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Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

gkogan.co

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Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#151

Post by PaulHoule »

shubhamjain wrote: post #51
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…

Absolutely true! An A/B test enthusiast in our team once significantly reduced padding on the pricing page to bring the signup button above the fold and used the increase in signup button clicks as a proof of success of the experiment. Of course, the pricing page became plain ugly, but that didn't matter, because "Signups are increasing!!" In this case, I do agree that the calculator is a bit daunting if you're not u…

If I had a choice between ugly and rich and pretty and poor I'd be sorely tempted by ugly, particularly if I was making the decision for an organization.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#152

Post by latexr »

blueboo wrote: post #146
latexr wrote: post #137

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 i…

IIUC the lesson of blog SEO is that, if you want to grow your readership, copious attention-co-opting calls to action are unambiguously worth the annoyance foisted on discerning readers. What’s respectful to users is a separate (but not wholly unrelated) question…

Even if that’s true (I’m not convinced it’s unambiguous), my points still stand: Are undiscerning readers the kind of subscribers you really want? Perhaps so if you are, as per my last paragraph, the kind of person concerned with profit over quality. If you are, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you don’t see removing stuff as obvious and your mind only thinks of adding more junk.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#153

Post by gk1 »

whakim wrote: post #65

I don’t get it. Presumably the pricing model didn’t change, so all you’ve done is push the burden of doing the math onto the user (or more realistically, hope they just don’t even bother?) If users are frequently estimating costs that are off by orders of magnitude, surely the correct response is to change the pricing model so it’s easier for customers to understand?

Once they’re using the product they can see their actual usage and cost metering. So they can either extrapolate that to larger scale or test it at scale for a short time to see hourly/daily cost and then extrapolate for the month or year.

In other words it’s not much of a burden and they get much more reliable information.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#154

Post by gk1 »

scotty79 wrote: post #108

> The calculator also gave users a false sense of confidence, which meant they were unlikely to double-check the estimate by reading the docs, contacting the team, or trying it for themselves. How dare they think that a thing called calculator is accurate and not double check!

That’s the point, nobody should expect them to.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#155

Post by hobs »

grujicd wrote: post #89
InDubioProRubio wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, every db-column gets a "in_use_boolean" assigned? It gets reset every year, reset on first use query and auto-purged after a year and a day. Self-pruning database..

This would break if you need something after two or three years. It happens. My point is - it's relatively easy to tell if something is used. Usually, a quick search will find a place where it's referenced. It's much harder to 100% confirm that some field is not used at all. You'll have to search through everything, column names can be constructed by concatenating strings, even if it's strongly typed language there c…

Only three years? I have many clients who want 7-10 years of historical data at the tap of a button... which they rarely if ever use :)

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#156

Post by unregistereddev »

Rastonbury wrote: post #143
sethammons wrote: post #119

Is it standard to use percents of percents in conversion tracking? Going from 20 to 23% conversion rate is not a 15% increase in conversions, it is 3%. If that is the kind of shenanigans being played, there is something else to remove

It is. To simplify, if every conversion makes the company makes $1 and 100 prospects enter this funnel, going from 20 to 23% means they make $23 instead of $20

Agreed, and to stress for clarity: Adding 3 percentage points to the conversion rate increases revenue by 15% in this example.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#158

Post by cynicalpeace »

v9v wrote: post #98

Also see Muntzing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

Software Engineers (a large portion of HN community) inherently have a hard time with this. We're always taught to consider edge cases. Oftentimes handling the edge cases can be more work than the rest of the project.

But when we handle them, we give ourselves a pat on the back, without thinking can I just ignore the edge case and shrug if someone runs into it?

In the case of the OP, the edge case is the occasional user who might want to project their exact costs.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#160

Post by gk1 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #149
xorcist wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not take a PR piece completely at face value. There's probably a bit of both, at the very least.

In my mind Pinecone is an exemplary example of modern "social media marketing" for a technology company. They started on vector search at a time when RAG in its current form wasn't a thing; there were just a few search products based on vector search (like a document embedding-based search engine for patents that I whipped into shape to get in front of customers) and if you were going to use vector search you'd need…

Thank you. :) I don’t think of it as social media marketing but more of helping our target audience learn useful things. Yes that requires they actually find the articles which means sharing it on social, being mindful of SEO, and so on.

Probably our learning center is what you’re thinking of. https://www.pinecone.io/learn/ … The blog is more of a news ticker for product and company news.

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