In the second half of the Internet, when the traffic and time dividends are exhausted, how to delve deeper based on the industry and users has become the biggest issue facing all companies.The first step to solving a problem is to clarify what the problem is.In the user reservoir, when the user traffic entrance changes from a mighty river to a trickle, how to increase the value of existing users becomes the key.The outline of this article is as follows:
The first two parts will discuss the design of the homepage framework based on the clarity of user needs.
The third part will continue to discuss the inner principles of the homepage product and the construction of methodology.
1. Scenarios with Clear RequirementsAs the facade that users access, the APP homepage needs to build products based on different usage scenarios in order to handle massive amounts of traffic and meet the core demands of different users.The search box, navigation bar and situational awareness of Dianping are not only the first layer of traffic reception, but also the most important layer of converters .1. Active and explicit demandWhen users have clear requirements in terms of time, place, and category, they will actively use reviews to meet their needs through the search box or category area of the navigation bar.This type of proactive and clear demand, whether it is Dianping, Taobao or JD.com , is the core scenario of traffic.
From the user's perspective, the purpose of product design is to improve efficiency and help users reduce the number of operating steps as much as possible to achieve their desired goals.
From a company perspective, how to achieve education on new businesses/categories in traffic convergence areas while taking into account the stability and efficiency of commonly used functions and guiding users to explore and discover is an important part of information framework design that needs to be considered.
Taking the navigation bar as an example, the navigation bar is the core path for users to quickly understand the basic functions/services of the APP, and can cultivate users' long-term usage habits.The navigation bar on the Taobao homepage displays Tmall , Juhuasuan, Tmall Global, Tmall Supermarket, Recharge Center, Ali Travel, etc., which directs traffic to sub-brands/mature categories and brings together subcategories such as men's clothing, beauty, luggage, etc. for users to discover and search.Currently, Dianping has limited sub-brands, which are not enough to support the entire module. Therefore, the navigation bar mainly displays commonly used categories, such as food, movies , takeout, hotels, etc.However, with the continuous development of the company, the number of sub-categories is increasing. Displaying 10 categories on one screen is far from meeting the demand for exposure of new categories, and there are relatively few users who actively slide to the second screen of the navigation bar.How to maintain users' inherent habit of searching for categories while taking into account the stability and efficiency of commonly used categories and supporting the exposure of new categories has become a problem that must be considered and solved.The current approach to comments is to divide the navigation bar into a fixed area and an extended area.
The stable area carries fixed high-frequency categories and meets the general needs of most users.
The extension area gives priority to displaying categories that users are interested in in new category businesses based on their past search, browsing and other interaction records on Dianping.
When calculating the user's interest in a category, we mainly use a horse racing mechanism, with the user's click-through rate as an important indicator, to encourage each business to proactively optimize its own category pages and improve the conversion efficiency of user traffic.In simple terms, the better the optimization of the category landing page , the higher the category will be displayed in the navigation bar at the same level of new business competition for the same user.At the same time, in order to support the seasonal operation of categories, the navigation bar adds basic configuration capabilities such as superscript bubbles such as "hot" and "preferred" to help attract new businesses and increase click exposure.In this way, the exposure and traffic needs of new businesses can be met without affecting users' cognitive habits and traffic handling efficiency.In summary, the purpose of navigation bar architecture design is to leverage the business. If the business provides better services, it can obtain more traffic from the platform and track subsequent effective conversions. At the same time, we must take into account the value brought by different businesses and gradually form a more complex and dynamically adjusted measurement mechanism.2. Active and implicit needsUsers may not express their needs actively or clearly, but they do have needs in their hearts, which we need to present to users through data mining, shortening the user's usage path, improving efficiency, and achieving results that exceed user experience expectations.To meet users' active and implicit needs or immediate needs of the scene, the situational awareness module is used on the review homepage.The birth of situational awareness was due to the commercial cooperation with Parkson Department Store in July 2015. Parkson hoped that when users were located in the mall, the homepage of Dianping would serve as the traffic entrance for Parkson activities.After reaching a cooperation agreement with Parkson, we designed a very simple module on the homepage. We originally intended it to be a cooperation project, but later we found that the click rate of this module far exceeded that of surrounding modules. After continuous iteration, it evolved into situational awareness.Contextual perception can accurately meet user needs or shorten user usage paths based on user historical behavior, location, time and other information, thereby improving efficiency and becoming a thoughtful scenario assistant.01 Instant RecommendationIf a user visits a Starbucks multiple times, the next time the user is located near the Starbucks, the POI will be displayed directly on the homepage, directly meeting the user's needs.02 Accurate displayIn popular restaurants or shopping malls, situational awareness will automatically display discount information of the store or mall;
When you order a takeaway, situational awareness will remind you how much time is left for delivery.
When you buy a movie ticket, situational awareness will remind you how long it will take to start and where the theater is before the show starts.
Contextual awareness is a scenario-based guessing of what you like, which accurately reaches users' needs based on specific time, place, and behavior.Compared with online e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, the temporal, spatial and geographical attributes of O2O lay the foundation for the uniqueness and prophetic nature of the situational awareness module.2. Scenarios with Ambiguous DemandWhen user needs are unclear, even though there may not be immediate consumption needs, there is still an opportunity to recommend products, merchants, content, etc. that may be of interest to users.So, how should we design it to help this type of users meet their needs? Dianping mainly improves conversion through two major sections: event operation and what you might like.1. Activity operation positionTaking Taobao as an example, the content on the homepage is rich and diverse. In addition to basic search and navigation, there are also various special theme sections and a large amount of content recommendations and updates.Various theme modules, such as fast shopping, super bargains, must-see items on Tmall, special products, popular markets, etc., can give users a lively impression and a sense of rich content, thereby satisfying users' needs for browsing.Of course, different theme sections are not meaningless piles of displays, but they carry different missions.From the perspective of role positioning, the activity operation position includes the following four major functions:
Different from the pure category form of the navigation bar, it provides users with a service entrance through scenario-based packaging or content organization;
Satisfy the consumption needs of users with unclear purposes and the needs of browsing and recommending products;
Meet the needs of daily business traffic diversion and new customer acquisition as well as promotion activity exposure;
Meet the needs of new customers on the conversion platform.
The first two points focus on meeting user needs, while the last two points are required for the company's business development and operational work such as attracting new users, promoting activation, and retaining existing users.In the activity operation position, user value and the company's interests are intertwined, overlapping and complementary.Taking the review homepage as an example, the following discusses the value of the modules "Preferred for You", "Daily Benefits" and "Featured Channels".01 Best for youThe module that is optimized for you is positioned to meet the greedy needs of price-sensitive users. Based on the user's past browsing profile, seasonal factors, and city popularity index, we provide different activities that suit the user's preferences and are tailored to each individual.It’s not just about discounts or hot-selling products; the activities on display are more about being suitable for users and tapping into the general trend of consumption upgrading.In addition, in order to balance the game between company value and user needs. The algorithm that is designed to direct traffic to low-frequency, high-unit-price businesses has been incorporated into the Best for You app, which has also led to users frequently complaining that the recommended activities are not personalized enough.02 Daily BenefitsThe mission of the daily welfare module is user retention . Users can get the daily reward by visiting the daily welfare page, and can get an additional grand prize by visiting the page for 7 days.The sign-in process is short and the operation is light. Different coupons are allocated to each user every day based on the user portrait . It has a strong sense of freshness and very high user participation.03 Featured ChannelThe task of the featured channel module is to attract new business. Arrange fixed display locations for some low-frequency businesses such as weddings, home decoration, learning and training.Improve the business awareness among users and cultivate them into potential users. When you have related needs in the future, consciously look for services through reviews.When organizing and displaying content on the homepage activity operation position, there are two points worth noting:(1) Clarify the positioning of the activity operation positionTaobao's activity operation position contains a very rich set of modules, but each module has an overall title or positioning. The significance lies in guiding its content organization, helping users understand the positioning of the module, reducing users' entry costs, and increasing module usage rate.The positioning of the section should not be simply and crudely divided by category, but should be organized and displayed in a way that uses dimensions that are not available in various navigation bars, such as discounts, popularity, quality, etc. to organize merchants, products, and content, and it should be compatible with displaying multiple categories and multiple contents in one thematic area.(2) Packaging in a scenario-based and themed wayProvide more functional and content-based non- promotional products to dilute and weaken the advertising content, thereby getting rid of users' negative perception of it as pure advertising.It is recommended to display more operational content packaged as instant consumption, rankings, quality selections, affordable recommendations, headline articles, etc., rather than displaying short-term promotional activities content.The latter looks more like promotional ads, which are likely to cause users to be disgusted and wary, and are not sustainable and are not enough to develop a clicking habit.2. You may also like“Guess you might like” is a synonym for recommendation and a symbol of the big data era.It is said that when we log in to QQ or WeChat , Tencent's database will analyze our user portrait in all directions with more than 8,000 dimensions.Through various collaborative filtering and hybrid recommendation algorithms such as item-based and user-based, based on the user's portrait, combined with previously browsed content and purchase records, the real-time behavior path is read to recommend content that users are interested in.Assuming that we have not browsed product A on Taobao, the algorithm can match it through big data and find that tens of thousands of people with the same tags as us have browsed product A. By analyzing the consumption behavior of similar groups of people, we can infer and predict: We may also need product A or it may also be part of our label.Suppose we have browsed product A on Taobao before. The algorithm can directly analyze our preference for product A through our past behavioral data such as product collection, store attention, adding to shopping cart, and receiving coupons, and then determine whether to make a recommendation.The search box and navigation bar allow users to find the products they want more conveniently, while the "Guess What You Like" feature proactively recommends products to users when their needs are unclear, thereby tapping into greater consumer value.In the latest version of Taobao, the "Guess You Like" feature has been moved to the "Taobao" entrance in the lower left corner of the Taobao mobile homepage. Its recommendation system has long become the underlying algorithm support for many modules.The advertising carousel and search box prompt at the top, as well as the display images of various theme modules, are all updated and recommended in real time based on the user's personalized portrait.It not only makes Taobao’s homepage more user-friendly, but also allows users to feel the satisfaction of “shopping”.Alipay 9.0 has been revised to show a homepage with different faces for different people, which is an application with thorough recommendation ideas.Compared with Taobao, Dianping can provide users with more accurate and situational recommendations based on time and regional attributes.For example, based on the time, breakfast brunch, afternoon tea, supper, etc. are recommended.Based on GPS positioning, we recommend popular businesses that people nearby are searching, browsing, and collecting.Guess What You Like can not only satisfy price-sensitive users, helping them find affordable, popular, and carefully selected group discounts, but also provide content-sensitive users with a convenient entry point to discover and explore high-quality stores and article content.3. Methodology ConstructionThe first two parts of the article analyze in detail how to build a product framework based on the clarity of needs and provide explicit solutions to reasonably handle massive traffic.The following will continue to discuss the inner philosophy and methodology construction of the home page product manager . Link believes that there are three points:1. Research user attributes
Internally, studying user attributes is not just an analysis of past historical behavior, but also a grasp of the changing trends in consumption capacity of the entire platform's user groups.
Externally, it is necessary to have sharp market insight and follow the real-time trends of the entire market, and to figure out how to combine the core competitiveness of one's own products so as to quickly migrate the services that were leading or established a good reputation in the old era to the new market.
In the portal era, NetEase was a leading leader in the content field. In the APP era, NetEase News Client is still known as the most opinionated news and information platform, while Sina and Sohu have gradually fallen behind in the news and information field.The sharp comments on current affairs, which are more interesting than the news, demonstrate NetEase's profound UGC community operation capabilities, which are also NetEase's core capabilities in the portal era.In the era of mobile Internet with more open-mindedness, it has exploded with greater value and expanded into the field of music, creating another well-known NetEase Cloud Music with social factors.For homepage product managers, it is more important to grasp the changes in the behavioral needs of user groups in the entire mobile Internet market than to conduct in-depth research and perspective on a single segment of the population.Live streaming is popular, Q&A is popular, and shared bikes are popular. Whether they are suitable for doing so, whether they need to be quickly occupied and followed up, whether they fit the target audience of the product, and how to combine them with the core values of existing products are all issues that the homepage product manager needs to think about.Because this will affect the tone and brand image of the entire product, product managers in charge of different business areas are not suitable for coordinating the overall situation.2. Build basic service capabilitiesThe capabilities provided by WeChat official accounts are message push capabilities and conversation carrying forms. What information users receive and what type of information carrier they receive are all decided by the operator himself.The capabilities provided by the iOS system are a unified underlying architecture and function call interface. Developers can access it based on their own product ideas and use the system to reach a large number of users.For platforms like Taobao, JD.com, and Dianping, the ability to build services means giving each business more diverse and accurate ways to reach users.The traditional platform homepage consists of a search box + navigation area + shopping event + vertical channel + what you might like. The overall benefits that each business brings to the platform basically determine the height and size of its exposure. The unfairness in resource allocation between businesses due to different attributes is often selectively ignored.If it is only based on the above description, the browsing and clicking intentions of all users on the entire platform are used to determine where to display each business and how much traffic to attract.The user resource pool for low-frequency businesses such as weddings, home decoration, and education will become narrower and narrower, and there will be no opportunity to cultivate new users.The home page product manager needs to think about how to balance the overall interests of wages and the interests of various businesses, and build more ways for low-frequency businesses to reach potential users.The Alipay 9.0 version has a different homepage for each user, giving each business the opportunity to be displayed in the information flow . Users can add and delete items on their own, building a complete diversion system.The homepage product manager needs to think more about the potential needs of users in various usage scenarios, establish correlations between businesses, and expand users' purchasing intentions.For example, if a user reserves a seat at a restaurant for 6 p.m. on Saturday on the platform, is it possible to link the user's past potential browsing, collection, and purchasing behaviors to push special offers for nearby movie theaters or nail salons?3. Synergy and win-win cooperationAlibaba’s annual Tmall Double Eleven event is a typical example of synergy and win-win cooperation.It aggregates all different channel resources to create a three-dimensional, multi-dimensional discount carnival, in which the entire platform, various businesses, tens of millions of merchants, and hundreds of millions of users all get what they need and obtain the expected returns.If you want to build such a good platform product or large-scale operation, the underlying environment and atmosphere is the most critical factor. After all, not all 1+1 is greater than 2.Its core focus is on a platform product, whether the ecological environment behind it is conducive to the survival of multiple parties, and whether it avoids a winner-takes-all situation.Just like whether our society is conducive to the lives of people of different classes or industries with different incomes, or whether the forest system is suitable for the survival of multiple organisms to form a stable ecological chain.There are two important factors in the homepage product construction environment: encouragement and avoidance.01 Encouragement includes functional encouragement and public relations encouragementFunctional encouragement refers to guiding businesses to access the basic service capabilities provided by the platform, such as the personalized interface provided by the Push notification access platform, to push content that users care about rather than large and comprehensive promotional content.Public relations encouragement is to set a benchmark in terms of public opinion guidance and publicize positive information about each business through the company's monthly reports and emails.02 Avoid including platform rules, punishment measures, etc.Taking Push notifications as an example, the platform rules prevent businesses from spamming clickbaitcontent to users. If users cannot see the 1-yuan rush or 9.9-yuan special movie tickets on the activity page, they are strictly prohibited from appearing in the sent copy to mislead users to click.Punishment measures can adjust the limited sending volume of each business based on the click-through rate of push notifications sent by each business every day, week, and month. The upper limit of the sending volume can be increased for high click-through rates and reduced for low click-through rates, so as to provide benign cyclical guidance.IV. ConclusionWhether it is the browsers of the PC era, or the super apps Taobao and WeChat on mobile phones today, in the absence of the Internet's demographic dividend, how to guide the traffic value of each user to the business that maximizes profits is the top priority of every homepage product manager.Therefore, Link believes that the core goal of the product responsible for the homepage traffic entrance should be to create a complete "ecosystem" with strong growth potential.A unique system of precise regulations and mechanisms can effectively stimulate competition and cooperation among multiple businesses within the platform and maximize the profit value of the entire company.In summary, the homepage product needs to be based on users, focus on grasping trends, build various ways to reach users for various businesses and improve the accuracy of reach.Leverage the business and enable it to provide better services, thereby achieving a win-win situation for cooperation among the company's various businesses by encouraging and avoiding the construction of a healthy platform ecological environment.
Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising
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