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Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

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Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#131

Post by john_minsk »

Great post and Elon Musk has similar rule in his thinking.

For anyone who liked the trick in the post consider checking out TRIZ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

There are too many interesting ideas in this framework, but one of the first steps in the algorithm of solving a problem is to "Formulate ideal final result", according to TRIZ.

Now the "Ideal final result" has a specific definition: The part of the system doesn't exist but the function is still performed.

I'm having a lot of fun with this and other tools coming from TRIZ when solving problems every day. You might like it as well!

As for A/B testing and getting unexpected results: inside TRIZ there is explanation why it works - it is called "Psychological innertion". i.e. when engineer is getting a problem it is usually already formulated in a certain way and engineer has all kinds of assumptions before he even starts solving a problem. This leads to him thinking along specific "rails" not getting out of box. Once you have algorithm like TRIZ, it allows to break through psychological innertion and look at the problem with clear eyes.

Some other trick one might use to find interesting solutions to the problem from the post: "Make problem more difficult". I.e. instead of how to make calculator simple and unrestandable, formulate it in a different way: "how to make calculator simple and unrestandable, visual, fun to use and interact with, wanting to share with your collegues?"

"Turn harm into benefit". calculator in the post is treated as a necessary evil. Flip it. Now we have a calculator, but we could show some extra info next to prices, which our competitors can't do. We can compare with competitors and show that our prices are better, calculator can serve as a demo of how customer is always in control of their spending as the same interface is available after they become customer to control their spend etc.

Formulating this way already gave me some ideas what could be added to calculator to make it work.

Hope it helps someone.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#132

Post by GuB-42 »

roenxi wrote: post #17

> In an internal poll, 7 of every 10 people in the company thought the version with the calculator would do better. An interesting and pretty classic dynamic - I liked the article overall but I think this point didn't get the highlighting it deserved. If 30% of the people involved think that the calculator is a bad idea that signals a potentially huge problem even if the majority think it is fine. Be alert to the pol…

Another problem with internal polls is that you will have the point of view of those who make the feature, not the point of view of those who use it.

Imagine the calculator code was a mess compared to the rest of the project, it uses outdated libraries and updating would break it, it may have some security vulnerabilities, uses an unreasonable amount of resources and breaks the build system. No one wants to work with it. Ask whether it is a good idea and most people will say "no", hoping to get rid of that mess. In that context 70% is a very good number. If on the other hand, it is a feature people love working on, then 70% would be very bad indeed.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#134

Post by bitshiftfaced »

richardw wrote: post #112
mquander wrote: post #22

I don't know if this calculator was good or bad, but the rationale sounds superficially ridiculous. > Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier. Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money…

I designed an internal system that optimises for long term outcomes. We do nothing based on whether you click “upgrade”. We look at the net change over time, including impact to engagement and calls to support months later and whether you leave 6 months after upgrading. Most of the nudges are purely for the customer’s benefit because it’ll improve lifetime value.

That's the only thing I was thinking with their A/B test. The calculator might immunize against unhappy customers later on. I think they could've looked at something like the percentage of customers who leave one or two billing cycles later.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#136

Post by hamdouni »

raghavbali wrote: post #122
otherme123 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money from your users, more of them will sign up The problem with their calculator was that the users introduced slightly wrong data, or misunderstand what means some metric, and suddenly a 1000x the real price was shown. Their dilemma was "how to fix those cases", and the solution was "get rid of the messy calculator". But they are not hidding a…

why not fix the calculator in a way that avoids/mitigates scenarios where users get to wrong quotes and then do an A/B test? This setup seemingly tilts towards some sort of a dark pattern IMO

They tried to mitigate :

   But any attempt to address one source of confusion inevitably added another.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#137

Post by latexr »

Here’s a followup for the author: follow your own advice. Remove the “Psst... Get the next post in your inbox” interruption midway through your post. Dare to remove the stupid button that follows you around as you scroll.

I counted five obvious ways to subscribe on that page alone. Five! Do you really need to shove them in our faces and in the middle of the freaking content? Do you think you get more subscribers by interrupting people and being annoying? Are those the kind of subscribers you want?

Removing stuff is often obvious, you just have to take your mind out of the “more more more, make money, attract customers, more more” gutter mindset and think “what is respectful to users, how can I help them while simultaneously treating them like human beings instead of wallets to be milked”.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#138

Post by richardw »

sethammons wrote: post #120
richardw wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I designed an internal system that optimises for long term outcomes. We do nothing based on whether you click “upgrade”. We look at the net change over time, including impact to engagement and calls to support months later and whether you leave 6 months after upgrading. Most of the nudges are purely for the customer’s benefit because it’ll improve lifetime value.

You could only be measuring in aggregate, no? Overall signal could be positive but one element happens to be negative while another is overly positive.

Well, adjusting nudges in aggregate but diced in various ways. Measured very much not in aggregate. We’d see positive and negative outcomes roll in over multiple years and want it per identifier (an individual). I’ve heard of companies generating a model per person but we didn’t.

A silly amount of work but honestly lots of value. Experimentation optimising for short term goals (eg upgrade) is such a bad version of this, it’s just all that is possible with most datasets.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#139

Post by ljm »

otherme123 wrote: post #115
mquander wrote: post #22

I don't know if this calculator was good or bad, but the rationale sounds superficially ridiculous. > Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier. Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money…

> Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money from your users, more of them will sign up The problem with their calculator was that the users introduced slightly wrong data, or misunderstand what means some metric, and suddenly a 1000x the real price was shown. Their dilemma was "how to fix those cases", and the solution was "get rid of the messy calculator". But they are not hidding a…

Being a complete cynical bastard here but I sometimes feel like these calculators are actually meant to obfuscate and confuse and the result is that a startup worried about scale is going to pay over the odds and then deal with ‘rightsizing’ after the costs get out of control.

I felt like that with elastic serverless’ pricing calculator which on the surface looks perhaps cheaper or more efficient than a normal managed cluster, because you think it would be like lambda. Except there are so many caveats and unintuitive hidden costs and you’ll likely pay more than you think.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#140

Post by btbuildem »

My employer has something like 250 products. Five of them are responsible for 80% of the revenue.

Dev teams of those five are stretched thin, barely able to keep up with bug fixes, and struggling to add new, important features -- so much so that getting anything on the roadmap is an impossible battle, no matter who is asking.

There are thousands of devs at the company, most of them attached to the products that contribute relatively nothing to the revenue stream.

I don't know if it's not obvious -- it must be obvious -- that to move forward the right thing is to cut most of the products and refactor the teams to drive the remaining money-makers. Yet, this has not happened, and I see no indications, no murmurs of it happening. Corp politics are wild.

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