In today’s sharing, I plan to mainly talk about two aspects. The first is how to recognize users, and the second is how to understand and create user value. So, let's get started. More than a year ago, I interviewed a product manager from Baidu. At that time, I asked him who the user was who paid him, but he couldn't tell me. I asked him again how old these people were, what their living conditions were, their educational level, etc., but he had no idea at all. He only knows: my users are Baidu's users, and my task is to guide them to my functional modules. Some people may know who their users are, but they cannot explain it clearly. There are very few people who can really explain clearly who their users are, where their users are, what their users’ demands are, and what value they create for them. This is a very serious phenomenon. If you are a product designer, no matter you are a product designer, an operator, an entrepreneur, a boss, etc. No matter what your role is, as long as you are user-facing, you must know who your users are. You don’t know who your users are, just like you are a basketball player and you don’t know where the basket is. You don’t know who you are targeting to make your product. You should actually see this kind of thing quite often. This is the user orientation of Kuaikan Comics. This is a simple description: their age group, gender, daily interests and hobbies, etc., and what is their approximate distribution. For example, the driver stratification we did when we were at Didi. The drivers are stratified into full-time and part-time employees, as well as how many of them have left. What we often see is stratification based on the life cycle or certain attributes. This is quite common. However, what I just mentioned are all macro-level understandings. In addition to this macro-representation and cognition, you still need to have a micro-story, and you need to know what the user’s real life situation is. Only by understanding the real situation and scenario can you explore his true value. For example, let me give you a simple description. Liu Fei, male, 30 years old, product manager. When you see this, you have no feeling at all. You don’t know what this person does, nor do you know what he can provide you or what he needs. You have no perception at all. This is a simple way of description based purely on attributes. Another way is to understand it more thoroughly. For example, what kind of people are these three? Let's analyze it. First, she has her own name, her name is Xiaohong, she is 21 years old, she is from Hebei, and has a secondary technical school diploma. Then, she has a boyfriend who works part-time and is learning a craft in a small shop. He plans to open his own shop next year, so that he can work hard to save money. What she usually likes is taking photos with makeup on. The one in the middle is Brother Qiang, 28 years old, from Henan, and he has a high school diploma. He lives in the suburbs. He is married and has no children yet, but he is saving money to raise a child. My usual hobbies are playing online games, mobile games or going to KTV with friends! The one below is called Uncle Ming, he is 40 years old and from Beijing. He has a technical secondary school diploma and his child is already in junior high school. His previous factory closed down, so he has now retired early and found a more flexible job, where he earns a little more than before. He has his own car and his hobby is to go out for picnics with his family on weekends. Having said this, will everyone have a relatively more specific perception of these three people? These three people are actually the target users of the three products I made before: manicurists, deliverymen and drivers. You get to know manicurists, deliverymen and drivers, and their daily lives, from their educational level to their living conditions and what they like to play. Once you understand these things, you may be able to better understand the problems they face and what value we can create for them. For example, to give a simple example, for these drivers, you may think that if I give them some subsidies on weekends, they will come out to take orders. But if you understand the actual situation, many of them are like this. I already have a family, and I need to spend time with my family and children on weekends. At this time, you will know that the psychological cost of attracting them to come out through some small subsidies on weekends is actually very high. So, this is what I want to say. To understand users, you need to at least understand them at this specific level. So how do you understand your users? In addition to some of the commonly used questionnaires or interviews, the most important and effective thing is actually four words: go to the scene! This is almost the best way I have seen for most product managers to understand users. For example, when I was at Didi, I also interviewed our drivers, or we would find some professional consulting companies to do this kind of interviews together. Their interview process is very professional. There will be a host and a one-way mirror. I don’t know if you have seen it, such as an observation room, etc. But in that scenario, some of the conclusions you draw from interviews may be inaccurate or incomplete. For example, sometimes you ask the driver: What problems do you encounter when using APP at work? Maybe the driver can’t think of it at this time, but everyone here must have encountered a driver complaining or swearing when taking a Didi. This is very interesting. His genuine reactions of complaining and cursing are his real feedback on the use of this product. But with this kind of feedback, he might forget about it after the incident, or he might not think it was a serious problem and just let it go. Therefore, if you really sit next to him as a passenger and listen to his feedback and complaints, then what you understand may be more real and complete. The following is a user scenario. User scenarios, one is the physical environment, the other is flow. The physical environment is easier to explain, and everyone may be familiar with it. It is the external environment in which the mobile phone is used. For example, the plug of the data cable that Hammer made before has a faint light. It solves a very specific scenario, which is when we turn off the lights and go to bed at night, and suddenly remember that we need to charge our mobile phone. At this time, we can't find the plug socket, so we poke around, and maybe we need to turn on the lights or something. If you provide a little light at this time, you may find the plug more easily. This is a relatively small function. For example, what was Didi’s previous one-click alarm function like? There is a "More Actions" in the lower right corner of the card panel. After you click on "More Actions", you will find an emergency help link in the middle. Well, just imagine that when you are really in danger, first of all, you don’t know what the more operations are, right? You don’t know that emergency help is included in more operations, so you panic and don’t know where to find such emergency help. The second thing is that you have to find such small words and then identify what each button is. At this time, the best time to call for help may have been delayed. So later on, a new version was made with a very obvious and easily recognizable security center on the left. After you click on the security center, there will be a particularly large and obvious "one-click alarm". At this time, users can first associate safety with alarm. In addition, users can quickly find the alarm button even if they cannot see it clearly. This is a previous revision made by Didi, which also takes into account the real physical environment. What’s more important is that you need to care about the user’s flow. What is flow? It is a consistent psychological state of the user. For example, when we were doing manicures before, we used the form of mobile phone appointment booking for home manicures. We found that there were many manicure users who were difficult to transfer to our products no matter what we did. Then we looked at the daily scenarios and psychology of these users and found that these users regard manicure as part of shopping. They would not take manicure out separately and say, "My fingernails are not good-looking now, I want to achieve a certain effect" and so on. They think that manicure is part of shopping, just like buying clothes, drinking and eating, it is a part of shopping. When they were tired, they sat in the nail salon with their girlfriends and chatted, and I did this by the way. You will find that it is an interesting and strolling process, not a process of pursuing effects and manicure results. In this state of flow, you want to transfer these users to your home-based manicure service, hoping that they can also make an appointment for a manicure at home. This is extremely difficult and the psychological cost is very high! For example, when I was traveling before, I bought a lot of figures in a figure store in Tokyo and spent almost a thousand dollars. Then after I bought it, I came back and thought, hey, I usually don’t seem to be willing to spend money. Then why? Are you willing to spend money when traveling? Moreover, when I compared these figures, it was obvious that they were much more expensive than those on Taobao, and the quality was even worse than those on Taobao, so I found it very magical. This psychological state is actually easy to explain. For example, when you are traveling, there is a concept of mental accounting in behavioral economics. When you spend money, which mental account do you withdraw money from? You said that from the perspective of the psychological account for travel, a trip to Japan would cost you 20,000 or 30,000, right? What is one thousand yuan compared to twenty or thirty thousand yuan? It's a small idea, right? You spent so much money going out to play. But when you get home, I sit here and order takeout for 30 yuan, and I spend a thousand yuan to buy a figure. I'm crazy. That is to say, in your daily entertainment activities, when you go out to play, singing in a mini KTV may only cost 50 yuan. You will feel very bad if you spend a thousand yuan at this time. So this is also a very important concept, that is, you have to observe the user's scenario and mental flow. It is not just the physical environment, but also what state he thinks he is in when using your product. This is also very critical, and it will affect his psychological cognition. The next point to be made is that users are a collection of needs. For example, let’s assume that these four products, WeChat, TikTok, Baidu Mobile and Moji Weather, have the same number of users, for example, 700 million users each, and the value of these users to the products is the same. But in fact, it is obviously different. The number of users you have may be the same, but the specific needs of your users are different. Just because you have control over these users does not mean you have control over their needs. If you are WeChat, then you will understand the demands of these users in their daily lives and social interactions, and even when they need local life services. For Tik Tok, this aspect is a little weaker because when users use Tik Tok, they have a demand for fragmented entertainment, and users may only watch this thing when they have nothing to do. The usage of Ink Weather is even narrower. I will only open it in very special situations when I want to know the weather. Therefore, for the same number of users of these different products, their value is different. Or, let’s put it the other way around: What is the product’s real user base? In fact, it is the sum of demands, not the sum of users. For example, we say that WeChat has 1 billion users. But if we break down its functions or the needs it meets, its address book and chat represent one type of user; its circle of friends may have 500 million users; and its official accounts may have 800 million users. In fact, WeChat understands the needs of 2.3 billion users. However, it still has 1 billion users. But for another product, he also said that his registered users are 1 billion, but his active users may be very low, maybe only 50 million. If you look at it from the perspective of demand, his real users may be just 50 million, or even more than 100 million. So from the perspective of demand, the value to users is completely different between them. The next point is that what the user says "I want" is not equal to the user's needs, which means that the user's demands are not equal to needs. Many students may know this. Steve Jobs once said this. Consumers don't know what they want until you create a product. It has been said on the Internet before, what would Apple be like if its product design was democratized? All user feedback may be piled up on one product, and finally the product may become like this, with all kinds of sockets that he may encounter, all kinds of sockets, all functions that he may use, and even including the affiliation with a mobile phone store. When all these things are piled together, they are actually worthless to every type of user. Because it's a mixture. So, why do we say that user demands are not equal to needs? Because usually, the feedback users give is sometimes a solution they imagine, and sometimes it is just some very basic and superficial demands. Behind his superficial feedback, there may be deeper needs. Let me give you a particularly classic example. In the era before cars, users would only express: I want a good horse, I want a faster horse. But what he actually wanted was faster transportation. From faster horses to faster means of transportation, this step of translation must be done by the product manager. You have to realize this, you can't say it needs a faster horse, and I will always try to provide it with a faster horse. At this time, if no user will talk about the car, then your car will never be made! For example, some users who want to lose weight. In fact, their demands are also different. Some people lose weight for health, some lose weight for socializing, to increase their social capital, to get along better with others, and so on. In fact, the essential needs behind this are also different. You need to provide different solutions for different people who want to lose weight. This may better meet their needs. One problem with this statement is that it is also often misinterpreted. Many people say: I never do user research, I just rely on my own guesses, because Steve Jobs said that consumers don’t know what they need, so I don’t need to understand what users need at all. However, this sentence does not actually mean that you can avoid doing any user research. Because as I said just now, you still have to know what the user wants to express first. He may want a faster horse or better-tasting bread. You must first know whether the user needs a horse or bread before you can provide him with a good solution. Behind this solution, you still need to conduct various user research and analysis. What I just talked about were some suggestions on how to understand users. Now let’s talk about: how to create value? This formula was proposed by Mr. Yu Jun before, and it is already very familiar in the product manager circle: User value = (new experience – old experience) – switching cost. To give a few simple examples, this chart shows the market share of various versions of Windows in the global market in previous years. Windows 10 has actually been released for many years, right? But if you look at the current market distribution, Windows 7 still has an absolute advantage, accounting for nearly half, or 45%, while Windows 10 only accounts for 27% of the market. So, why doesn't everyone upgrade to Windows 10? If you put it into the formula, it will be easy to understand. First of all, the experience difference is not that big, right? For most of us, using Windows is not about using the various new features that Windows provides. As long as you can make my compatibility better and allow me to install those other software, that's OK, right? As for Windows 10, it provides several important and core features. For example, the first one provides a tablet support. But for everyone, we all use PCs or laptops and do not need this kind of support. Another thing is that he provides a variety of security products. But everyone knows that Windows security is not very good, especially the new version, which is even worse. As a result, people will be reluctant to upgrade, including the compatibility, which must be similar between the new version and the previous version. So for many people, they don’t understand why they should upgrade. Because its new experience is not that good, and sometimes the experience is even negative. In addition, as for the migration cost, everyone knows that the error rate of installing a system, a Windows computer system, is very high. You may want to back up all your data before reinstalling the system. For ordinary users, the cost is very, very high. In the end, its user value may be a negative value, which may be unacceptable to many users. But on the other hand, why do most people update WeChat as soon as possible? You can also apply this formula and it will be easy to understand. Most of WeChat’s updates are relatively restrained, and its updates are usually major functional changes. When others are sending red envelopes, but your WeChat is still unable to send red envelopes, then your experience is really bad, right? Then its migration cost is very, very low. Regarding the upgrade of WeChat, some students may have turned on the automatic update in the system. This has absolutely no cost for you, whether it's time cost or other costs you spend, they are all very, very low. So, in terms of user value. If you update a WeChat account, its value will be much greater. When I first started working, I remember many people were saying: What product should I use to replace WeChat? How much better is my product experience than WeChat? How much better is my interaction than WeChat? Or how much better is my security and stability than WeChat? Previously, there was a student who was in a traditional industry. He gave a very complete interactive introduction, a PPT of about thirty or forty pages. He slammed it on the table and said to me, "Teacher Liu, I want to defeat WeChat. Do you think this will work?" Then I saw his interaction, and it wasn’t very good. For some products, you will find that their experience and stability may indeed be better than WeChat, right? But in this era, it is completely meaningless for you to make a product with better experience and stability than WeChat. Why? Because, similarly, if we go back to the previous formula, we will find that there is one factor that has the greatest impact, which is the migration cost. There is no problem in attracting a user, but even if you attract this user, he will not be able to use the product because he has his own social circle. Let's assume that this person is already an autistic patient and he only has ten people to socialize with. You have to find these ten people and take over their own social circles. In the end, you will find that sooner or later you will have to move the social circles of more than one billion people to this product. Then there needs to be a product that is relatively available to everyone, and the cost of this is infinitely high. So there is actually not much meaning in making such a product. In this formula, the most easily overlooked thing is actually the old experience. Many people would say: I have a deep understanding of this formula, but the product direction I am working on has no old experience. I have created a brand new market and a brand new demand. But in reality, all products have old experiences. For example, before, a friend who worked in the music industry asked me to give him some advice. He said he was making a comprehensive platform, and he asked me if there would be a market for it. He even released the prototype diagram, which has four TABs: the first is the information of nearby music studios and training schools, the second is the tools for class clocking in and electronic teaching materials, the third is the second-hand trading platform, and the fourth is the local music activity exchange platform. Then, he believed that combining these four functions would create a brand new product, targeting a brand new market and meeting the brand new needs of users. Do you think this is reliable? The core problem is that it mixes these four products into one product, and these four products actually all have their own previous experiences. For the first one, it is Dianping. The second special point is that traditional teaching used to use manual check-ins and paper teaching materials, but the experience is not that different, because for many students and teachers, they have to reinstall and learn a new electronic product. And for second-hand transactions, Xianyu and Zhuanzhuan already exist. Douban already has local music exchange activities... You make a product, but maybe every feature of it is not as good as the original product. You can't create any new value by mixing them together. So this is an unreliable point. Another case is that Didi previously considered whether to develop a small game on the passenger side, because they thought that many passengers would not see much information on the APP interface after getting in the car, or the APP was of little help to them. Could this thing be done to improve user retention? But after thinking about it, I decided not to do it. Because everyone imagine, the actual scenario for a user is that I take a Didi, what is the first thing I do after getting in the car? I turn off Didi, right? Then what to open? Open Honor of Kings, WeChat, TikTok, Kuaishou... You have to make a very awesome game to be better than Tik Tok and Honor of Kings! That's impossible! At this time, you have to face the old experience, and you have to identify it correctly: your old experience is not a dry Didi page, your old experience is the product that users will actually use in the car. So, your old experience is so inferior to this experience that you can’t beat it at all. Then this function is completely meaningless. Let’s talk about the next point, which is why product managers need to understand behavioral economics? This was taken when I went to Professor Yu Jun’s office. All the books here are about psychology, economics, and sociology. Why should product managers understand behavioral economics? Because, what I just mentioned is how we should understand users. We need to judge the user's scenarios, judge the user's value, and judge the user's needs. But at the same time, have you ever thought about a problem, because we also need user cognition. When we make a product, what will users think of it? This is a very, very important issue. First of all, this kind of value is very subjective, and the value of any product we make must ultimately be recognized by users. Only the value recognized by users is the product value. However, users have a complex psychological cognitive mode, which is a mixture of emotion and rationality. Therefore, there are always biases in users' cognition. This example is a typical example of price anchoring. When you search for Supor rice cookers, you will find that the best-selling model is the third one. The one on the far left is 119, and its functions are very simple. The one in the middle is the most expensive 409, and its functions are relatively complete. The one on the far right is a little cheaper, but its functions are similar to the one in the middle, except for a few less features. Then we look at their sales, and we will find that the sales of the two on the left are very, very poor. The last one is 200,000 units, and the sales of the first two are less than 10,000. At this time, as a product designer, or if you are the operator of this store, what would you think? Will you take the first two off the shelves? The first two are actually used to attract users to buy the third one. Imagine a real user scenario. When a user searches for a rice cooker, he may not have much knowledge about rice cookers at this time. Then when I saw the first one, I thought, damn, it’s too simple, only one hundred yuan, and other rice cookers are three or four hundred yuan, this rice cooker is not worthy of me. Then, look at the following two. Hey, these two seem to be about the same price. I took a closer look and compared them, and found that the one on the far right is 30 yuan cheaper than the one in the middle, but it doesn't have many fewer functions. The one in the middle just has a few more, seemingly useless functions, such as a slightly larger capacity, or some other smart features, but they are very useless functions. At this time, users will definitely choose the third option. Moreover, when the user chooses the third one, he will be particularly happy. Because first of all, users will feel that they have bought a very advanced rice cooker that is much better than the first piece of junk. The second is that I got a good deal because I used my intelligence to judge that the third one was much better than the second one and had a very high cost-performance ratio. At this time, users will not even think about: How much is the rice cooker worth? Because at this time, the two rice cookers before have already given him this psychological cognition, and its price anchor is already very clear, so the user happily buys this rice cooker. This is a classic way of price anchoring. If you search, you will find that many products are actually like this. After you search for them, you will be very surprised as to why the store still displays so many products that almost no one buys. In fact, it’s all for price anchoring. There is also a smaller case. I saw a product manager who worked in P2P on the Internet before. He significantly increased the conversion rate by simply changing the copy. On the pop-up window for regular investment, it said "Would you like to start a regular investment of five dollars per week?" This was actually much less attractive. However, when you change it to saying: If you do this or that, you can accumulate so much money with the principal alone in five years, then after you have a very practical perception, your conversion rate will increase a lot. This is called the framing effect in behavioral economics. You can search it. That is to say, if you use different description methods for the same thing, the user's perception will be completely different. For example, I saw that Meituan Takeout didn’t do anything when it came to choosing tableware. However, it later added a sentence and its conversion rate increased. What does it add? Meituan Takeout advocates reducing the use of disposable tableware and contributing to environmental protection, right? When you choose tableware, you may be thinking that you are contributing to society, and it will be easier for you to make a choice. This is also a very pleasing method of conversion. When I was working as a driver at Didi, this was a group where there was a huge gap between user perception and expectations of your platform, and it was also very, very difficult to serve. This is because they often make some very subjective judgments. For example, their most common complaint, which many students may have heard of, is that they have rewards, which are calculated based on the number of orders within a limited time. However, when he received the second-to-last order, he suddenly discovered that this order was a particularly long order, and he could not receive the last order. He will think that your platform did it on purpose. I was just one order away from receiving the reward, and suddenly a long order was assigned to me. In other words, there is clearly an order nearby, why isn’t it delivered to me? In fact, many drivers will open the passenger side and take another look, right? There are some passengers placing orders, or there are obviously no cars nearby, and then I see passengers placing orders and wonder why they don’t send them to me, etc. They will use all sorts of methods to guess, or, as we often hear, they think the commission has become higher again, or that the various policy advantages recently promoted are deceiving them. That is, they always think in a negative direction. Some things are even more exaggerated. Some drivers would think: It’s really annoying that I am always assigned orders from women. And because female passengers generally have a higher complaint rate. For example, they think, what if there are no orders? I'll restart! Many drivers, especially many experienced drivers, actually say very firmly that you must restart, restart repeatedly, turn Bluetooth on and off repeatedly, and turn WiFi on and off repeatedly, and then it will be easy to get orders. The most amazing thing is that a driver once told me, in a serious tone: when you can’t get any orders, just call and scold the customer service, scold him like crazy, and immediately you’ll get orders. But in fact, those of us who work in the product industry all know that customer service definitely does not have the authority to directly place orders. This is very interesting. In psychology, this is called the backfire effect or cognitive bias. Once you have made up your mind about a point of view, you will actively collect various arguments to support your point of view , right? In various driver groups, you may see someone saying Didi is good, and then kick him out. Then, I just looked at those who cursed Didi and the drivers who made conspiracy theories. When you collect this information, it will consolidate your point of view, and then to a more exaggerated degree, it is called the backfire effect. The backfire effect means that when you see opposing arguments, it will support your point of view. It is a very magical psychological effect. You can go back and collect it, it is also very interesting. Therefore, for these groups, you still need to have a good understanding. You still need to know why they become like this in their hearts, what kind of psychological problems they are facing, how you can change their expectations, and how you can change their cognition. This is a problem that needs to be solved very much. This explains: we define the product, but the product value is always defined by the user. To give another example, there was a very popular news some time ago. The one on the left is Japan’s shared car rental. They are running a shared car rental platform, and when they were doing research, they found that about 12.5% of people were actually regular users with zero trips, meaning that the car never moved when they used it. But they did these research analyses, and the one on the right was compiled by someone on Twitter. What do they do in the car? They would work and sleep in their cars. Then they may charge their phones, sing in the car, live stream in the car, or change clothes in the car. They will use this as a private space. What can you do with this private space? It all depends on the user's imagination. Users will never look at the design of your product and then use it according to your guidance. They think: this can provide me with some value, and then they will think that this product provides this value. The next point we will discuss is, what is user experience? Because I have been working in the O2O industry, which is equivalent to the service industry. In the service industry, what I have experienced most deeply is user experience. In fact, the most important thing is to maintain a consistent experience. What does it mean? For example, for food delivery and taxi-hailing, what is its core user value? Its core user value is definitely not how fast the app is, right? It is definitely not the richness of functions in the APP. For users, what matters most is the core user value.
These are the most fundamental, but in fact they are some of the more difficult details to do. Therefore, whether or not this coherent and consistent experience can be maintained is the most important thing for users. On this basis, the unity of logic and the perfection of functions are actually much more important than making a collection of highlights. For example, this is a small case. When I used Mobike before, I found that the pop-up window of "Cancel Reservation" was written. The title is Cancel Appointment, and the content is Are You Sure You Want to Cancel? There are two buttons below, OK and Cancel. In a pop-up window, there are three cancels and two confirms. At this time, the cognitive cost for the user will be very high, and he may stay on this page for a long time. This is a very bad pop-up window case below the horizontal line. For another example, this is even more exaggerated. It is an intelligent assistant of a certain bank. You ask it why you cannot log in, and it gives you five selection numbers. You can enter 87 to 91. The reason why you cannot log in, you enter 88, and then it says: Bye, bye! It is obvious that when the product manager designed it, he did not take into account the two lines at all. One is the line where 88 means goodbye, and the other is the line where you express the reason why I cannot log in. These two logics were not considered together. This is the logic of a very ridiculous product. This will cause many contradictions, and you can actually see them in many products. How did we do user experience before? We will make a complete picture of the driver's experience. Then in this full picture, we will take all the contacts, namely the various contacts that the driver, the platform and the product may have, and what problems may be encountered for each contact. Then of course we have to do a qualitative analysis first, which are the problems that may be encountered, and then conduct some quantitative research based on these problems to see which problems are more serious, how can we solve this problem below the horizontal line, which we think is acceptable to experience. So, let’s review, the first one is how to recognize users. My rules for understanding users are these five.
Author: Liu Fei Source: Liu Fei |
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