Treat KPIs with caution, or you can cause product decline

You should have never heard of the term. Don't get me wrong, there's not much direct relationship between it and KPIs-I use it to describe features and interface designs that are out of demand and challenging user habits. However, such designs are often found in "strategy"-oriented companies, and the product's architectural logic is fully serviced by the KPI metrics of the product manager and the strategic stakeholders.

Sina Weibo can be said to be the best case I have ever seen. Whether or not Sina officially admits that over the past year, the decline in Weibo users is an indisputable fact, and you cannot blame it entirely on the rise of the micro-trust circle, after all, the more "private social networking" circle of friends and media attributes of the strong microblogging is a completely different two kinds of products. Perhaps more importantly, Sina Weibo has been constantly challenging the user's patience in its product architecture.

In my opinion, the first kind of mistake that Sina Weibo makes in product design is "frequently challenge user's usage habit". Over the past year, Sina Weibo has made many revisions to mobile apps and Web pages, and its changes to functional locations are often confusing:

For example, once Weibo's top, forward, favorites, and comments are at the bottom right, I actually think it would be a good design to put together a micro-blogging operation, but for some reason, after a facelift, the deletion in the timeline is changed to a small "x" number on the upper right, and it is still hidden. -It is only visible when the user moves the mouse to the appropriate area.

Not long ago, the top function was treated the same way: on Weibo line "fan headline", these two functions are categorized to the right bottom of the "promotion", originally this is also a reasonable design, but now, Sina Weibo and the two logically similar functions of living apart, Put the top and delete these two unrelated actions together.

Although I do not think Sina's product manager will be silly to allow users to delete less micro-blog, the function of the button weakening, in order to high light "fan headlines", the top also weakened. But it looks as if the top-right corner of Weibo is more and more like the "limbo" of a common function.

The design that frequently challenges user habits is also common in mobile apps. A recent example is the new iOS version of Sina Weibo, which has changed its position to "find friends," and has also been evaluated by a large number of users.

The second type of error that Sina Weibo makes is "constantly extending the user's operational path." This has a noticeable effect on mobile terminals with limited screen size.

The first is the design of the user's personal page--as we all know, in the past period, Sina Weibo will emphasize the user's personal interest, dynamic structured data Product "personal page" as the center of gravity.

The direct consequence of this change is that the original user clicks into the personal page can see the micro-blog body content, was compressed to the level two page.

Sina's trend is still growing, in the recent update of the new application, I am surprised to find that the first screen of Weibo personal page the most conspicuous function unexpectedly is "red envelopes" and "new friends." And if your best friend is involved in a red envelope, click on the personal page of the TA and you won't see anything other than the marketing campaign.

In other words, Sina Weibo has been for its own strategy and marketing, and constantly use those irrelevant content to seize the most important space, and the user's most basic demand-read micro-blog to weaken.

Sina Weibo also has a very serious mistake, I call it "smart recommendation", in other words, microblogging product managers seem to be good at turning "effective information" into "spam".

The first example is the product recommendation from Taobao. Originally, the two data through, according to the user's interest map and purchase, collection, browsing the history of goods to do personalized recommendations, is a good idea. Unfortunately, on Sina Weibo, it has turned into a set of recommendations based on user "browsing and buying records"-the biggest problem of which is that the difference between users ' interests ' and ' purchase intent ' is confusing. For example, you may have just bought an air purifier, so you will not have this kind of purchase intention for a long time, but if Weibo will continue to recommend you similar products, and spam ads undoubtedly.

The second example is a feature that we've seen recently in the timeline, "pictures of your Friends". In fact, it's an easy mistake to make a "recommendation for something" based on a social network--if you tell the user at the bottom of an item page, "Your best friend has been praised", so this is an effective message to help the user choose, but if you're actively recommending "your friends like It" on social networking sites, Then it becomes an advertisement based on "relationship".

The reason is that in the weak relationship platform of Weibo, social relations and personal interests are difficult to match, and any "inaccurate" recommendation has a much greater negative effect than its transformation. And we can see that on Sina Weibo, there are still a lot of "not smart recommendations" such as paying attention to the automatic letters recommended subscriptions by the Authenticated users.

To sum up, in the past year, Sina Weibo every iteration of the product, is too much for its "strategic" service-and Taobao cooperation to commercialize, develop the V users, enhance social properties ... It is always overlooked that it should first be a platform for users to publish and deliver content. This "KPI design" may be the catalyst for accelerating the decline of Weibo.