We focused on the client (and not on competitors) - and over the year received over a million new users

Case of JotForm.

In February last year, we released a new version of the product.
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Prior to that, almost the whole of 2016 we spent on updating the main functionality and were delighted with what happened.

But soon after the release of the new version, the chief designer came across one interesting discussion in the Designer News community.

In the most popular comments, the first two sentences from our page with information about the company were quoted (it says that it was founded in 2006) and added:

“So why then is [a particular competitor] more popular?
About you guys, I never heard. "

What a shame.

For 12 years of work, I have become quite thick-skinned. I know how the Internet works: someone is kind, someone is sarcastic, and someone just doesn’t shine with his mind - as in the case of this comment.

However, this remark hurt me.

Our company appeared before any of the competitors, and we have 3.2 million users.

And I know that we are not very popular in the startup world.

JotForm has achieved everything on its own, we have never attracted foreign investment . We are not hanging out with the "cool guys." You, most likely, will never see in the top TechCrunch article about the next round of our funding.

Transferred to Alconost

But if people think our competitor is better, could we change that opinion?

Our competitors are better known in the startup world, but does this mean that we should follow their example?

We started in 2006, so our users work in a wide variety of industries, including more “traditional” ones: non-profit organizations, legal, financial, accounting firms and even large corporations are among our clients.

If we were in fear of missing something important, we would have taken the competitors approach, our product would not be suitable for users from these categories. However, we are working in an extremely competitive area, where even Google has entered the ring - so our task is not an easy one.

Of course, losing your head and chasing after fashion is tempting, but in the end we decided not to change ourselves.

We invested time and effort in the development and implementation of new functionality - and tried at the same time if possible not to alienate customers.

And we did it.

We improved the product as we considered it necessary, and as a result, over the last year we registered more than a million new users.

Instead of chasing after competitors, we listened to our users - and thanks to this we learned something.

Study the data carefully even when it seems incredible.

Criticism can be useful for the company: it stimulates not to stay up and inspires to invent something new.

But you can’t just and for no reason impose this new on users (even if all the “cool guys” do it).

Sudden unsolicited changes are a risk of losing the trust and favor of customers. And this is very serious.

You can not make changes by force. It is important to adhere to the following rules:

1. Release new versions or changes in core functionality for a small test group.
2. Develop a clear criterion for measuring user reaction: it can be a number, behavior, or another indicator of the real customer response to changes.

The team and I thought a lot about that discussion. Deciding not to imitate our rivals, we set ourselves a new task.

We need to rethink filling out forms - and remake JotForm.

For three weeks we worked hard: designers, developers and other departments worked as five-day sprints, focusing exclusively on one idea or task.

We have invited teams from specialists of different profiles to give free rein to creativity, to think globally, widely and unchecked.

After four weeks of such a marathon, we had a promising new design. This prototype eventually turned into recently released JotForm Cards .

But first there was testing. When registering a new account, only 50% of users received forms of the new type, and the second 50% received old ones.

If a user logged into an account or worked with forms within a month after registration, we considered him “active” - this was our criterion of success.

Result? Everything is very bad.

For those who had new forms in the style of cards, the probability of becoming active users was 30% lower than the control group.


Trouble ... So, the users did not like the new design of the forms?

It upset us. We tried to change the colors, the default background and the main components of the form design - we tried everything and everything was in vain.

After conducting several e-mail surveys, we collected feedback: the majority still preferred the traditional approach.

We discussed the current situation and came up with a new testing strategy.

Choice may be more important than change.

It was obvious that dividing users into two groups and giving new forms to one half, while the second still showing the old forms is wrong.

But what if you select another group of users who will have the opportunity to choose one of two design options?

So, we decided to break new users into three categories:

• A third will use the old forms.
  
• A third will be on the new version.
  
• And one third will be able to choose the desired type of form.
  

We gave a third of new users the opportunity to choose one of two versions.

The test lasted a month; we expected the old design to be ahead again.

However, this time we were not ready for the results.

Users who had the opportunity to choose the style of forms, became active with a probability of 20% more.


Hooray! Users were more likely to become active if they were given a choice of two options.

We started digging through the data. Many preferred the traditional forms, a small group wanted a new design - but those who had the opportunity to choose were most satisfied.

For us, this was an important lesson - a lesson that I had to learn once again for 12 years working at the company ...

Do not think you know what customers want.
Analyze the data.

As I have already mentioned, many of our clients work in industries such as law, non-profit activities, education, finance and accounting - they overwhelmingly prefer classical design.

If we simply forcibly transferred users to a new design, we would be in distress: we could lose customers and damage our reputation.

We understood that freedom of action is important. Our users need a choice. Today we have clients who use both classic and new forms, depending on the task. The choice for them is the advantage of our product.

And we would not understand this if we simply “cleansed” the competitor’s style: “one question at a time”.

Customer support = collecting necessary information

Focusing on the customer, not on competitors, means paying more attention to the customer support department.

Many companies believe that support departments are only needed to sort out applications and answer boring questions.

However, this is not at all the case: customer support is very important because it is located in the epicenter of product development.

The support team should have the right to vote and the opportunity to contribute to the development of the product, take the initiative to investigate customer issues - and not just mechanically close one application after another.

Many, for example, criticize Slack for the fact that they have more specialist support than in the sales department.

But thanks to this, Slack has become a billion-dollar company in just over a year. Now they are larger than similar startups with bloated sales departments.

We applied a similar approach. There are no sales specialists on the JotForm team, but there are 35 support staff who work around the world - around the clock, seven days a week, and the average response time is 1.5 hours.

That's what it means to serve users, and not to chase the competition.

Here is another example. Technically advanced users often need the ability to change the CSS style of a form. Our support department has the opportunity to help in product development, so they began to independently investigate these requests.

We found out what style settings would be useful and finalized the product accordingly. Without the analysis department conducted by the support department, we would make a large and unnecessarily complex CSS style editor.

If the customer support department has the appropriate authority, they can learn a lot from customers. And together you will make your product much better.

Healthy competition is great and it helps keep fit

From the moment I read that comment, a year has passed. And now we know: in fact, the majority will prefer neither our competitors nor the style of their solution. We know this because we have data that speaks about it.

Yes, indeed, someone has not heard about us, but in 2017 alone, almost a million new users came to us, and there are no signs of a slowdown in this growth. And we have a very high customer retention rate.

Of course, there are detractors, and some people don’t like our approach - but this is normal. We have learned to serve the needs of our regular users.

And if someone wants a thoughtful new design - now we have a solution for them. We are trying new things. We listen to users and learn - all the time.

But most importantly - competitors motivate us to become better. They inspire our team to work even harder. If there were no other players on the market and there were no different approaches - perhaps we would not have sought to develop and implement new ones.

Conclusion? In our online world there is always an opportunity to raise the bar even higher. Gaining momentum in 2018. And I can only add:

Strong competitors help to become better.
Get inspired by their work - and get down to business.

About the translator

The article is translated in Alconost.

Alconost is engaged in the localization of games , applications and sites in 68 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.

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