Talking about the operating model of tool products from the experience of "Driving School One-stop"

What is the Driving School One-Stop APP?

"Jiaxiaoyidiantong" was registered in November 2005. It provides students with a full range of services such as driving dynamics, driving guides, driving knowledge, simulation tests, new car prices, driving school information, etc. It is a professional website serving driving beginners, car drivers and driving training institutions. On February 27, 2015, 58 Ganji acquired Jiaxiaoyidiantong.

Summary in one sentence: An APP under 58.com that is part of the automotive O2O chain. ”

What functions does the APP have?

I believe that many people still regard Jiaxiaotong as a driver's license test tool , and its core function is still a test tool. First of all, during the registration stage, the APP will recommend a driving school based on your location , including its name, price, address distance, student reviews, etc. There will also be an application guide. It also launched a "self-study direct test" service based on regional policies.

Secondly, during the examination stage, both Subjects 1 and 4 have question banks, examination tips articles, and practice PK answering games ; Subjects 2 and 3 have video teaching and driving operation step guides.

Finally, it has insurance, and if you fail the exam, there will be a compensation amount (the specific compensation is unknown)

It can be said to be a provider of full-process solutions for driving tests.

Like mobile phone card operators , it also launched services similar to "mall" . The interface shows that the product design understands human nature: "easy, low-cost, and the opportunity to get big rewards."

Like many tool apps, vertical circles will naturally extend into "communities" for students to discuss, complain, show off and share. "In summary, it follows almost all the "routines" of tool products.

What impressed me about Driving School Tong?

I thought hard, and what "touched" me about this APP at the time was: "It successfully retained me for a period of time. Later, when I thought about it carefully, this function not only increased the retention time, but also helped to remember more questions and increased the probability of passing the exam." At that time, there were only 2 days left before the fourth subject exam, and I started to practice questions. At the beginning, I directly "practiced test questions", but later I felt that there was no exam scenario, so I directly did a "simulated exam." The functions of both have their own advantages. The test question practice is to go through the question bank sequentially, while the mock exam has an exam scenario, the question types are consistent, and questions that have not been done before are randomly displayed.

Please look at the mock test interface design in the picture above. The explanations about the test questions are very routine. The key point is the sentence "the system will give priority to unanswered questions". It is difficult to control the "proportion of unanswered questions" in the system's questions so well. From my experience, before completing 60% of the questions in the question bank, the questions that have not been done in each simulation account for 5% of the question bank. That is, with each simulated exam, the proportion of completed question bank will increase by 5%. This number just met my expectations. I thought I could complete all the questions in the question bank after simulating 20 exams.

But after I completed 60% of the question bank, the proportion of questions that you have never done in each simulation accounted for 1% of the question bank, and the proportion decreased quietly. At this time, a large number of questions that you have repeatedly done appeared, and it was the best consolidation period for question memory. When the scores were above 94 points each time, I felt it was too slow. At this time, I looked back and found that the proportion had been reduced to 1%. It was at this time that I felt that the product design was thoughtful.

As a test god who has taken many exams, I know that test memory has a time limit. My first memory limit was about 2 hours , that is, after I simulated a large number of test questions (more than 600), my memory could last for about 2 hours. After a long time, the memory will become fuzzy. When I see a certain question, I may know that I have done it before, but I am not sure what the specific answer is.

I think there is a reason why this app quietly lowered the proportion. It is not entirely for the purpose of retaining users, but also for thinking about how to get more users to pass the test from the perspective of the test . This may be the core competitiveness of the driving test app. Tool products always win by their functional effects, such as Keep and Meitu . ”

What are tool products?

All Internet products are designed to meet certain needs of users. WeChat and QQ meet social needs, Didi and Uber meet travel needs, JD.com and Tmall meet shopping needs; Tianweitong meets the need to predict the weather; Alipay meets the need to pay; NetEase Cloud Music meets the need to listen to music; Jike and Toutiao meet the need for information; Maimai and LinkedIn meet the need for workplace social networking; Inke and Xiaokaxiu meet the need to share live videos... With the passage of time and the growth of user base, large demands have become industries , including Internet e-commerce , Internet social networking, Internet finance , and Internet education; but what about those small demands? We have never heard of "Internet weather" or "Internet exercise", so these small-demand products are collectively referred to as "tool products". In the minds of users, Meitu is a photo editing tool, Keep is a fitness tool, and Weather.com is a tool for checking the weather. They cannot escape the word "tool". ”

What are the design routines for tool-type products?

Focus on core functions and let users know at a glance what they can do with "you".

"Weather Pass" is a weather forecast product, and the focus of the product functions is "current temperature → whether it is raining → temperature trend in the next few hours or even days". So when you open the APP, you will see the content you want to see, and then the functions will be supplemented. "Weather Pass" can post updates and connect with Weibo updates (with priority given to weather, travel, and cultural updates). It has video, picture and text display forms, and also sorts the popularity of content, launching the "hotspot" function.

Keep is a sports and fitness product, and its core functions are auxiliary training, running count, cycling count, etc. On this basis, we extended fitness trends, then discovered fitness experts, and launched a series of activities in collaboration with them.

It can be seen that the design focus of tool products is to amplify the "explicit" core functions. Users are very likely to download the product just for a certain function. As for extensible functions, as the product users accumulate, the universal needs of users can be observed and the product can be iterated. Do not lose sight of the main goal.

How do tool products realize monetization?

Let me talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

People's needs are limited, while the range of products is unlimited. More products satisfy people's "pseudo-needs", which are dispensable needs. It would be better to have them, but it doesn't matter if you don't have them. The most important thing is that the willingness to pay is low.

People's physiological needs are food, clothing, housing and transportation, and the willingness to pay is the highest; security needs are divided into present security and future security, and can also be divided into psychological security and physiological security, and the willingness to pay is very high; social needs and respect needs are above survival, people need to socialize, need to be affirmed, and in order to pursue a comfortable life, why not pay; self-realization needs are people's pursuit of dreams, which is reflected in careers as entrepreneurship . Entrepreneurship requires support, financing , loans, promotion , and must be paid for.

If tool products don’t even rank in the five levels of needs, why would people pay for them? As mentioned at the beginning, almost all tool products will have shopping malls, communities, membership systems , offline integration, and even create their own brand products to achieve monetization , not just relying on advertising.

For example, for parenting science products, a maternal and infant mall is based on gaining the trust of users and carefully selecting high-quality maternal and infant products to recommend to users.

In today's environment where domestic products are generally distrusted and foreign products are admired, users lack trust in the products and worry about the physical safety of children and mothers. Parenting science tool products first gain users' trust in the operators behind the product through reliable content, which means that safety needs are met.

Once users trust the operators, they will want them to evaluate and rate various products on the market, and even move the screened products to the platform for sale. Because physiological needs must be met, even if the platform does not sell the product, users will go elsewhere to buy it. Since the user's psychological defense of product safety has been broken, why not go with the flow and launch a maternal and child mall, and use e-commerce promotions and other methods to sell the products. In this way, parenting science products will have a profit model, and the cost of maternal and child products can be negotiated with manufacturers, and profitability will no longer rely on financing.

Many tool products are too hasty and have launched a series of monetization functions before fully gaining the trust of users, causing the embarrassment of users not buying into the product. Another type of product chooses a direction that is too narrow and does not extend to products that can be monetized (either virtual or physical).

Therefore, if tool products want to monetize, they must first meet the user's security needs (trust in you), and then shift to meeting people's greater needs. Only by grasping the user's core needs and doing a good job of the product's core functions to gain the user's high trust, will users be willing to follow the platform to extend other gameplay and even generate consumption.