How to design a good operation activity?

In addition to working hard on visual design, operational planning, etc., an effective operational activity design also needs to pay attention to user psychology, that is, the actual psychological activities that users will experience when participating in the activity. In this article, the author shares his feelings about design operations activities based on his experience. Let’s take a look.

My recent work has mainly focused on operational activities. When I first came into contact with operational activity design, my concept of operational design was still vague. I thought the focus of the activity was whether the visual design was attractive and whether the event operation and planning were perfect. But in fact, user experience plays a vital role in the success of this event. This article mainly reviews the work and gains from participating in operational activity design in the past few months.

1. Definition of Operational Activities

Through short-term marketing methods, operations students plan and execute activities to achieve the goal of rapidly improving business indicators. Whether the activity can attract user participation and achieve business goals is the key to its success.

Key Features

• Short life cycle: Usually, operational activities have a time limit and are usually accompanied by certain story scenes or create a specific atmosphere;
• Crowd segmentation: Operational activities generally have user groups with specific characteristics to achieve the best business conversion. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the target users before designing, and fully consider the needs of different user groups during design to achieve a good user experience;
• Clear business objectives: The main purpose of operational activities is to improve business conversion, including attracting new users, paid conversion, daily active user retention, etc. Therefore, when designing, the focus should be on how to guide users to participate in activities and achieve business conversion.

Therefore, combining the characteristics of operational activities, it is found that for users, participating in an operational activity is equivalent to being exposed to a new product. If users participate in this activity, in addition to being attracted by the activity itself, they also need a certain learning cost.

2. How to design a good operation activity?

In order to create a good user experience, we need to remove barriers to user experience for users. In Growth Hacker, the author mentions two ways to overcome activation barriers:

1. Remove friction from the user experience;
2. Optimize new user experience.

1. Remove friction from the user experience

In user experience, friction can appear in any process, hindering the task that users want to complete. With every annoying obstacle users encounter, they wonder, “Is this worth it?” If the activity itself is not particularly engaging for the user, even the smallest inconvenience will drive them away.

Therefore, when designing operational activities, it is necessary to pay attention to the user's experience at each touchpoint in the experience and the integrity of the link . If the change of task status during the activity is not given to the user in a timely manner, the user will not be able to determine how to proceed to the next step. If the link is broken again, users will get lost in the page and don’t know how to continue, and will quickly leave.

2. Optimize new user experience

The second is to design and optimize the new user experience, the first principle of which is to treat it as a unique encounter between the user and the product. The new user experience should be considered a standalone product. We need to design a unique experience that attracts users to keep using the product.

In the "Open Course Navigator Program" project, we will provide invitation codes to senior users and ask them to attract new users. If they successfully attract new users, they will receive a small cash reward. In addition to attracting new members, the main purpose of the event is to attract traffic to the new features of the open course community and cultivate the habit of checking in.

Use the addiction model to keep users involved in activities. The addiction model is divided into four stages: trigger, action, variable rewards, and investment.

1. Trigger: In order to keep users participating in the event, after successfully attracting new users, a binding relationship is formed between the inviter and the invitee, allowing them to urge each other to check in, thereby achieving the purpose of our event and accumulating high-quality check-in content for the community.
2. Action: B=MAT (motivation, ability, trigger); the design of the event homepage focuses on the bonus amount, and each time the bonus amount is entered, it scrolls from 0 to stimulate users' sense of ownership and activity, dopamine anticipation effect, and produce a sense of pleasure.
3. Variable rewards: meet users' needs and stimulate their desire to use; by setting random cash rewards on different days, users are driven by curiosity to continue participating in activities.
4. Investment: How much effort the user has invested in the product; the design uses a progress bar to stimulate users' continuous motivation, aiming to cultivate the habit of sticking to the check-in.

The second principle is that your first landing page must accomplish three fundamental tasks: convey relevance, demonstrate product value, and provide a clear call to action.

We all know that users’ attention span is very short when browsing fragmented information, so whether we can attract users within a few seconds is the focus of our design. The design of the landing page will directly affect whether users will participate in the activity.

In order to create this unique encounter between users and our products, we need to think from the user's perspective, grasp the user's psychology, and answer three questions of users on the landing page:

1. Is this what I want?
2. What can I get from it?
3. How can I participate in the event?

1) Is this what I want?

We conveyed to them that they are the core users of the open course we selected, so that users have a stronger sense of ownership and a sense of responsibility to participate in the tasks; we attracted users' attention through the design of the boat tickets, echoed the theme of the event, created a story scene, and established emotional resonance with users. In the later stage, visual design can be used to create an immersive user experience, thereby improving user engagement.

2) What can I get from it?

The title allows users to quickly understand the core content of the event: invite friends and earn bonuses.

3) How can I participate in the event?

Place a call to action button below the ticket to improve user participation efficiency and prevent users from losing due to lack of understanding of the cost when they first enter.

Conclusion

When I first came into contact with operational event design, I felt that the focus of operational activities was whether the visual design was attractive and whether the event operation and planning were perfect.

Through participating in operational activity design work over the past few months, I have discovered that user experience plays a crucial role in the success of operational activities. When users first come into contact with a new activity, whether the activity process is clear and the operation is user-friendly directly determines whether users can participate smoothly and truly realize business data conversion.

Author: An.

Source: An.