Analysis of Zuoyebang’s product strategy (Part 2)

Zuoyebang is committed to providing learning tutoring services in all subjects for primary and secondary school students across the country. It has over 800 million users and approximately 170 million monthly active users. It is a leading brand in online education for primary and secondary schools. On Zuoyebang, students can get the analysis steps and answers to difficult questions by taking photos or using voice. In addition to studying, they can also communicate with students of the same age across the country. The author of this article analyzes the product strategy of Zuoyebang to see what problems exist in Zuoyebang, which has achieved such success.

The author has noticed that many people have praised the Zuoyebang learning community, but most analyses remain on the surface, such as improving user stickiness and promoting learning enthusiasm. However, after long-term observation and in-depth participation in the community content, the author found that the community function is still "superficial".

The establishment of the Zuoyebang learning community was not all smooth sailing. After several rounds of adjustment and even giving up at one point, it became today's "learning" community with high activity, a strong learning atmosphere, and a willingness to share learning materials.

Why is a question-searching software so persistent in building a learning community?

For reference: Xiaoyuan Search Questions and Xueba Jun do not support users to freely post content to the platform publishing square. Next, we will focus on the discussion on the establishment of the Zuoyebang community.

1. First, summarize the content of the previous article

Zuoyebang product operation strategy!

1. It started as a posting question-and-answer community, and in the first version, a forum for groups with the same interests was established through the "classmate circle".

Regardless of whether the first-generation product team treated social interaction among classmates "accidentally" or "intentionally", Zuoyebang won at the starting line by relying on the advantages of the community; and having discovered the benefits of the community, Zuoyebang naturally found it difficult to give up the community function in the later stage, thus developing the community to its present state.

2. The core function (question search) and auxiliary functions (community, learning materials provision, online courses) are often inseparable and mutually reinforcing.

3. Other mainstream question-searching apps do not provide learning community services. Users who want to publish personal learning content to the platform can only do so through Zuoyebang (platform uniqueness)

2. Analysis of the Path to Formation of Learning Communities

1. Who will have the demand for question-searching software?

In a nutshell: students, parents and teachers who can’t find the answers.

Teachers should be a minority among them, because in most cases teachers take away the answers and leave the exercise books without answers for students to solve. Therefore, students and parents will use the question search function when studying and tutoring.

2. Which type of students will need to search and study a lot, students with good academic performance or students with poor academic performance?

The former has less demand for searching questions and is more inclined to practice questions; the latter just wants to copy questions directly after searching quickly and use their time elsewhere.

The majority of students at the middle level of learning are those who actually search for a large number of questions and study them. They have fixed study time and extracurricular hobbies and are the absolute majority in the school. They lack long-term perseverance in learning and their energy is easily distracted to other aspects.

Although no official dares to publish the rough portrait of its student users, I believe that the "one scan to get the answers to the entire winter vacation homework" function launched by Zuoyebang during the 2015 winter vacation and its popularity at the end of the winter vacation (see the first article for details) are enough to prove the idea of ​​the early question-searching software product team:

"To facilitate students to have a rich learning life" - students are active by nature, and the learning content itself is boring. If you want to keep active users for a long time, relying solely on learning content is bound to be limited, and it also needs to be supplemented by other content that students are interested in.

Therefore, in the early days of the "Zuoyebang" APP, discussions on topics such as chasing stars and making friends were everywhere, reflecting the product team's good wishes to "enrich students' spare time life", facilitate students' original intention of "learning life", and encourage students to speak freely in the software and find like-minded people.

As shown below, the picture is from Baidu:

As shown in the picture below: A student asked his classmates for help with all the questions on a blank test paper. The top of the senior circle was the Champions League experience trip.

This is probably the dilemma of all question-searching software: the software positioning (helping students learn) is contrary to the purpose of some software users. The dilemma is more obvious in the community: a community of a learning app should encourage users to post learning content, but in reality this is not the case.

Since students mainly use software apps after school and on weekends, most students are physically and mentally exhausted after a long period of study and are more easily attracted by interesting topics. Therefore, a "community composed entirely of students" will be filled with a large number of topics unrelated to learning.

Coupled with the product team's good wish to "enrich students' learning lives", even some topics that should not be discussed by students of this age group have gradually become popular.

The crisis broke out on August 5, 2017, and quickly sparked social discussion - China Daily criticized the Zuoyebang APP for containing pornographic content. The crisis ended with Zuoyebang shutting down the Classmates Circle at 14:30 on August 6, but its impact is still reverberating in all aspects:

Stricter government supervision; the public has doubts about whether the question-searching software is really "helping with learning", and the image of Zuoyebang has plummeted; after the community is closed, users who cannot interact with online friends may leave; the previous method of attracting users by playing the "edge ball" of learning will definitely not be used anymore...

If Zuoyebang closes the community permanently, I would like to summarize the reasons for the failure of the community function as follows:

"Providing community functions in question-searching apps will magnify the contradiction between product positioning and user goals", "Relying on community shortcuts to break the circle will ultimately backfire", "Tool apps have many users, the quality of students varies, and young people are easily misled by bad information", "The social atmosphere and learning atmosphere are contrary to each other", etc.

The update log of Qimai Data shows that on November 16, 2018, the “Study Circle” of Zuoyebang made a comeback and has continued to this day.

The following is a discussion on “learning circles”:

3. Core question: Can social interaction promote students’ independent learning?

Let’s get back to the essential question: Why should students post their learning updates?

1. Satisfy the desire for self-display and gain appreciation from others;
2. Hope to get encouragement and support from others;
3. Find a partner to study with;
4. Let strangers supervise learning progress and create pressure to urge self-study;
5. Record your own growth path.

On the surface, except for the fifth point, the other four points all involve the participation of "others" and need to be supported by social functions. However, by observing similar learning community apps, it is not difficult to find that the natural social genes and learning within the community are often difficult to perfectly match.

Coupled with the psychological desire for attention during adolescence, even if you share your learning with the purpose of 2 to 4, it is easy to turn to 1 under the dual temptation of the number of fans and comments.

Take the number of fans, a function commonly used in community apps, as an example. Excellent users uploading high-quality content (the most common ones are high-quality notes and learning vlogs) will attract the attention of others, and thus the number of fans will increase significantly after they publish high-quality content for a long time.

The benefits are:

1. Expand the influence of outstanding users, so that some users will follow them, imitate or admire them, and promote the formation of a good overall atmosphere on the platform;
2. By increasing the number of fans, the performance desire of high-quality users on the platform can be fully satisfied, and the fans' expectations will also provide timely feedback to high-quality users, motivating them to create better content and persist in the long run. This will encourage outstanding users and their fans to progress and grow together.

However, social networking can also limit the production of high-quality content for the following three reasons:

1. Creating high-quality content (such as notes, etc.) takes time

Therefore, high-quality users cannot produce efficiently. Instead, users who plagiarize or copy other people's works (notes, learning vlogs) have higher output, are more likely to be exposed, and are more likely to be recommended by the platform. This is almost a fatal blow to high-quality content producers who emphasize originality.

2. In order to become a "star user", some users frequently leave comments under high-quality posts to recommend themselves in order to gain attention.

This is very common in the interactions in the Zuoyebang community. This trend will also encourage users to gain attention by "interacting more with others" rather than "producing high-quality content", and will lead to a series of behaviors such as asking for attention and likes when posting.

The latter is often considered irrelevant to learning.

3. Although there is a virtuous cycle between fans and quality users, fans (and comments) also shape the quality users in their minds.

Some high-quality users may give up the pursuit of high-quality content due to the threat of "losing fans" and instead create content that the public likes - such as spending time on decorating notes (adding filters, stickers), longer and longer copywriting from the Internet, a lot of inspirational stories and beautiful pictures...

Some people have begun to question the rationality of "note sharing" in the comment section: some of the notes contain basic content that is already in the book, so is sharing like this "learning" or "show"? The picture below is a random screenshot shared by Zuoyebang. The text part is the "copywriting" and the picture is the note picture.

In essence, all the social genes that continuously drive high-quality users to produce are also stumbling blocks that hinder their continuous production of high-quality content.

In particular, learning communities focus on sharing notes, and pictures of notes are the hardest hit by copying. If this continues, high-quality original note sharers may be drowned in the torrent of copying.

But the dilemma is that the notes or study vlogs that are copied are not irrelevant to learning. In fact, most of them are better than the original content uploaded to the platform. However, most of the people who copy them hope to gain attention rather than show their learning achievements.

Such behavioral demonstration is unlikely to motivate others to learn, but will only lead more and more people to find easier ways to gain attention, thus abandoning learning itself in the learning community and starting to focus on the "community."

How to solve this problem? If moving is prohibited, how can we supervise the authenticity? If it is not prohibited, the trend of leaning more and more towards "showmanship" is the direction that a learning community should advocate?

——At present, Zuoyebang has not given an answer.

What we know is that it is working hard to guide the community towards producing high-quality content. However, after an in-depth analysis of this issue, the author gave his own answer - see the section on future iteration directions of product functions for details.

Author: Don't worry, you are right

Source: Don't worry about Hong Kong