Operational promotion: 4 steps to detonate your growth!

What I want to share with you today is that user experience is the basic driving force for product growth. The user experience industry has been developing in China for two or three decades. In the past decade, it has changed many English names, such as UCD, UED, UX, UGD, etc. I think the reason why the user experience industry likes to change its name so much is that practitioners have always had a kind of anxiety.

This anxiety is caused by the biggest challenge facing this industry: people always feel that their value cannot be verified, and that their decision-making power and voice in the project team are very small, so they try to find a sense of existence through new concepts.

But the reality that cannot be avoided is that 99% of user experience departments in the industry are art departments.

If a department does not have an interaction designer and does not conduct user research, but only makes web pages, it will not be able to obtain product data after the launch and will not be able to verify the success of the design, let alone control the experience across departments, feedback experience problems and provide optimization suggestions. Such a department is a standard "art department".

In fact, it is not that UED (User Experience Design) is outdated, but that most practitioners have not deepened their profession in the past two or three decades.

The team I am currently in charge of has 4 design centers and more than 120 designers, which are responsible for almost all of Meituan Dianping’s businesses in Shanghai. My team has 400 upstream product managers and operations planners, and nearly 1,000 downstream development teams.

The value of our Dianping App User Experience Department is to help the company achieve its business goals by delivering good user experience to users.

The value logic of the user experience department I will talk about today is also very simple:

1. To build a good user experience, you first need to be strong in your professionalism, and then you can prove its business purpose.
2. We need to closely integrate user experience with business purposes through data.

1. Product Case: Optimization of WeChat Takeaway Channel Page

Meituan Dianping’s food delivery business has four major traffic entrances: WeChat’s food delivery channel page, Meituan APP channel page, Dianping APP channel page, and the food delivery APP itself. Therefore, the WeChat takeaway channel page is one of the four major traffic entrances for our takeaway business.

What role can our experience team and interaction designers play when doing this project?

This is the takeaway channel page in WeChat in 2016. It can be seen that the overall brand perception at the time was mixed, user decision-making content was scarce, and product experience was poor.

The product manager gave very vague requirements, but in fact this project was to revise the core user path.

Generally speaking, when a designer receives a vague requirement, what will he do?

Currently, most teams do this when they receive a request. The product manager tells the designer: The current user churn rate is high and the experience is poor. The expected design style of this homepage renovation emphasizes quality, and then the design department directly changes it.

But if you do this and the page becomes beautiful, how can you prove your value?

In fact, there is no way to prove it. So what we really need to do is return to the business goals, and the needs must be separated from the business goals.

Therefore our strategy is:

(1) Return to the business goals to analyze what the user experience department should do

The company's goal at the time was to bring in 2 million orders and 15 million new customers from this traffic portal. This way I can break down what I want to do based on my real goals.

(2) Let the interactive students mine the data, analyze the entire traffic data, and break down the factors that affect our KPI

Break down the formula and see what factors our design can affect.

Order volume = UV x conversion rate x daily transaction frequency

Conversion rate = success UV/channel UV

I cannot decide the number of “UV” (unique visitors) that enter, it is determined by the WeChat entrance. We cannot decide the “daily transaction frequency”, as it is determined by users’ habits and needs for ordering takeout. But I can influence the "conversion rate". The conversion rate is determined by the user experience. Reducing the churn rate, reducing the success or failure of understanding and the operating costs can increase the conversion rate.

So can we use some experience strategies to optimize its conversion funnel?

When we were analyzing the data, we found that the data at the level of old and new customers was not that bad , but there was a big gap in the retention data between those who logged in and those who did not .

The ones marked in red in the picture are all very bad, with a churn rate of 74%, and half of them are not logged in users. This is an obvious problem and can be part of our targeted optimization.

Then look at the user's behavioral characteristics.

From this curve, we can see that in addition to main meals, lunch and dinner, there are two peaks, which are afternoon tea and midnight snacks. So, can we make some targeted operational strategies based on these two times?

After calculating the proportion of midnight snack orders outlined in the red box, we found that there are still many areas for optimization. For example, the two items for midnight snacks and afternoon tea are also not covered by our current functions.

Let's compare the conversion rates of several traffic entrances and traffic paths horizontally, as shown in the figure:

The conversion rate from the home page to the menu page of the WeChat entrance is very poor, just over 50%, while the other two are around 70%. The process from menu to order confirmation is only 50%, while the other two are over 60%. This then leads to a lower final conversion rate.

(3) Once we locate the page to the scenario, we can find the problem and then discuss how to convert it.

The purpose of positioning is to find out which issues affect conversion. We conducted user testing and competitive product analysis and drew some conclusions from the output reports.

• From the user's perspective, analyze the scenarios for takeout and the pain points.
• From the merchant's perspective, an expert group will conduct an investigation on the merchant page and menu page, organize these interview reports, find out the key points of the design, and then organize all the functional points and the experience plans that you want to create.

After testing these channels, we finally came up with some overall optimization points, such as exposure, content matching, acquisition efficiency, etc.

After going through these steps, what does the final optimized page look like?

Let me give you a few examples. There are several enhanced modification points on the homepage . For example, in order to enhance the brand awareness, we added a dynamic red envelope with a strong presence, which is not included in our APP.

Why do it here? Because we analyzed it.

Half of the users do not log in, and the loss rate of login conversion is particularly high - 74%, so we must have a very strong red envelope that is always moving to attract you to cross the login threshold in order to increase their conversion. This is why we need to make targeted optimization on the menu page.

In addition, we have also optimized the overall order page.

How do we ultimately prove whether the changes are effective? Track data.

Let’s make a comparison. If I release a new page without doing the analysis process, it would be difficult to prove the value of this revision.

Many design teams forget to design a closed loop. The last step of our user experience design is to prove whether the revision was done correctly, summarize the experience and precipitate a methodology.

In the first round of revisions, we broke down many requirements from the product goals so that we could implement these requirements in a rhythmic manner.

For example, after this revision, the revenue increased by 21%, but I don’t think it has much to do with user experience, so I will focus on the conversion rate.

We found that the transaction conversion rate of the entire transaction funnel increased by 2.17%, which proves that at least we did the right thing in this revision. However, the effect is not that obvious, so we can look forward to the next round of optimization. For example: If the first version did not have enough time to operate afternoon tea and supper, you can add them in the next version, and then strengthen the single page of popular dishes, optimizing them in rounds.

Every revision still looks at the transaction conversion rate. If it is improved, it means that the user experience has improved and retention has improved. When you accumulate more active users, they will bring you a lot of incremental users, and they will recommend it to others, which will indirectly help increase UV.

For this project, the order volume eventually increased by 122%, from 910,000 to 1 million. With a little operational support, the annual target was basically achieved.

Overview of the optimization effects of the WeChat takeaway channel page:

After two rounds of revisions, the initial conversion funnel increased the conversion from the home page to the store menu page by 18%, which is an absolute value, not an increase in percentage. The increase was more than 30%. The second funnel increased by 2.61%; the third funnel increased by 1.24%, and the final conversion rate increased by 6.37%. This proves that the revision was successful.

After this project was completed, the business manager of the WeChat takeout channel sent several emails to praise our user experience design team.

2. Operation Case: Operation Activity Design

In the previous case, the interaction is deeply related to the product, there is a lot of collaboration between departments, and the interaction designer has a relatively good understanding of the data. However, many operational visual designers know almost nothing about data. They can make beautiful pictures, but the data is not good. Here, I would like to introduce a method to guide operational design.

This is the traditional marketing law: the AIDMA law of marketing.

In the traditional marketing field, if you want to do an offline brand advertisement, it follows this rule - attract the user's attention, arouse his interest, then form brand memory, and finally trigger decision-making action.

Because there is a breakpoint between physical media and users' offline transaction behaviors, you need to remind users when the demand occurs. For example: I don’t necessarily have to buy water now, but when I’m thirsty, can I think of a certain brand?

If I think of Coca-Cola or Pepsi, I will buy it. If I don’t think of your brand, you have lost the sales opportunity. Can this marketing rule that requires recall to facilitate a transaction be applied on the Internet?

Actually it doesn’t work, we need to optimize it.

One of the characteristics of offline transactions is that brand awareness and consumption behavior are discontinuous. Therefore, offline brand advertising is very dependent on creativity. If the creativity cannot hit you and make you unable to remember it, the advertising will be in vain. For example, there is a 30-second advertisement after the CCTV News Broadcast. What advertisement can you think of?

Melatonin, right? This is a successful advertisement. It can make you recall what you gave your parents during the Spring Festival. Give melatonin.

Traditional marketing advertising relies heavily on creativity, but the Internet is different. If you need your users to remember things on the Internet, the idea has already failed.

Internet marketing requires direct conversion online. By the time he closes the page, you have already failed.

Therefore, this model needs to be optimized as follows: attract, understand, act, and share.

1. Attraction

When you are running an event, the entrance banner determines the success or failure of the event.

So how to design a good banner?

The entrance actually contains only a few elements, and we have summarized several characteristics:

• First of all, your interest points must be clear. For example, if a red envelope of 100 yuan is a direct discount or a voucher, it must be very clear.
• Secondly, avoid using those very literary, self-made words in the copy. At the same time, all action points should be written in Chinese characters, not "go". It’s clear whether to grab or take.

Therefore, in the copywriting, you should clearly state your gameplay and benefits in one sentence, and the subtitle can describe the scene. For example: Valentine's Day, Spring Festival. Some students will use Valentine's Day and Spring Festival as the main title, but this is a failure.

Then let’s look at the entrance of the pop-up window.

The top ones can reach 30%, and the ones below are all below 5%.

What is the reason? The buttons must be clear, and the benefits must be clear.

Those packaged in the form of red envelopes are the most popular. Even if you offer an instant discount on every order, please package it into a red envelope, with a five-yuan red envelope for every order, and don't say it as an instant discount on every order. Then for an operation entrance like this, the vertical version is taller than the horizontal version.

In fact, on a page, everything that affects clicks is the design. You will find that three-dimensional graphics, high saturation, and some very concrete graphics can directly affect the click-through rate.

To sum up: the entrance determines success or failure, you should do the right things and avoid the negative traps.

2. Understanding

Virtual products are different from offline products. Physical products can be understood at a glance, but the cost of understanding virtual things is extremely high for users. Therefore, on the landing page, the first problem to be solved is the problem of understanding, not the problem of attracting.

Attraction problems should be solved at the entrance.

Now users who import landing pages want to know as quickly as possible: what can you give me and how can I do it. For example, this simple and clear message: 40% off on group purchases - that means there is 40% off on the group purchase value.

In this traditional e-commerce language, the button design needs to be very clear. After users click on it, they can invite friends and send funds. It’s that simple.

Our experience is that this kind of expression, which is easy to understand and does not contain uncommon words or difficult to pronounce, generally has a conversion rate of 60%-70%, which means that the churn rate will be less than 30%.

Therefore, understanding is the last hurdle for user conversion. Only after understanding, the user is likely to perform that operation.

3. Action

For the action point, it is best to have just one button, and try to highlight it in the visual hierarchy. The buttons should be obvious and direct, and the text on the buttons should be simple.

Multiple buttons will cause traffic diversion, for example, in this case:

There are two buttons, and because the bottom button has a title, it is taller. Awkwardly, the click rate of this secondary button is comparable to his, which creates a huge diversion at the intersection.

There is also this kind that does not conform to mental cognition.

This is a poll: test one of your friends, what is your type? The name sounds interesting, right? There are a few tags below with some descriptions, and you can click on the tag.

The logic was very good at the time, but the operation required a check mark to submit. Because of this additional submission action, the submission rate dropped by more than 90%, with only 4% of submissions completed. We later did the same campaign again, but removed the "submit" step and changed it to a click-and-invest campaign, and the conversion rate was 95%.

The core reason is that the cognitive model of multiple-choice voting is not a shopping cart-style check-and-submit. The mental model of voting should be click-to-select. Therefore, don’t do things that are inconsistent with your cognition. If there are logical links that are inconsistent with your cognition, the attrition rate will also increase.

If you are not sure about the cognitive model, it is recommended to use a prototype for agile usability testing. Remember to keep it simple.

Understanding is the last threshold for users to click, so this threshold should be as low as possible.

4. Share

Sharing is the way to maximize the use of network effects. It is very easy to spread information on the Internet, so we should make full use of this feature.

There are several ways to encourage sharing:

① The simplest way is to give red envelopes, but there are also some other ways to play

For example: bind your activity mechanism with red envelopes, and you can only continue sharing when the activity is halfway through.

Or you can split the red envelope. You can first send a red envelope of five yuan. You can get another red envelope by sharing it once, or you can share it once in the lottery and get three chances to draw, and so on.

After users get some benefits, there are more benefits that they can get by sharing again.

② You can also interact with friends

For example, if you steal food ingredients from users, you will send a message to them, which will generate sharing and can achieve a sharing rate of 30~50%.

③ Do interesting tests

Interesting tests are shared more often than money-wasting ones. For example, test who you are as a backup planner for. The sharing rate is extremely high - 80%. So, if you can hit the user, you don’t need to pay, and the coverage will be wide.

Therefore, I believe that any operations that are not for the purpose of sharing are a waste of the company's money.

3. Finding opportunities from data: case study of display ad space mining

If you want to add an ad slot to the advertising product you are operating, you need to submit a proposal to the platform.

The evaluation standard for platform products is the platform's DAU (daily active users), so they don't pay much attention to advertising revenue, and will reject the ad space due to various issues such as experience.

What kind of help can the user experience department provide in this cross-business collaboration? What does the advertising business require? It needs location and exposure, and the bigger it is, the more valuable it is.

Then what is the difficulty?

I don’t understand the platform’s evaluation criteria and I’m always kicked back. Moreover, it is not clear what the platform traffic is like and where to place the advertisements.

So what can UED (User Experience Design) do?

We not only support the Guangping platform, but also the Dianping APP platform. That is to say, UED (user experience design) can sort out the traffic map, then do competitive analysis, and provide solutions for our advertising space. At the same time, we can better understand the judging criteria, so that the passing rate on the platform will be improved.

This is a traffic map. By finding the platform product, we can pull out such a traffic map.

We see which part has the largest traffic, frame it, and then see if there are any advertising opportunities there. Then analyze what advertising formats are worth referring to in the ad placement settings of competitors, and finally come up with this plan.

This was a plan from a year and a half ago, but the current APP is no longer like this. At that time, we will add a title to this recommendation module, and we will also evaluate the value of these advertising spaces, which is the sales value, expected exposure and sales value. This is something we ask the advertising platform to evaluate for us, for example: search tag naming.

Then there is the question of whether a coupon can be displayed after pulling down, which is actually a form of brand exposure.

Because you give users coupons, to some extent, users won’t care too much about being disturbed, right? At this time, with the help of the brand merchant's logo, the store was exposed. Then we can make a small animation effect, expose the brand logo and so on.

Summarize

After talking about the three cases, my theme is: user experience can really become the driving force for product growth.

The model I shared was originally created by me two years ago. Any similarity is pure plagiarism.

The detailed explanation of this model is a certification course in the company's internal product academy and a required course for our senior product managers. It is designed to help you understand how user experience actually affects your product.

In the past, we all focused on a funnel model, from users knowing your product brand, to light use, to heavy use, and finally conversion. But if we only focus on this triangular funnel, it will be very problematic.

For example: How is the word-of-mouth experience effect attached to the product? In fact, it is very simple. There is an evaluation method called NPS (New Product Standard) which is a macro evaluation.

What is the reputation of your service among users? User experience and word of mouth are actually very difficult to quantify. Here I will share a quantitative algorithm. The impact of this operation is always there.

Nowadays, the degree of informatization is getting higher and higher, and the word-of-mouth communication effect is getting stronger and stronger. If you don’t do one experience point well enough, your brand image will collapse in minutes. There is no personality that cannot be destroyed by a Weibo trending search. If it doesn't collapse, it will definitely collapse if another one comes.

Finally, here’s a tip for those in the design department: How do you ensure that your designers, departments, and teams can continue to operate, rather than coming up with a project on a whim?

This is about leveraging the team’s value loop—first do the right thing, then find out how to do it right.

All of our designers will conduct in-depth research in the industry and get to know the businesses. As an interaction designer for SAAS, you may even work as a receptionist in a leisure and entertainment store to help users record orders and settle accounts. Only in this way can you experience the real scenarios and needs of this industry for SAAS.

After finding the right things and methods, the intermediate process requires establishing a professional methodology.

Use the design channel to build standards for designers across the company - what kind of designers can be promoted and what are the performance standards? You have to write these professional requirements very clearly.

After doing something well, you still have to prove whether you did it right or wrong, otherwise it will be meaningless no matter how many times you do it.

Demonstrate and evaluate through data and product value. From a management perspective, if your core job is just drawing, you will never be able to upgrade. You have to use various work mechanisms to revolve around it.

The values ​​of our user experience department are clear: user experience is the means, and commercial monetization is the goal.

While providing a good user experience, it must also help with the final commercial monetization. Especially in a cold winter like this, spending money is shameful and making money is glorious.

Making money is truly glorious, so it is imperative to demonstrate how user experience impacts commercial monetization. If you can do this, why worry about your team’s value not being recognized?

Source: Noteman