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User Disengagement

zerodha.tech

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Re: User Disengagement

#31

Post by shishy »

Nextgrid wrote: post #8
BIackSwan wrote: post #5

Zerodha 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 mor…

I think engagement comes into play in both scenarios (having and not having a business model) and is really detrimental in the latter case.

But if you have a business model then looking at engagement metrics can be incredibly useful in informing a lot of product decisions and shouldn't be disregarded. Just a mistake IMO to optimize for it alone in the absence of other things.

Re: User Disengagement

#32

Post by josefrichter »

bibliographer wrote: post #9

We 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…

I'd say it's about trying to design it in a way where they get maximum utility without any "onboarding". Of course there's a fine balance where a tiny bit of "onboarding" is helpful and feels natural, but examples of that are very rare.

Re: User Disengagement

#34

Post by e3bc54b2 »

While zerodha is on the good side of the spectrum, I have to call out couple of claims from this post.

No marketing is a half-truth at best. Their app often sends notifications about blog posts and upcoming trades (IPOs etc that user did not initiate). So much so that I had to disable notifications for the app.

No ads claim is similarly bull. There are ads for various (startups?) firms who supposedly augment zerodha's product right on the console (where various reports are shown).

I'd reiterate, compared to various abominations out there, zerodha is better. But to claim they don't do marketing or advertising is not really true.

Re: User Disengagement

#35

Post by Lightbody »

This is a great article, but like others have said, difficult in practice to pull off. But doesn't mean we (the industry) shouldn't try.

My own personal experience: I have a calendar assistant startup (http://reclaim.ai if you're curious) that does a bunch of awesome things. And we designed it to work where you already are -- namely in Google Calendar.

But a lot of potential investors, for example, question our definition of "active user" when we tell them we consider the customer getting value if we blocked out and defended time for their lunch as their schedule filled up.

Conventional wisdom is that the user isn't getting value unless they are coming back to your UI and getting your notifications etc. But that's just not the case for us: we helped our customer manage their time better without ever requiring them to come back into our app.

Isn't that like... the best possible thing? Solving a problem with the least amount of friction? It's working for us and fortunately we found investors who agree, but there are a lot of people out there that think about "engagement" in fairly simplistic terms that I think holds back our industry and also hurts the customers.

Re: User Disengagement

#36

Post by infogulch »

bibliographer wrote: post #9

We 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…

I noticed that you scare-quote "engagement", rightly so imo. Delivering value to the user is the end, engaging them to enable them to extract value is the means. "when means becomes an end" is a good description of the toxic dynamic of that occurs when engagement metrics are optimized at the expense of value delivered which plagues our industry today.

Maybe expanding the term to allude to this dynamic would justify dropping the scare quotes; 'valued engagement', 'value delivered engagement' or something.

Re: User Disengagement

#37

Post by itronitron »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #14

I love this piece. I philosophically agree with most of it (in fact I wrote a previous HN front-pager* called Disrespectful Design). But a bunch of the advice is just not practical because of, well, human psychology. For example, there's a lot of research showing that in competitive markets, people lazily choose the product with the most visible brand (or that is most accessible, ie in your face at the shelf on the s…

>> engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product

I disagree, engagement tracking is just a lazy stand-in for actual user studies and interviews.

Re: User Disengagement

#38

Post by Ozzie_osman »

itronitron wrote: post #37
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #14

I love this piece. I philosophically agree with most of it (in fact I wrote a previous HN front-pager* called Disrespectful Design). But a bunch of the advice is just not practical because of, well, human psychology. For example, there's a lot of research showing that in competitive markets, people lazily choose the product with the most visible brand (or that is most accessible, ie in your face at the shelf on the s…

>> engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product I disagree, engagement tracking is just a lazy stand-in for actual user studies and interviews.

I never said it's a stand-in for actual user studies. I said it's critical. You need both. User studies will never give you the broad, hard data you get from engagement tracking. They also won't give you as fast feedback. People have all sorts of biases in how they present themselves in user studies, and you should get that data and try to sift through it, but it's not a substitute for actually seeing how people behave.

Also, engagement tracking is actually really hard to do well, so it's definitely not lazy. But it definitely is shallow.

Re: User Disengagement

#39

Post by lykahb »

I agree with this. The time spent in app is roughly proportional to the number of ads watched and the revenue.

I noticed this shift shortly after when the internet connectivity become ubiquitous, in late 2000s. The older software designed to work offline may be clunky by the modern standards, but it honestly tried to meet the needs. There was an economic incentive for that too: a satisfied user is more likely to buy the next version or recommend the program to friends.

The connectivity and easy online payments have created new sources of revenue that are tied to how an app is used - the microtransactions and ads. It is inevitable that the dark patterns have followed. It is admirable when a business chooses a more ethical business model at the cost of revenue, even if the most users may not recognize it. But it will never be widespread until the structure of incentives changes. Zerodha has a better standing to do this choice because the stock brokers have revenue largely independent of the engagement.

Re: User Disengagement

#40

Post by harshal »

thorn55 wrote: post #7
BIackSwan wrote: post #5

Zerodha 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 p…

As a happy Zerodha user since 2017, I agree with all of this. Even if the pandemic would not have happened, Zerodha would still be India's largest, most profitable broker.
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