Category: Professional

Last year, I visited Melbourne and led a diner discovery and search master class for many of the city’s best restaurants.

“When your team goes home at the end of the day and they’re describing what they’re doing to their spouses or significant others or roommates, they should be using the language in the user story, because they’re inspired by the vision you’ve talked about,” Skorpen said. “If people go home, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I can’t really explain it,’ that’s a sign the product person has failed.”

…

“One thing you learn in product management really quickly is that your instinct, your precious product idea, is going to be wrong all the time,” Skorpen said.

“9 STRATEGIES FOR WRITING MORE EFFECTIVE USER STORIES” by Tatum Hunter, based on interviews with Lauren Hutton, Vanessa Kafka, and yours truly.

Uber drivers average a 4.8 rating.

Lyft drivers a 4.86.

Average Yelp restaurant reviews are 3.71

What’s the difference?

Is the average Uber driver delivery a better experience than the average restaurant on Yelp? I don’t think so. Is Uber deleting bad reviews? I don’t think so.

Part of this is selection bias. Uber and Lyft police their platforms in a way Yelp can’t. Bad drivers get kicked out. But I think that’s only part of the story, based on my own experience managing a system with many tens of millions of reviews.

My hypothesis: People rate versus expectations. Most experiences, Uber ride, meal, whatever, meet expectations. And for Americans, meeting expectations means you get five stars.

If you’re consistently not meeting expectations, you’re going to be kicked out of the platform or you’ll go out of business (or clean up your act, in which case your average rating should improve).

So, how does this explain the difference between Yelp and Uber? Uber knows whenever you take a ride and prompts you to review. The share of rides that generate a rating on Uber is probably very high. If most people leave reviews, and the typical experience is a five star experience, most reviews on the system will be five star.

It’s very different for Yelp. Unlike Uber or Lyft or OpenTable, Yelp typically doesn’t know when you’ve been to a restaurant. They can’t prompt you to review your typical five-star meal. Only a tiny fraction of dining events are reviewed on Yelp, and for many people it’s going to take something exceptional to get them to seek out Yelp and choosing to leave a comment.

An exceptionally good experience can’t get better than a 5-star rating. There’s a lot more room to move down. Hence lower average ratings.

Originally on Twitter.

Miles Skorpen, Head of Consumer and Marketplace Product at OpenTable, shared an anecdote about reputation management that underscored Meyers’ observation about authenticity: “We did a test where we hired photographers to go out and take staged photos. It dropped conversion actually. We were flabbergasted. We learned that it doesn’t matter that the photos are low-quality, dark, or blurry. People want to see that this is the authentic restaurant.”

Yext ONWARD19 Recap

When I was in college, I spent two years as editor in chief of our daily online-only newspaper, The Daily Gazette. One of my first projects was leading a redesign of our website — and that included adding advertising; overnight, we were pulling in a thousand dollars a month.

I didn’t really know what to do with the money (the college paid our costs), so I came up with a scheme to divvy up the money as a salary of sorts to our team. Each semester, we’d pay writers, photographers, and editors a few hundred dollars — but they had to be active participants, meeting a quota of contributions. I imagined this could lead to a golden age for quality content.

Instead, the program failed miserably. Story contributions and staff attendance dropped rapidly over the course of the semester.

Next semester, we changed course. We stopped paying the team (apart from a couple, more significant, work-study scholarships) and instead used the money to buy t-shirts, send people to conferences, hire a journalism coach, and throw parties. This became a turning point for the Gazette: Our staff grew, the team wrote a lot of great stories, and we were named one of the top three college news sites in the country.

Looking back, I now realize that this challenge is a great lesson in the difference between rewards and culture.

What I realized after that first semester is that when we started paying our staff, working for the Gazette became a job — not a passion hobby. Our staff had tons of other opportunities, and a couple hundred bucks wasn’t worth hours of their life. When we pivoted how we used the money, though, we built tight relationships within the team, we created a sense of camaraderie, and we made the Gazette a social touch point at the school.

People want to get paid appropriately, of course, but as people move up Maslow’s hierarchy they want more than just a paycheck. I’m always thinking back to my time at the Gazette, and wondering how I can focus on building a culture so that work isn’t just an obligation.

So what should you do? Events like OpenTable’s recent internal hackathon are great. Share books with colleagues, so that you establish common frameworks and mental models. Print t-shirts, host board game nights, sponsor wine tastings. And don’t give undervalued rewards.

When we were designing RedLaser 4.0, one of our biggest questions was now to handle navigation. In particular, we weren’t sure where to put the button that launched our barcode scanner. It’s a critical function, but we were adding more features, so we needed to make sure it stood out.

We put it at the very center of our navigation bar, with a giant scan icon. We made the background red, so that it would really pop.

Sure, the app wouldn’t boot straight into the scan mode — we wanted users to see all the new features — but we were sure we’d done the next best thing.

The design failed, horribly, in testing. One user, a long-time RedLaser user, spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to launch scanning. She later told us she hadn’t even noticed the button.

This is a common story in mobile: Complex user interfaces are extremely hard, and a UX change can backfire in unexpected ways. If a button isn’t explicitly labeled and visible above the fold on the home page, it will get exponentially less usage.

This is a challenge: Phone screens are too small to show an explicit user interface for all but the simplest apps.

RedLaser isn’t alone in facing this issue. Swarm is a gorgeously designed app from Foursquare. It is the culmination of FourSquare’s efforts to re-envision and dramatically simplify the check in process. To do this, by default it continually broadcasts your current neighborhood to your connections. FourSquare realizes that while this behavior is critical to the app, it can also be really creepy: you don’t always want your friends to know when they’re nearby.

A very important part of the interface, then, is turning this tracking off. It’s easy, but also a new interaction element: You swipe left-to-right across the top bar and it changes your state:

While this interaction approach is easy and smooth, Swarm’s challenged because it isn’t a kind of interaction users expect — and there’s no explicit text to let you know it is even an option. Even savvy mobile users find it hidden:

https://twitter.com/danielbachhuber/status/474018824857989121

This leaves developers two choices: Build simpler apps, or teach users.

It looks like many of the largest companies in mobile are choosing the former. The triumph of Whatsapp is its focus and simplicity — and it is followed by focused apps from eBay, LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, and more. A single-purpose app can create a focused, simple, user-interface.

A single-purpose app, however, just creates different problems: User acquisition, and user retention. Big mobile companies with their own ecosystems can use apps to feed each other (just like clicking an eBay link in RedLaser will send users to the eBay app). The vast majority of mobile players don’t have this luxury, and user acquisition can be brutally hard. So when you’ve convinced a user to download your app, it needs to be a must-open, home-page-worth app — and this frequently will mean complexity.

Most app developers can’t afford to fragment their user base. So complex apps need to get user education right.

User education, however, is hard. The most common approach is to show an overlay on launch, calling out a few critical buttons. In Swarm, FourSquare insisted every user disable and then re-enable location tracking before permitting wider use of the app. Others require users to watch short videos or swipe through pages of text.

None of this works. Most users in a new app want to get up and running as quickly as they can. We’ve all been guilty of furiously button mashing through tutorials, trying to get to the meat of the app. So what should a designer or product lead do?

The most impressive user education system I’ve encountered is, surprisingly, for the app Secret. Secret is a social sharing app whitest people anonymously broadcast information.

Secret uses three complementary approaches to user education

Method 1: The traditional tutorial

Secret starts with a traditional user education flow When a user opens the app for the first time, they need to swipe through a series of screens describing the basic operation of the app. This happens before registration, which is important so that users get a sense of how the app works and aren’t driven to close or delete immediately. These screens are extremely simple, focusing on concepts rather than on specific functionality.

At RedLaser, we found people swipe through this kind of screen extremely quickly. The default assumption should be that the average user will not see this content.

Method 2: In-line education

Secret’s first innovation in user training is inline education. The key interface for the app is a user’s secret feed. When a user pauses to read a secret, it is blurred out and a single, focused, explanation of a user interface element appears. These messages are contextually relevant — they only appear when the user pauses to read a message that could benefit from further explanation.

The advice is effective and powerful because it is highly relevant to the user’s current situation. The messages either suggests a specific action the user can actually take on the secret they’re reading right then, or it provides context for the secret (if not from a friend) which makes the secrets more valuable.

Exiting these messages requires a click in a small area, and the exit button changes location (following the messages), which means that users can’t quickly skip through the messages.

Method 3: Spaced Retrieval Therapy

Secret’s final training method is spaced retrieval therapy. In SRT, you regularly re-expose people to information to lock it into their minds.

Secret uses this for key pieces of information: How to like secrets by swiping left to right (critical because this determines whether and how secrets are shared), and permissions requests.

This information is displayed inline, just like a normal secret, which means users are less likely to block the content out (as in banner blindness).

It isn’t clear when Secret decides to show this information. To most effectively train people about interfaces, they should display the information on a regular pattern with decreasing frequency (e.g., after 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, etc.). If a user positively responds to the content (for example, by taking the action without prompting), the frequency of reminders can become less frequently.

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For other posts on mobile, read about the trend of increasing apps per company and iOS 8’s major pro-privacy changes.

In January,  Uber announced it was dramatically slashing rates for UberX cars. With the new rates, UberX cars are the lowest priced transportation option I can find in San Francisco.

Techcrunch and other venues posited that this was a purely competitive move: Consumers were trying out alternative services like Lyft, and Uber needed to be cheaper to compete. While I’m sure that’s part of the story, I think there’s something more going on.

The ride share service is brutally competitive — and not just on the consumer side. It puts enormous power into the hands of drivers, because people don’t just want low rates but also supply. One impact of this is that the economic surplus will probably accrue to drivers — services will compete to pay them a larger and larger percentage of the total charge just to get them driving for their service, rather than a competitor.

Moreover, since the people using services like Lyft and UberX are extremely price sensitive, the best way to get new customers is to lower rates. Overtime, you’ll probably see movement like this:

Prior to January, it looked like profit for ride share businesses would slowly decline as prices dropped and drivers took a larger and larger percentage of revenue.

Uber’s January move changed that — they jumped from A straight to B on my chart, instead of slowly bringing down prices. Since they didn’t reduce the absolute dollar value of driver revenue, the drivers effectively take a higher percentage of revenue.

So what? Uber just kicked off a price war … because it is one they can win. 

See, the above curve is  only true for community drivers. Black car services are a totally different market — you differentiate on service and convenience, not  price. This is a market Uber owns.

Uber’s main concern is about winning marketshare & press in the broad taxi service (possibly because they see a future with driverless cars, where capital is more important than labor, and they’ll win back their profit margin), and about making money via Uber black car. 

Which gets to another reason for the price decrease: To better differentiate its services: Uber vs. UberX.

Prior to this price decrease, Uber had better service but otherwise wasn’t much different — a bit more expensive.

By lowering prices (and forcing its competitors to do the same), Uber actually might have reduced the number of cars on the road. Suddenly there is a huge competitive advantage for the black car service — they’re simply more available, all the time.