Deceptive marketing from daily deals

I recently ran across a great little piece of marketing run by daily deal site, LivingSocial - when my girlfriend was using her Flixster app on her phone to find us a movie to watch, before she could access the app she was presented a prompt that asked her a question and gave two potential responses.

The question was: Do you like cupcakes?

Potential responses:
- I love cupcakes
- I hate cupcakes

Upon clicking 'I love cupcakes' she was then taken to a further screen for LS where they tried to sign her up. Granted, most people would probably recognize it was a LS ad... but then again, my experience with the average American consumer would suggest that most might not. Further, the way they frame the question and your options really makes a tough mental decision - to answer 'I hate cupcakes' would be an outright lie for the majority of the population... and for some reason (glad for this) we even have difficulty lying to a computer...

In short, a nice marketing tactic. It won't make me love LS, but might get me a step further to try the product. A little deceptive though and definitely annoying from a product perspective inside the Flixster app...

All for now!

Finance Works demo online...

Finance Works demo online...


Room for improvement, but a good first step.

Product Upsell: Usage-based Trials

My last blog here was about the great first-use-experience in using the Action Method online personal management tool. This new blog will be about how they did an excellent job of up-selling me to actually PAY for the product!

There are a few widely used business models out there today employed by web applications designed to get users to 'try before you buy' the product. The two that come to mind most are:

• Freemium - offer a scaled back version of a product with limited functionality - when users want to make use of higher-order functionality, they can choose to pay for the premium version of the product
• This is great for incumbent companies, as it basically gives away a low-level version of the product which in some ways 'fends off' or 'crowds out' smaller startups that might start with basic functionality and build more stuff on later
• Examples of this include: TurboTax, Pandora, Flickr, Skype, LinkedIn
• Time-based trial - offer your product with full features for a set period of time (e.g. 30 days)
• This a nice way to show off all the bells and whistles of your product and get the user hooked. The issue here is that the time based approach may not give the user enough time to try it out and fully give it a test spin... maybe they don't get to it in that first 30 days?
• Examples of this include: Basecamp (37 signals), Apple's iWork... many others
• The giveaway - Sometimes companies simply give away credit to their services - example Google Adwords... they love to give away $100 or $200 of free advertising.. great model.

Action Method employed a unique approach in that they let me use the full functionality of the product, but cutoff my use not based on time, but rather based on usage! This makes a tonne of sense, because in a way, once you set a 'usage' limit, it ensures that users have taken full advantage of the product and gotten hooked. I didn't feel any time pressure to use the product and instead just tried it out risk free. This type of upsell I refer to as 'Usage-based trial' and I hope it gets applied more broadly.

Of course, each of these models has their merits depending upon the actual product being sold - you always need to balance giving your users a chance to try the product with simply giving away your product that you should rightfully be charging for!

Best of luck!
1984

A great first use experience

I recently joined a site called 'Action Method', and I was wowed by their startup / first use experience. It was really easy, intuitive and instructive. In product management / design, the first use experience of a product is critical - it is the point where you'll hook a user or lose them forever... there are countless applications that I've checked out but abandoned because I couldn't navigate the product or understand its benefit to me quickly enough. This is sad if you've gone through all the effort to create a great product / service, but then the product falls down on execution because people can't actually get over the hurdle of initial investment. Some of the great strategies that Action Method used were as follows:

1) Offer a video summary of the application (I discussed this in a previous post as well)


2) Take you through a quick tour of the different screens - they laid out the steps that you would take in the order that you would likely do them. It was pretty intuitive.

3) The part I liked the most was the way they included a brief written description of a given screen with the option to close that description and never see it again... this was really helpful for me and not too invasive

Just a few good things to consider when building a first-use experience. What also shouldn't be forgotten is that the user flows need to be SUPER-INTUITIVE... i.e. the click flow should be exactly how the user would be thinking about things, and aligned with the way they would discover the different functionality of the application.

All for now,

1984 

Guide me through a process...

Just ordered some tea online from Mighty Leaf - they sell delicious teas of many different kinds. Quite good, but not the focus of this blog. I just wanted to call out what I thought was a great user experience in signing me up to their system and helping me order the tea quickly and efficiently - i.e. they got $50 out of me without blinking an eye!

The below screenshot is a view of the entire purchase process - it was a clean look and feel, along with a nice navigation across the top of the screen that let me knew what step I was in, and which ones still remained before I completed my purchase. This is alot like TurboTax, which is another relatively good user experience in terms of letting you know where you are in your tax filing process and removes any 'uncertainty' of what has happened and what remains. This is really helpful, as opposed some experiences you get on sites like expedia where you can feel like you're lost in different screens and pages. This was a refreshing experience - if only more companies could take a page from the Mighty Leaf book, online purchases would be much better.

One other thing to note here - it's not necessarily about reducing the number of screens I see as a user, it's really about making the experience flow nicely and easily without requiring any heavy thought from me... or distraction throughout the process.

Just a small observation. Well done Mighty Leaf.

1984

An elevator pitch for your app / product

A great marketing / awareness / on-boarding tool that has gained increasing use over the past few years has been what I call the application elevator pitch - it's essentially a ~1 minute video explaining how an application or product works and why it's valuable for the end user. Google has been a great proponent of this and applied it to many of their early stage products and developments. Many other companies have also followed suit. I am a big fan for a few reasons:

1. It helps a user quickly and easily (in a fun way) understand what a product is about and why they might use it
2. It forces a company to really focus on the value they're providing to the market - if you can't explain what you're providing to the market and why it's important in less than one minute, then chances are you don't have a focused enough offering

Some great examples of this that I've seen include a few from Google:

One from the personal finance application, Mint.com:

Just a great way to get your product idea out there and gain awareness.

Enjoy!
1984

Credentials & usernames - how about something people will remember for once...?

One particular issue I take with many web applications these days happens when they ask you to create a username for yourself to sign in to their service - I'm fine with creating credentials (though signing in with Facebook would be preferable), however what I don't like is when they get you to create some random name -- what really needs to happen is for these sites to force your login credentials to match your email address... this only makes way too much sense:

1. You know that there will never be a namespace issue, as every email address is by definition unique
2. People are much less likely to forget their email address, as opposed to some random username or tag they gave themselves when signing up for your service

Ultimately, if people want a 'tag' name for posts or some social aspect of an application they should be able to call themselves whatever they want... but for credentialing, let's keep it simple stupid!

Signing off for now,

1984

Our life as a game...

I don't know that this is necessarily a new thing per se, I imagine it has been growing in popularity over the last few years, but what really struck me today was how many Web 2.0 companies / applications are applying gaming principles to attract and retain users. It's both brilliant and bizarre at the same time. Our lives are now being turned into games... get points for:

• Eating at restaurants - Foursquare
• Watching TV shows - Gomiso
• Driving your car - Waze

This has been driven perhaps by a few things:

Zyngbook - Facebook and Zynga - these two behemoths of the social technology world were instrumental in bringing small time multi-player gaming into the mainstream

Pseudo-psychologists - There have been a number of pseudo-psychologists in the last decade or so that have hit it rich with best selling books that look at the irrationality of human psychology and behavior. I'm sure burried in their ramblings is something about how humans inherently love variable reward games and will play them repeatedly

Whatever the cause, it's still bizarre. While I admire the efforts of these companies from the standpoint of a savvy businessman, it pains me to see that so many people continue to wrap their lives up in what can only be described as noise. Facebook is of course the pinnacle of this... perhaps it's time people stopped playing their virtual lives and went out to get a real one.

1984