Talk about user cognitive cost!

Let me first explain the general logic. Professor Yu Jun said that the so-called product value is new experience - old experience - the cost paid by users for the new experience = product value. This formula is easy to understand, but there is one thing that many entrepreneurs get wrong, which is the cost paid by users. Some people say, isn’t cost just money? Some people say that in addition to money, the cost is also time. Those who are more knowledgeable would say that there is actually a customer acquisition cost. But even so, many people still ignore the cognitive cost.

Many of us have heard this story: A senior Nokia executive accidentally discovered that his own child, who was only four or five years old, was playing with an Apple phone. No one taught him, but he was enjoying it. When the executive saw this scene, he realized that Nokia was finished. This is a case of cognitive cost. Many people interpret Apple's success from the perspective of product design, technological leadership, business vitality in the third-party market, etc. In fact, initially, Apple phones greatly reduced users' learning and cognitive costs for smartphones. If we don't understand this, our understanding of others' success will always be superficial.

How to reduce cognitive costs?

1. Product name and copy

As mentioned in an old article, names should be concise and straightforward, not too connotative, not too literary, and should be highly recognizable to users.

Good examples: lottery assistant, meeting assistant.

Well, let’s talk about a bad example, for example “Yi Ling Micro Course”, this name has very poor recognition and is often misunderstood as fortune-telling based on the Five Elements and I Ching. I am very ashamed. I mentioned the bad case of Keqiji before, but later it changed its name to Baixing.com and it got much better.

2. Icon and button design

In line with user expectations, all optimizations should not affect user understanding and usage. It is best to have text labels on the icons to make it easier for users to understand. I am annoyed by those self-righteous designs. They feel that the icon design is very stylish, but do not give text descriptions, leaving users at a loss. I have to complain that for some time I couldn't find where the essential settings of Knowledge Planet were hidden.

3. Product function and target design

I recently chatted with different entrepreneurial teams in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and found that they still have this kind of idea: after making a product and finding a demand entry, they want to cram all their ideas into it.

Later, I kept emphasizing that you cannot look at the product from your own perspective. You think that when a user comes, you can just give him this, that, and that. Moreover, your research method is also problematic. You go and ask the user, "Do you want this? I'll give you that." Of course, the user will say yes, but this research method is fundamentally wrong. When a brand new user sees the name of your product and the entrance to your product, what will he think of and what feedback will he expect? This must be made clear. When making products based on this, it is not about what you want users to do or what feedback you want them to have.

There is no need to cram many functions into that kind of mini-program. It would be better if you could separate one function or one theme into separate ones. Users will know what it is just by looking at the name and will think of you immediately when they want to use it. The entrepreneur said that he hopes users are unified and easy to manage, and he wants users to do this and that, but your starting point is wrong. You should conform to users rather than asking users to conform to you. If you cram everything together, users will have no idea that this product can do this or that. The user cognition cost is too high, and many potential users can't find your product at all.

For example, it is not convenient for me to disclose the projects of those entrepreneurs, so I will just give an example that is easy for everyone to understand, a lottery assistant. It has a straightforward name, simple operation, and low user cognitive cost, which is very good. Some entrepreneurs may think that since so many users are using it, can I make gifts, do guessing, do this, do that, and then make a complicated function menu, and then think that it is very good, look how powerful my program is, if users want to draw a lottery, click here, if they want to guess, click there, if they want anything, click here and then there, it is powerful, rich in functions, and highly customizable, and then they give it a name, called a universal assistant, or a universal generator. Isn't it amazing? The user's cognitive cost has increased dramatically. When users face specific scenarios, they won't think of you at all, nor will they look for you. If you really have so many ideas, a lottery assistant is a lottery assistant, a gift assistant is a gift assistant, and a guessing assistant is a guessing assistant. Each function can be made into a separate product. Some entrepreneurs have said that users are scattered and the products are not grand enough. That means you only look at things from your own perspective and don't understand the user's cognitive cost.

4. Interaction Design

Users click to search, click to confirm, click to sort, and the interactive feedback should meet user expectations. This has been mentioned before. What are the so-called user expectations? What do we fear the most? We fear being too clever and wanting to surprise users. Many times, what users get is not a surprise, but a shock.

One more thing to add about Alibaba's recent Easter eggs. I commented on Knowledge Planet that the so-called Easter eggs are content that can only be accessed and interacted through certain special entrances, without affecting the user's normal operations and experience. This is a surprise beyond the user's expectations. If you allow users to browse normally and special information appears, this is not a surprise, it's a fright.

Of course, WeChat’s holiday Easter eggs can be triggered by normal operations, but being triggered by keywords can basically guarantee that you won’t go astray.

Later, I searched the news and found that Alibaba has a tradition of doing this. In the past, Alipay suddenly added the suffix "baby" to user names during a certain festival, which made many people think that their accounts were stolen and frightened users. This kind of behavior of thinking that one is cool and talented on impulse is really stupid.

To understand the user's cognitive cost, to put it simply, is to make it easy for users to learn and use your product without any instruction. I have given this example before. When Meitu was first rising, it went to Xiamen University every week to invite female college students to try out the product. Engineers, product managers, and operations staff would observe users' usage habits and communicate with them to understand their usage scenarios and minimize users' cognitive costs. This was a very important factor in Meitu's rapid rise more than a decade ago.

In the reader welfare class of Knowledge Planet, I mentioned the history of Li Xingping's invincible products. In fact, fifteen years ago or earlier, Li Xingping's team had no R&D and no designers, but where were the advantages? Faced with the large number of grassroots Internet users and young users at that time, Li Xingping's website design was able to keep the user's cognitive cost extremely low; popular things and things that users wanted most were listed on it as much as possible. You don't have to search, you don't have to think about what this category is or what that menu is. What you like is on it, and you just click on it when you see it.

At that time, the elites could not stand this style of listing everything on the entire screen. They thought it was too low-level. Don’t they understand simplicity? Don’t they know that the screen should be clean and clear, and the functional divisions and menu layouts should be logically clear and reasonable? First level, second level, third level, and then a few floating layers, it would definitely be awesome. Sorry, grassroots users, I just like this kind of thing that looks like everything is above at a glance. At that time, the elite class was completely unaware of grassroots users, and this was also the golden age for grassroots webmasters.

5. Moderate advertising and marketing

Uncontrolled advertising and promotion will also lead to an increase in user cognitive costs. For example, a well-known download site had all its advertisements taken over by someone. What kind of advertisements were those? Ads for rogue software disguised as download links. When users entered the download page, they first saw the advertisement disguised as a download link, while the font of the real download link was very small and inconspicuous. As a result, a large number of users mistakenly clicked on the ad link and installed rogue software. The income of the rogue advertiser was many times the advertising fee paid to the download site. The rogues made most of the income, while the infamy was left to the site owner.

A moderate advertising experience should not allow advertisements and other promotional marketing activities to infringe on users' expectations of original operations, or excessively seize users' understanding of the product. This is the so-called killing the chicken to get the eggs and draining the pond to catch fish.

6. About customer acquisition

Customer acquisition cost and cognitive cost are independent, but why do we need to mention them here? For quite some time, traffic experts believed that low-cost customer acquisition is the best way to go. Whoever can get users at a low cost will have a popular product. But in fact, for products of different tones, the lower the cost is not necessarily the better. User cognition is also involved here. If the marketing methods you use to acquire customers generate user cognition that is inconsistent with the user goals of the product itself, it may have a counterproductive effect.

In other words, negative value users.

What are negative-value users? Are they the ones who post useless ads in the community? Are they the ones who send private messages to harass high-quality users? Are they the ones who argue with everyone they see? Are they the ones who curse the game and ask people to play another game?

Many products, due to their excessive pursuit of low-cost customer acquisition, have brought in a large number of zero-value or negative-value users, which may lead to the loss of original high-quality users, thereby losing the product's charm and sustainable operating ability. And the operations staff may even be complacent, thinking, look, my customer acquisition cost is 50% lower than that of my competitors.

Therefore, user awareness and customer acquisition are not completely independent. Acquiring customers at low cost while effectively achieving consistency in user perception is a test of operational capabilities.

When I mentioned search engine optimization before, I mentioned a point of view that many people think that SEO and search optimization are low-cost means of acquiring customers, and I just need to grab as much traffic from popular keywords as possible, but in fact this understanding is superficial. What are the search keywords? This is what users need! Users will only search when they need something, right? What is the search index? It’s the intensity of the demand! The higher the index is, the more users have this demand, right? Therefore, the essence of search optimization is to truly understand user needs through search keywords and related indexes, and then through this understanding, establish a website page structure that conforms to user cognition. The keyword-based website structure layout is not only search engine friendly, but also an effective way to reduce user cognitive costs.

Now is the mobile era, and market-based search optimization has become a trend. Don’t underestimate this. When Himalaya first started, ASO was done to a crazy extent. I believe that my readers don’t need to explain what ASO is. If you don’t understand it, I suggest you search it.

In fact, many excellent products have done ASO in the early stages. Don’t think that this thing is just a copycat package with various traffic-directing routines. I have introduced an excellent vertical product. When the product first came out, it was indeed very niche. We found a professional ASO platform to help optimize and adjust it, and it quickly ranked at the top of relevant keywords. Later, natural users gradually emerged, and word of mouth became better and better. Now it does not need the help of third-party organizations at all, and naturally ranks first in almost all keywords and category download lists in this vertical category, with very impressive daily active users and online users.

Moreover, if the search users are accurately positioned, their quality is recognized by the industry as being far higher than that of users from various other marketing channels.

This year, we know that the Apple market has undergone major adjustments, and a large number of domestic ASO platforms have closed down and transformed. To be honest, this is a good thing. Those pure traffic-grabbing routines have been curbed, which can better reflect the true search value and user value. Excellent products will not be overwhelmed by copycat products. Of course, in addition to ASO, paid search ASM is also an emerging resource for acquiring high-quality users.

Source: Caoz's Dream Talk (ID: caozsay)