User Disengagement
zerodha.tech
User Disengagement
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: User Disengagement
#2> I have come to realise that the term user “engagement” in software, more often than not, is a thinly veiled proxy for user entrapment, whether intentional on the part of software designers or not.
I do not think anything is veiled. Good software does lots of work and grab a little attention while bad software needs more attention than necessary for the sake of business needs.
Re: User Disengagement
#3Most users do not understand what software is for themselves: most do not even understand the difference between local and remote, proprietary or FLOSS, perceiving just the UI, locally seen, as a thing in their hands...
The sole possible positive engagement is in a community, so FLOSS, mandatory by law, a PUBLIC academia who led research so most new ideas come from public money, for public interests and the private sector just pick what it want but do not led the development toward dangerous situations. Something that can't happen with enough Citizens comprehension of the issue and it's meaning for our society.
In a near future entrapment can mean you are locked out of "your" car due to a private third party service issue, you pacemaker can cease to function from a remote order or you cant be identified because some private-owned "public" ID service does not work properly, ... you? ... Oh, yeah, us, all.
Re: User Disengagement
#4Excellent approach - I hope it is part of a trend.
I also wonder if after decades of VCs pumping trillions of dollars into apps and platforms seeking shallow 'engagement' user metrics, and at least the vanguard of the population starting to get sick of it, and it becoming a zero-sum-game, the landscape has fundamentally changed.
E.g., iirc Google originally used the metric of short user time on their site to indicate success - the users who quickly found a useful result would navigate away from Google sooner. They grew rapidly with this approach because people found G actually useful, not engaging, and came back. I wonder (hope) if development & funding will more focus on abandoning superficial 'engagement' metrics in favor of actual utility metrics - such as briefer and repeated usage vs your competitors' products.
Re: User Disengagement
#5Zerodha has had the good fortune of ending up building a good product whilst the market needed it.
If the pandemic had not happened, the growth would not have been what it is right now and that is when “build it and the users will come” philosophy stops working.
The engagement metrics do work, but just like everything else in life, if you overoptimize for any one thing, it is detrimental (eg- drinking water in excess is harmful).
Re: User Disengagement
#6> We charge users a fee, .. to sign up. This friction causes users without a strong intent to do financial investments to drop off. .... The mere act of signing up does not create a user.
This is so obvious. It amazes me, that one needs to swim against the tide, on something as obvious as this.
this is a good post.
Re: User Disengagement
#7Zerodha has had the good fortune of ending up building a good product whilst the market needed it. If the pandemic had not happened, the growth would not have been what it is right now and that is when “build it and the users will come” philosophy stops working. The engagement metrics do work, but just like everything else in life, if you overoptimize for any one thing, it is detrimental (eg- drinking water in excess…
This is wrong.
Zerodha was already India's largest broker more than a year before the pandemic happened[1]. The stuff mentioned in the post isn't something they're just starting to do now; they've been doing it since the beginning. They did benefit immensely from the pandemic stock frenzy, but they were very successful much before it happened.
I've been a user for more than three years, and have never seen a single pop-up or ad or basically any kind of nudge from Zerodha regarding signing up for any of their products. There are third-party add-ons (like Tickertape), but they explicitly make people aware that these are separate products with their own terms, conditions and fees if any. This is very much appreciated by users, and they tend to have fewer complaints per user in comparison to the competition[2].
They've grown primarily because they're good at what they do, and there is no catch regarding any of their products. Rest of the financial industry in India is a cesspool with a massive buyer-beware attitude, which is an instant turn-off for most people, but there weren't many other options until recently.
The one thing I find wrong about the post is that they aren't track-free; I notice Google Analytics being blocked on ublock origin. Hard to disagree with anything else.
[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/ris...
[2]: https://www.chittorgarh.com/report/broker_complaints_exchang...
Re: User Disengagement
#8Zerodha has had the good fortune of ending up building a good product whilst the market needed it. If the pandemic had not happened, the growth would not have been what it is right now and that is when “build it and the users will come” philosophy stops working. The engagement metrics do work, but just like everything else in life, if you overoptimize for any one thing, it is detrimental (eg- drinking water in excess…
I don't think "engagement metrics" work. I mean, the objective of any business should be to make profit, so the metric that should matter is ultimately the average revenue per user. Engagement may in some cases correlate but why use a proxy when you can use the most important metric directly?
"engagement" only comes into play when you don't have a business model to begin with (and instead hope to carry on raising more VC money or sell to a bigger sucker) so that's the "best" you can do because your actual ARPU is negative.
Re: User Disengagement
#9We are working on a B2B application right now and we're seeing 2 linked patterns we're looking to overcome:
-- one strong champion in the customer organisation that uses us actively, then changes jobs / goes on maternity leave / retires -> customer churns
-- a champion in the customer organisation does not find the time to onboard other users in their company, so the value of what we offer is smaller than it could be.
For us, getting more users onboarded and introduced to the value offering (we're calling it engagement) seems like a perfectly valid challenge to address — does not feel like a dark pattern at all, but is "useful and meaningful to the end users".
We're also tracking "engagement" with different features in the platform to help us decide on 1) onboarding gaps, 2) whether the features are any good (both, of course, then researched further with interviews). Here it also feels like our work qualifies under the author's core tenets.
Re: User Disengagement
#10Engagement metric is a measure, but should it be a goal depends on the product.
e.g. for google search low engagement is better, but for youtube low engagement might mean good or bad depends on the users objective