Category: Product Features

  • Privacy Features in a compliance world

    A key part of a user’s journey that Contextual helps out with are Feature Discovery and Feature Adoption. Typically this is (a) announcing new features, (b) explaining complex features, (c) targeting unused features to the audience who havn’t engaged.

    The goals are to:

    1. measure the uptake before,
    2. announce or guide the users,
    3. measure the uptick in usage and engagement

    This morning I was presented with a new use that Contextual could and should be helping our customers with.

    Face-Dectection-Compliance-Flow-1

    Compliance Management

    I was presented with a typical sequence in Facebook that looked similar to what our customers create. A modal dialog with a small journey and a CTA (call-to-action). 

    What was different was the content – I could (tongue-in-cheek) call this Feature Justification 🙂 but it does show an evolving trend that all Apps must do in a GDPR, CCPA, post Cambridge Analytica world.

    That trend is to explain what you are doing with user’s data and engender trust.

    Everyone is sick of clicking “cookie banners” on every site and app they visit and nobody reads privacy policies due to the monolithic legalese.

    As a SaaS platform that uses data to add value, we still get plenty of questions about how we treat data. For example with GDPR there are specific questions around PII (personally identifiable information) that need to be answered.

    Facebook’s goals/User goals

    Facebook know they need to earn back trust. They’ve targeted users (i.e “me”) to re-earn that trust (fat chance), by explaning a feature, its net benefit to me and the value they can add. 

    Here is the subsequent guide steps.

    Face-Dectection-Compliance-Flow-2
    Face-Dectection-Compliance-Flow-3
    Face-Dectection-Compliance-Flow-4

    Previous
    Next

    Note the penultimate step has the “Turn On” CTA defaulting to what Facebook’s goals. That might seem a little snakey but I’m sure that most platforms would do the same thing.

    Now a Compliance world

    I was at the Segment.com conference earlier this year and they have added features to let Apps pass data to other tools in a “need to know” basis.

    We see that Apple, Firefox and Google are locking down the browsers exposure to 3rd party cookies – so as a customer of Contextual you may feel from time to time you need to explain more about a feature to deepen engagement. You can guarantee Facebook is doing this in a data-driven way – they wouldn’t do it otherwise.

    Think about it – you’re users may trust your App a little more.

  • Canva: Product Management Process and Stack

    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

  • Feature Prioritization and roadmapping

    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.

  • Consumer Grade Enterprise Apps and the death of “docs”

    Its no secret that Google has taken enterprise business from Microsoft in recent years. G-Suite** launched (2006) 5 years before Office 365 (2011) and established a serious foothold for shared spreadsheets, docs, files and mail.

    If you’ve used G-Suite, you will be familiar with the tips and popups they use both on Web and Mobile to educate you about features. 

    Whilst G-Suite is a classy product, they still have used this education layer of tips and tours to help users get up to speed – we’ve reported some G-Suite examples in previous posts.

    Consumer Grade UX

    G-Suite is an example of Enterprise SaaS its at its best (you can imagine how many millions have been spent on Google docs!), they’ve built a product set that can be used by consumers and has survived the furnace of over a decade of use. 

    However, Google realized that when it comes to the Enterprise, users still require some help to get onboarded with products their employer wants them to use.

    To solve this, G-Suite also has a Chrome plugin specifically designed for companies to onboard and skill-up their employees.

    The G-Suite tours provide a comprehensive set of features: tips, walk-throughs, coachmarks and videos and comes from the acquisition of https://www.synergyse.com.  This fills a gap between seperate docs and Microsoft’s Clippy (we spoke about here). 

    G-suite-coachmark
    G-suite-lesson-list

    Previous
    Next

    Other Apps that are used in the enterprise often need walk-throughs or tours to explain features to users. Examples that I’ve seen are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Workday – enterprises are using tips/tours for:

    1. reducing training costs
    2. increasing productivity
    3. educating remote staff

    The problem has been (until Contextual) the same can’t be achieved in the Mobile Apps that Enterprise uses….AND…large quantities of staff are now predominantly mobile.

    Are “docs” dead?

    In the past nobody actually read the manual. Now, we can expect that a mobile-on-the-go workforce or user base will never go hunting around for docs.

    The solution is:

    1. have Apps so simple they need no explanation (e.g like a shopping app)
    2. deliver feature-rich Apps but with Consumer-grade UX (as discussed above)
    3. Provide contextual help via tips, tours, tooltips (as shown by G-Suite Training)
    4. Add some videos

    The best solution is a blend of (2), (3) and possibly a sprinkling of (4). Some companies use videos or animated-GIFs but we think they should be used sparingly.

    Generally load times, delays, resolution makes them sub-optimal. More importantly –  looping animated GIFs are funny with cats, but when it shows someone picking from a drop-down list and scrolling around, its plain boring or confusing!

    Follow Google’s lead

    We’ve previously explained that Google, Facebook, Dropbox and other successful Apps all use tips even though they have huge teams of Product Managers, Data Scientists and Developers. Simply put, Tips and Walk-throughs work for increasing user engagement and understanding.

    The G-Suite Training example is great but not all companies can go out and acquire a company like Synergise 🙂 Luckily Onboarding products like Contextual are economical, functional, easy to use and considerably cheaper!

  • How Facebook educates users about their new “upvote” feature with popups

    Facebook is trialling a new feature to counteract Fake News**, where you can “up” or “down vote” users comments, the idea being to support better conversations within Facebook community.

    I had noticed the new feature a few days ago but hadn’t really thought much of it. It wasn’t until I was surfing Facebook last night that the pop up below came up on my screen.

    Now to be honest, I had no idea what the up and down arrows were until Facebook kindly informed me through a simple yet informative pop up.


    It got me thinking that if one of the biggest companies in the world uses pop up tips to introduce new features then tips must really be effective!

    This is a perfect case of what the leaders are doing today, trickles down through the hip startups (like Pipedrive, Netflix, Canva) and later becomes commonplace a few years later.

    This is where Contextual comes in, we make it easier for companies :

    • That don’t have the mega budgets of companies like Facebook
    • That are time and resource poor
    • To be able to create tips just like the facebook example in minutes..
    • While  also allowing you to track how much of an impact the “Pop up Tip” had

    Let’s look at three points why this “InApp Popup” was successful at educating me:

    1. Timing: I had enough time to notice the feature and think about it (not that I really knew what the arrows did), before Facebook explained to me what it was and how to use it.
    2. Simplicity of the design: Facebook has used simple colours that match the colour scheme of the app, it only took me 30 seconds to read it and it was simple to understand.
    3. Placement: of the pop up was strategically placed so that it didn’t block the whole screen and the user can clearly see the new feature behind the pop up.

    This is all possible within the Contextual Dashboard where you can create helpful tips for your mobile app users without any code.

    In Contextual you can also set triggers or the target for “Pop up Tips”  just like this facebook example, you can see this in the video where we target users that “have not voted”.

    Here is a quick demo of how you could create a similar pop up using Contextual.

    https://vimeo.com/269127310

    ** To read more about the up/down vote feature, check out this Slate article.