Slow company watercress: User value greater than experience through the product to do business

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Watercress Yang Bo

Each company's rhythm and stage goals are not the same, watercress (micro-blog) is the lucky thing is always able to use their own rhythm to do things, can always put the user value in the first place.

Some people say that watercress is a "slow company", in fact, we did not deliberately to slow. Why does it make people feel this way?

Watercress model does not have reference samples, a lot of things need us to stones. Innovative products actually need to pay a lot of costs, including the experience of the new model of the time cost, it will take more than a year or two to stabilize the model, and then enter a healthy growth stage. This is a time when you are trying to make a mistake and observe, but it looks like nothing is going on outside, it seems very slow.

In this process, we are also looking at a number of new models, can grow to determine the size of the user itself, but also determine the ability of the team and experience.

User value greater than user experience

The user experience is of course important--most people's view of the user experience, more of the functional design level, can be more than this, in the user experience is very attention, even defined as the most important thing. But then we look from another perspective, the user experience can indeed always be good, a user he is very cool today, tomorrow is good, there may be six months later, a year after the unchanged, but suddenly one day he will not come.

Many products do so, users say very good, can also be tired, or there will be newer and cooler products to meet him. Watercress did not happen on a large-scale similar situation, but this problem and our earliest to do watercress's original intention. We realize that the user experience actually has a deeper part and defines it as user value.

The so-called user value, is what you have in the long run to bring people what value, to put it bluntly is that you are not useful. This will determine the user's use of your product in two or three years. Therefore, when we first define watercress, it should first be useful, followed by the user experience.

For watercress, the development process and user needs are consistent. Each new feature has the best user experience to optimize it, and it is well bonded to the user's value.

Look back at several nodes of watercress, some algorithms, some social services, community, we have been expanding can provide the scope and depth, the company has been moving forward. We are not subject to the impact and impact of new product patterns each year, because in the long run we guarantee that value is expanding rather than shrinking.

100,000 user's Law

I have been very wishful thinking to the user all praise and scold are considered to our love. The process is not easy, and really requires a very strong heart.

The user's opinion is always to listen to, but you do not have to listen to become action immediately. Because users are not product managers, most of the time they are not able to express their needs very logically, and doing so directly can create a lot of problems.

For example, the broadcast of watercress, it for each user to list a friend's action update, there are many users reflect, asked to add a look only "recommended" function. Why? The original is because the user's radio has a large number of books, movies, music collection updates, so that his screen is very bad, and these are not the information he cares about. What he needs is not a new function, but a screening of useful information. Aware of this, we found that the most need to do is not directly to see the recommendations, but how to reduce the book, Film screen painting.

Therefore, we should not only use the ear to listen, but also to feel, to find out what is behind, users sometimes scold you have his truth.

It is interesting that when the product is very small, the user is not much, this time to get user feedback is very straightforward. But when the user more and more, reach 1 million, 10 million, this process will have a big problem.

I summed it up as "100,000 user's Law": when the number of users more than 100,000, the product directly access to the user's opinion channel is invalid. On such a large user base, if 1% of users are dissatisfied with you, and 1/10 of the Users express, which means that every day there are 100 users scold you. That feeling is a barrage of abuse, and you can not tell whether it is 100 or 10,000 people scold, it may be a small proportion, but you have no way to measure. So there are other ways to do it outside of direct feedback, such as using numbers to talk and quantitative analysis. At this point you can't sit passively and listen, you need to take a more proactive approach to getting real feedback.

It's easy to keep users for a day or two, what do you do three years and five years to keep them? So there are times when you have to choose between a short-term user experience. Users do not think very far, if you meet their short-term needs but to the long-term use of damage, when the error caused, the user has gone, you can not go to the original to give you the opinion of the user accounts.

Watercress "Do not operate"

Community or social, the concept is now a little bit rotten, and it really means a lot. Not the Alpha city, watercress internal group, small station, online activities as our community, and its operating principles are very simple: we do not operate.

We've been recruiting community operations managers, a lot of people are interested in, we will talk about, can talk about a long time later found that we are not very clear to find what people need to do, because so far, watercress community in the common sense should be operated to do things, we are using product means to express.

For example, we have to solve some problems, do some guidance or push some things, will be through a button from the top to the following way to achieve, the Community home page is the algorithm automatically calculated. We never do the topic or hype in the community, so far the entire community does not have an editor.

The product form of the community itself is usually relatively simple, watercress itself step by step into the community, the product itself and other communities are not much different, so the focus is not on product form.

Earlier, we pursue content and quality, do not want to content too much water, how do we do it? Many companies will do operations, so that editors will be good content proposed, but watercress did not go this way. When we first started designing, the core of the group is a small forum that can post, replies, but put the button on the back of all the content of the last, rather than in the main post-when users reply, you need to read all the replies before replying, rather than immediately reply to the main post.

This is obviously sometimes inconvenient to users, from the user experience can be said to be not the best choice, but in the long run, it can guarantee the quality of the community's content, and therefore ensure the user value, so in fact it is set up. This is a trade-off problem, but also from the product of watercress community operation ideas.

User value and business value

The ecological environment of the community itself is very complex, with various types of users and a wide variety of demands. We did a survey before, "What do you like best about all the features of watercress?" In the final results, one of the top 10 is "advertising"-users say they like ads. We feel very happy.

This relates to the relationship between user value and business value. I never felt that there was an essential conflict between the two, the logic is this: when you only look at the user experience does not look at the business, in fact, easily conflict, but if the watercress can produce enough user value, to the user's real life is helpful, the user value will naturally become business value, you share a small part of it.

Therefore, if the product only good user experience, but no good user value, it will be very difficult to commercialize, when the commercialization of things that hurt the user experience, these two things can not be reconciled. The thing that watercress does has a lot of value to the user, every time the user found a book in the watercress, he decided to buy the time, watercress not only gave him value, but also to publish the book's author and publishing house produced value, to the bookstore produced value, this is the commercial value produced by watercress. It is produced from scratch, because users do not have to find the book, not to buy. This function is not a vicious ad, in essence it has a support point.

In addition, each company's rhythm and each stage of the goal will not be the same, watercress is fortunate that we have been able to do a lot of things with their own rhythm, can always be user value, user experience, including the size of the user in the first place, commercial follow-up on it. When commercialization naturally comes up, it is actually very easy, and the damage to the user experience in this process is not really significant.

I even often feel that our ads are part of the content that helps us define the brand of watercress and help users find something interesting. In the long run, watercress will also have a new business model outside the advertising, when it will naturally produce.

Douban founder and CEO Yang Bo │ Oral Xiayong │ Finishing

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