Power User Curve over MAU/DAU for understanding users

Anyone in product development understand the importance of power users as they are the ones that drive successful companies. 

Traditionally, we use DAUs and MAUs to measure engagement. However, they do not measure power users. Introducing Power User Curve, which is histogram of users’ engagement by the total number of days they were active in a month/week depending on your business. You can measure engagement as app logins or for specific features which are relevant to your business. 

The advantage with Power User Curve is that it shows the variability among your users: some are slightly engaged. When mapped to cohorts, Power User Curves let you see if your engagement is getting better over time. Data for different features can help us decipher and make more informed decissions. 

Read the article in detail here - https://andrewchen.co/power-user-curve/ 

This is How Google will Collapse

This is an interesting article on reasons leading to possible collapse of Google empire which has been traditionally been built on ads. 

• Shift in user trends from search to discovery
• Lesser ads being delivered because of blocking ads features on devices esp iPhone 
• Lack of trust amongst users in banner ads
• Over-reliance on screen ads and missing disruptive trend of voice based search

Read details here- https://hackernoon.com/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee

How Duolingo Built a $700 Million Company Without Charging Users

https://producthabits.com/duolingo-built-700-million-company-without-charging-users/

This is a good article on how Duolingo disrupted the language learning industry and became a $700 Million company in 9 years.

Duolingo provides free app to learn a language. Currently, they have over 25 million monthly active users learning a language each at their own pace.

The company started in 2009 tapping into hundreds of millions of people who wanted to learn a new language but couldn’t afford to shell out a ton of money for expensive software. Duolingo’s early monetization plan was to charge businesses for the content that users translated as a byproduct of studying a language.

From 2009-12, Duolingo didn’t actually partner with companies to build out the B2B translation service, but they designed their app to increase number of users and engagement. Besides web app, Duolingo created a mobile app which used pictures, video clips, and the phone’s microphone to help users learn words, write, and speak.

In 2013, for the first time, Duolingo announced partnerships with BuzzFeed and CNN. With crowdsourced translations, their effective translation cost was around 4 cents per word, compared to translation industry's average price of around 6 to 10 cents per word.

However, Duolingo realized that expanding their B2B services was going to require a more enterprise sales-driven model—which meant potentially less attention on the product and the users. So, in 2014, Duolingo deprioritized B2B translation service and instead released a testing certification service for a small fee.

In 2015 and 2016, Duolingo launched program for Schools and flashcards both of which helped improve engagement significantly.

In 2017, Duolingo started serving ads to users. It also released a subscription plan that removes ads and lets users download lessons for offline use.

Duolingo has raised $108 Million in funding in over 5 rounds with current valuation at about $700 Million.

Book review - Design Of Everyday Things by Don Norman

"Design Of Everyday Things" by Don Norman is a book that not only shares principles of good design but also evaluates those from perspective of human psychology.

Book starts from design principles including making things discoverable, understandable and making it more delightful for users.

It then delves into difference between human and machines and who is good in what. Basically, human strength is being creative, flexible and imaginative while machines are good in being precise and acurate.

It then talks about how humans can interpret precise behavior from imprecise knowledge in the head and in world and that's something that even AI cannot do.

Finally, it talks about errors and how can they be classified as slips and mistakes. It further classifies them and talks about how to use design principles to avoid them.

Overall a must read for everyone interested in solving customer needs.

Big tech warns of 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/big-tech-warns-japan-millennium-bug-y2k-emperor-akihito-abdication

The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito’s coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shōwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito’s coronation will itself mark another new era. 

It means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era. Also, Japanese computers use one character to represent the entire era name (compressing Heisei into ㍻ rather than 平成, for instance), Unicode needs to set the standard for that new character.

Update 21 Aug - The new name will be encoded at U+32FF. Companies in font space will have to work to ensure the new character is supported and any word processing software will have to ensure that the same is interpreted and displayed properly.  

Getting users to their Aha moment

Aha moment (sometimes called the eureka effect) is the moment when new users first realize value in your product.

Here is a good article on how to find aha moments for your product and how to get users reach their aha moment sooner. - https://www.appcues.com/blog/aha-moment-guide 

Some of the ways to get users experience Aha sooner includes 

• Personalizing your user's journey to create more tailored onboarding experience (like one exp for novice and other for professional)
• Getting the users to experience Aha faster-
• Let people experience the product without asking them for signups etc. beforehand.
• Offering something for free like UserTesting offers 5 mins video of website review for free
• Creating a quick personalization guide with help from user- like iimjobs.com asking for role preference from a curated set of options for a job alert
• Step by step walkthrough

Online marketplace acts as a source for price data in Indian economy

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/online-marketplace-acts-as-a-source-for-price-data-in-indian-economy/story-tdJseAftmpPhlv6XvLSlCL.html 
Good read about how prices on an e-com site can be used to calculate inflation index like CPI. The advantages of this approach being its cheaper, quicker and more efficient. 

Lyft new search bar design

https://uxdesign.cc/what-every-product-designer-should-take-away-from-lyfts-new-ui-742c9668b067 

Unlike other transportation apps, Lyft’s search bar isn’t at the top and it’s not at the way-bottom, it’s in a sweet spot for thumbs. A good example of making sure your most frequently interacted with elements are the most reachable elements of your interface.

Positioning Is the Part of Product Market Fit You are Likely Ignoring

Positioning Is the Part of “Product Market Fit” You’re Likely Ignoring

Most people when searching for product market fit, focus on the product - let’s release an MVP (product) to see if people are interested; if not, add more features to product and so on. Instead focus on positioning and keep updating that until you find the right mix.

Positioning is about finding answers to following questions -
- Who do customers think your product/service is for? - Wide vs narrow targeting
- What do customers think makes you unique?
- What pain points do they think you solve?
- How credible do they perceive you to be?

UX for Lean Startups

This is 3rd Lean book that I have read on Lean, the first two being Lean Startup and Lean Analytics. I can vouch this is definitely one of the best books and strongly recommend to anyone who has an idea about solution to a problem and wants to convert that to a product. The book offers practical advice for validating all that you need towards building a product. 

The book starts by offering advice on how to conduct qualitative research on the idea to check if customers really need that and then moving on to landing pages to confirm the hypothesis and then to A/B testing to get statistically significant data on whether proposed changes increases certain metrics or not. 

Between the various ideas, the books talks about how to speed up things aka faster user research, faster design etc. emphasizing the "lean" concept of doing just enough and thus avoiding wastage. 

Other key takeaways for me were designing the test first, when to use qualitative vs quantitative tests, tips on creating various types of MVP including landing page, Wizard of Oz, Fake door test etc.

Creating habit forming products

We all (ok, most of us) are hooked to Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and other similar apps. Such is our hook that some of us are actually addicted to these apps. What is the secret of these habit forming apps? Nir Eyal in his book Hooked tries to provide an answer.

He explains that any habit forming app has 4 parts as depicted in following image-

Lets see this with an example of Facebook –

1. Trigger

• First time trigger for downloading FB app could be –
• You heard it from one of your friends via word of mouth
• Saw some online ad for FB
• An automated email from one of your friends who has been using FB for some time. 
• Some product ad that has a FB page and has a campaign etc running that you would like to be part of 
• Once you have downloaded FB and have started using it, the external trigger would be the app notifications for one among many of the following
• Friend requests, 
• Video recommendations, 
• Friend suggestions, 
• Likes on your picture, posts etc. 
• The internal trigger could be that you are feeling bore and therefore would like to see Facebook. Notice that in this case Facebook has successfully mapped an emotion in your mind with their app. 

2. Action

• Comes in form of user opening the app and viewing updates from others, sharing his own. 
• Nir talks about making action task as frictionless as possible and that’s what Facebook has been good at - App is available on mobile and desktop, provides infinite scroll and for people in countries with limited data speed, it even provides for a Facebook Lite app. 

3. Variable reward

• Reward in Facebook comes in form of 
• “Reward of Tribe” which is a rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included in our community.
• “Reward of Hunt” which is to do with reward that makes us feel that we have acquired new knowledge, maybe about our friends, new skills (through some video, group pages etc. )

4. Investment

• Comes in form of user storing his personal photos, his check-in details, his posts with Facebook. 
• Also comes in form of user inviting more of his friends
• Eventually, user forms a network of friends who like or provide comments to his stuff and thus giving him a trigger to come back later to check what his friends have written and who all of them liked his stuff. 

Similar to Facebook, Hook model can be applied to other products too.


However, there are few cases where Hook Model doesn’t seem to have an answer. In my opinion, these are products which are not "social" in nature. As an example, if we were to apply Hook model to a successful product of last decade, say Acrobat Reader, this is what I get -

• External trigger- I receive a PDF from a friend/office etc. or I download a pdf from some site
• Internal trigger- The pain is related to ability to read content of pdf document.
• Action- Motivation is to read the doc and ability is ease of opening at no cost to buy a software (via free Acrobat Reader) to open pdf
• Reward- I can read content and that's possibly a reward but it doesn't fit into tribe, Hunt or Self category and there doesn't seem to be variability.
• Investment- I don't seem to store anything with Acrobat. I am probably inclined to use any other software which can let me open pdf. For that matter, I am ok to use any product A which lets me open a document of type B. 

As can be seen, reward and investment is not very obvious but still Acrobat has been a very successful product.