Learn from the error to make the product successful

This article is written by Leo widrich, the founder of buffer, and Tom Moor, the translator @ c7210.

Buffer is an application that helps users publish content more efficiently on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Up to now, it has more than 0.5 million users. When we started building this product two years ago, developers were fully prepared to face various challenges, including the obstacles encountered during the design and development process and possible mistakes.

 

Mistakes in projects are inevitable. As long as you can learn something from them, these errors will guide us in the right direction. To some extent, what pushes a product to a successful stage may be the mistakes made along the way.

The following content is compiled by the author as the first person:

Important Design Principles

Before discussing the experiences we learned from mistakes, I 'd like to talk about one of our important design principles:

• Verify before development.

Next, let's talk about what is going on.

The original intention of creating a buffer is to create a "smart" method that allows users to publish content more efficiently on Twitter and other social network platforms. When this idea came out, our founder Joel Gascoigne immediately began writingCodeInstead of verifying the idea first. After a few minutes, he realized that this may not be the correct method.

Next, Joel creates an introduction page for this product that does not currently exist, and places the link on Twitter for dissemination. Potential users who are really interested in this idea will visit the introduction page through links. After they click the "service solution and price" button, the next page will tell them, the product has not yet been completed. Please leave a mailbox so that you will be notified immediately after the product is launched.

Starting from this incident, we gradually summarized the three most important design principles and experiences in the following process:

1. The first version of the entire product or a new function should be minimized.
2. Be prepared: the project may be long-term and involves multiple transformations.
3. Any new ideas and ideas must be verified first.

After talking about the overall experience, I will use some practical examples to give you a more detailed introduction of what we have learned in the project.

Lesson 1: The process should focus on "User retention" rather than "benefits"

The important lesson we learned in the early stages of the project is to focus the process on "user-retention" rather than generating revenue.

How do we understand this? Let's take a look at the registration application process for the initial version after the buffer goes online:

1. After clicking the "service plan and price" button on the introduction page, you will be directed to a page that describes specific service types.
2. On this page, you need to make a choice in the free or paid solution.
3. After selecting the service type, you must enter the user name, email address, and other information to complete registration.

At that time, there were indeed many users who would choose the payment option, which was not a bad thing. However, we soon discovered that the user turnover rate of this type of products that will select the payment option before they actually use the product is very large. Some of them seldom use the product after payment, and some even Unsubscribe the paid service.

So we tried to modify this process and didn't ask the user to select a solution here. we said to ourselves, "let's first let the user experience the product and determine the value the buffer brings to them, after official use, we encourage them to upgrade to the corresponding paid version as needed."

The modified process is what you can see on the buffer Website: users can log on directly through their third-party accounts and experience all the functions in the free solution, use the product immediately and seamlessly.

The re-design of the related process produces the following two results:

1. More people are starting to use our products.Because we removed the service solution selection page and the relevant registration process, reducing unnecessary obstacles.
2. More people have upgraded to the payment optionBecause they can easily enter the use status and discover the value, they decide to pass along with us.

Later, we made a lot of improvements to the product, including the addition of more free features, and the core features of the product are always free. We recommend paid upgrade solutions to users only if they are confident that they have already experienced enough value.

Focusing on user retention is an important lesson we have learned.

Related reading:

• Progressive attraction-allows potential users to understand products and complete conversion in practice
• Design principles and creative elements of the "coming soon" Page

Lesson 2: Social login is more effective than traditional email Login

In order to improve the conversion rate on the homepage, We made many attempts and conducted a series of A/B tests. The results were not very satisfactory. In the end, we decided to try the social login method, that is, allow users to log on directly through their Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts.

After all, the buffer product is used to facilitate users to publish content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, So it is logical to do so, users can use the buffer directly through their related accounts, reducing unnecessary troubles.

For the purpose of comparison, let's take a look at the traditional registration method used by buffer before using social login:

This change has greatly promoted the growth of the number of users and the conversion rate has increased by nearly 50%. In fact, on the day of switching the login mode, the daily growth has changed from 500 to 800.

Lesson 3: verify each hypothesis as soon as possible

We once had the idea of re-designing the browser plug-in, which eventually failed badly.

Browser plug-ins are an important part of the entire buffer product. They can help users directly add content on the web page to their own "buffer" and share it with social platforms, the overall experience is great.

So naturally, we will focus on browser plug-ins and hope to improve them as much as possible to implement some cool ideas. However, in the process of improvement, we seem to have picked up some bad habits in the past and made some mistakes that should have been avoided. The steps at that time were as follows:

1. We identified some problems in the browser plug-in of the buffer and brainstormed what we wanted to improve.
2. Next, we spent a lot of time and resources re-designed and developed a full-featured new version of the plug-in.
3. During the tests after completion, we found that the new version of the plug-in has brought great confusion to users.
4. Finally, we decided to discard the plug-in of this version.

What you can see here is the failed work that never goes online:

It can be said that this defeat made us"Verify each hypothesis as early as possibleThe principle is deeply imprinted in my mind and becomes a habit in the future.

To improve the product or implement new features, take the following steps:

1. Identify existing problems and identify points to be improved or added.
2. Communicate with existing users to see if they have encountered these problems during use.
3. After the idea has been preliminarily verified, you can quickly create a wiredrawing or a prototype that can be interacted with by subsistence allowances.
4. Communicate with users again to show them the prototype and observe their interaction behavior.
5. Repeat this process until the design plan is finalized.
6. Continuously track various metrics, maintain communication with users, and verify the performance of new products.

Related reading:

• Lean entrepreneurship-new packaging of user experience
• Early product prototype design and user testing

Lesson 4: clear and easy-to-understand UI text

I have been thinking about this for a long time: For titles, buttons, prompts, and other UI elements, we should try to use clear and easy-to-understand texts as much as possible when conditions permit, rather than other forms that seem smart but bring cognitive burden to users.

Intercom's des Traynor defines this issue in an article:

You have created great functions for your actual needs, but you find that they are not using them at all. Most of the time, this is because the user does not see this function, or even though he notices it, he does not know what it is.

This problem is often encountered in projects. A representative example: in buffer, You can integrate your account on several social platforms to publish content in a centralized manner. For example, after you log on to your Twitter account, you may need to add your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, as shown in:

We once thought that using a plus sign to guide users to add accounts is a very clever way.

However, this is not the case. We constantly receive emails from Users asking how to add their other accounts to the buffer.

So we made some improvements, such as using a larger plus icon and some similar small adjustments. However, the last and most effective solution is very simple: directly use the "connect to more accounts" text instead of the plus button, so that the information is clearer and more effective.

From this incident, we realized that even if we need to make sacrifices in the form of appearance, we should also choose a solution that is clearer and easier to understand for the user, rather than something cool to look.

Related reading: how to effectively improve user experience with the help of the UI

Summary

We believe that our company and the buffer product are still in the initial stage, so even now, many design processes and methods may still be experimental and yet to be verified.

For us, the greatest inspiration we have gained from our previous journey is that, instead of relying on an idea, we need to consider each new function and new design scheme as an assumption that needs to be verified.

We plan to implement more ideas and implement more interesting functions, but we are also ready to discard most of them. We believe that from a long-term perspective, such a way of thinking can help us build products that users really need.

Via: sixrevisions

Translator's blog: beforweb