learned the characteristics (from a customer’s point of view) of what an onboarding solution should provide.

    We were scratching our own itch and we realized along the way that customer’s in our very own mobile sector were experiencing the same need. We went out and talked to a bunch of people with mobile apps and learned their painpoints. They were often that

    Contextual was born!

    Contextual has a lot more to do and a huge market need to address. Consumers choose to engage with their vendors via mobile Apps – we aim to help deepen that engagement.

    Mobile Tips are everywhere.

    Just when I was transferring Holly’s image over for this blog post, Google Drive pops up a “New Feature” Tip. Here it is. The big companies know contextual, unobtrusive tips make sense. Your App could benefit from it too!

    Google Drive New Feature Tip