Kevin Hale: The Subtleties of User Experience (Part 2)

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Kevin Hale: In general, we constantly conducted experiments on the support service in Wufoo, because we were literally “obsessed” with it. One of the experiments that we conducted was as follows: we heard someone talk about the lack of a connection between the emotions that we have when we need help, and satisfaction and the reaction we get from people when we help them.
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Especially often this connection is absent on the network, since we simply do not see these non-verbal signals. So, according to the author of this idea, there will never be a relationship between us and users until face recognition appears on the network.



We thought: "We are not experts in the field of facial recognition, but it seems to us that there is another way to see sympathy." Since we created form designers, we added a drop-down list called “What are you feeling right now?”. We thought that no one would use it and thought it would be a useless experiment, but we decided to see what happens.



It turned out that this field was filled in 75.8% of cases. For comparison: the field with the drop-down list "Browser Type" was filled in 78.1% of cases. That is, in fact, people told us: “In the case of my problem, what I feel is just as important as the technical features that you need to know in order to fix the bug.”

We did not prioritize tasks based on the emotions of those who approached us, so most clients could not “replay” the system in this way. We noticed that one of the interesting side effects of this experiment is that people began to treat us better. We went back to work and looked at the data, analyzed the text and realized that in written communication, for example, by e-mail, there are only three ways to express vivid emotions: exclamation marks, expletives, and capital letters. Definitely [according to the results of the experiment], each of these three indicators decreased when communicating with us through the support service. As soon as people had a way to express emotions, they began to reason more rationally and as a result made our work more enjoyable.



Another unexpectedly stunning result is that this approach helps you create better software. And this is confirmed by a number of studies. Jared Spool, a user interface designer (one of the largest experts in his field), argues that there is a direct relationship between how much time we spend communicating with users directly and the quality of the design.

He believes that the design process should occur this way. Communication should be open. It is impossible to draw conclusions solely on the basis of reports or graphs. You need to interact with customers in real time. Such communication should take place at least every six weeks and last at least two hours; otherwise, your software will deteriorate over time. Our developers communicate directly with users for 4-8 hours every week. This changes our view on software development.



Jared Spoole offers a different look at how we create products. Imagine that this spectrum [on the slide above] shows the whole amount of knowledge necessary to use the application. The extreme left value is the complete lack of knowledge, the extreme right is all the necessary knowledge. And these two transverse lines reflect the essence of your interaction with the user. The transverse line on the left shows the current level of user knowledge, and the transverse line on the right shows which level of knowledge you want to bring them to.

The gap between them, according to Spool, is called the “knowledge gap”. What is interesting, there are two ways to eliminate it. You either provide the user with more knowledge, or reduce the amount of knowledge required to use the application. And often we, as engineers, those who are working on the creation of products, think: "Let's add new functions." But new features only lead to an increase in this gap.



As for us, we have focused our efforts on another direction. We used 30% of the time spent on development to create internal tools to help the support team. But often this time was spent on the fact that people helped themselves. For example, we created pages with frequently asked questions, pop-up hints, made it so that by clicking on the Help link instead of going to the page with general reference documentation you would get to a specific page with information that is most relevant to what you are working on.



We changed the design of our documentation again and again, constantly conducting A / B testing. One of the iterations on the work on the documentation page reduced the load on technical support by 30% per day. This is one of those cases when the day for all who work on the product, suddenly became 30% less load.



What happens if everyone continuously works in technical support? I said at the very beginning that development is a function dependent on conversion and “turnover”. This is the Wufoo growth curve in the first five years [slide above]. The interesting thing is that we did not pay for advertising and marketing; all this growth was provided by the subscribers themselves.

The difference between the number of new users and unsubscribing from services is extremely small, and this is very important. Many still forget that there is almost no difference between an increase in conversion of 1% and a decrease in turnover by 1%; they have exactly the same effect on your height; however, the latter is in fact much easier and much cheaper to implement. And we very often neglect this, until the difference becomes too big. Typically, these tasks are not the most basic employees of companies.

To be honest, this chart is not one of those we are especially following in Wufoo, not even one of which I am proud of. This is one of those that I am proud of [slide below], because, despite the fact that we have a good, remarkable growth curve, this is what allowed us to scale, while remaining a small company with an amazing culture. And it required us to perform a variety of tasks aimed at fulfilling the needs of our users.



John Gottman noted that there is another kind of behavior in relationships that leads to divorce. In essence, it turned out that there is a subgroup of people living together for 10-15 years, and then suddenly filing for divorce. None of the indicators suggests that this will happen. Gottman looked through the data and realized: "Hmm, there is no passion between these people, there is no fire." Relations in some sense follow the second law of thermodynamics: in a closed energy system, everything tends to destruction, so you constantly have to apply energy and effort to return it to its original state.



Many people think that it’s necessary to show people how “they are dear to companies” by creating, for example, a blog or a newsletter. We evaluated our performance, and it turned out that the percentage of active users, generally speaking, was small; and most of them had no idea about the amazing opportunities that we could provide them.



Therefore, we created a new function and called it the Wufoo Alert System [Eng. Wufoo Alert System]. It allowed us to mark in time each new function introduced for users, and each time they opened the application, we looked at the time difference between the moment of their authorization or the last connection and the moment of introducing new functions, after which users received the pop-up message: “Hello, while you were gone, there were great opportunities in Wufoo.”



Without a doubt, this innovation was the most discussed, and I heard about it every time I talked with users. They said something like: "I like this feature," Hello, while you were away ... ". Even though I pay the same amount every month, you do something for me almost every week. It's just amazing, I just feel that I get the maximum benefit from the service. ”

Besides the fact that everyone supported those who paid their bills, everyone also said “thank you”. And this was mainly due to the fact that we put an equal sign between the variables "moderation" and "modesty". Every Friday we gathered together and wrote words of gratitude to our users on ordinary cards. I know that many would not be delighted if they were engaged in such things; This was our tradition, which played the greatest role in creating a very cohesive team and in working on what is important to us. Everyone constantly remembered what our goal was and why we did what we did. Those were plain cards: simple handwritten words, we still attached dinosaur stickers to them.



Interestingly, this practice is fixed from the first days of the creation of Wufoo. Chris, Ryan and I tried to figure out what we needed to do to show users how we appreciate them during the Christmas holidays; Chris came up with this idea, and he said: “Guys, a couple of years ago, my mother made me write letters of thanks for Christmas presents to all relatives, and I really didn’t like to do it, but next year I received very cool presents ... therefore I think we should try it in our business and see what happens. ”

Thus, for that first year, we wrote by hand Christmas cards to all our users. It was the second year, and we had too many clients and only three founders. We thought: "We are at a dead end, we do not know what to do." And so, we read a book called “The Ultimate Question”, and in it the author says that you need to focus on the users who bring the greatest profit; if you take care of them, everything will work out. Then we thought: "It should work, we can do it." In fact, we wrote only to users who paid us more than others.

January came, and one of our long-time loyal users wrote to us. He wrote: “Hello everyone, I really liked the Christmas card you sent me that year, and I just wanted you to know: I still haven’t received my second card and am looking forward to it; I know that you have not forgotten about me. Thank you very much". We were greatly discouraged. The best way to exceed expectations is to not give them a reason from the very beginning, so we are in a difficult situation. After thinking carefully, we decided to stop doing this only once a year; this should happen every week. And even if we do not reach all of our users, this habit itself will mean a lot.



I talked a lot about touching moments that developers don’t like to think too often, so at the end I will share more accurate data. There is an article [and also a book ] written by Michael Trisy and Fred Virsema and published in the Harvard Business Review several years ago; in it, the authors talk about the direction of the market leaders. They argue that there are only three ways to achieve market leadership, and depending on how you are going to achieve it, you should organize work in your company in a certain way: you should strive for a better price, a better product or a better overall solution.

To achieve the best price, you focus on logistics, like Wal-Mart and Amazon. If you want to produce the best product, focus on research, the most vivid example of this is Apple. A better overall solution means that you should be closer to the client. You may notice that this path is followed by elite brands, as well as the hotel business. What I like in this way to achieve market leadership is that the third is the only one that can be realized by anyone at any stage in the development of their company. He almost does not require money to start. As a rule, he only requires a bit of moderation and good breeding. As a result, you can achieve success in your market, no matter who your competitors are. At this I have everything, thank you for your attention.

Questions from the audience:

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