Archive for the ‘ User Engagement ’ Category

Contextual Registration

We launched Secret Goals last week and ran a few campaigns on StumbleUpon, driving traffic to the site, and recording how people navigated the site using Clixpy.

We immediately realized that our registration page sucked.

Everyone hit it and just stopped right there.

And then we thought, “Why have a registration process at all?”. We need to collect at least an email from people so that they can come back to the site and log in or we can email them a link to log in through, but beyond that we didn’t need any more information.

So why not ask people for their email in the context of setting up their goal? Explain to them why we need their email address and what emails they should expect to receive, all within the context of creating the goal, with no other registration process.

We tried it out (see before and after images below). In our first test we sent 100 people to the site and no one registered. In the second test we sent 100 people to the site and 2 people registered.

It’s not exactly the biggest win ever, and the results are very anecdotal (welcome to startup life), but we like the feel of it a lot more now and the fact that people are signing up at all is a big deal for us at this stage of the product’s life.

Before

After

2010
12/15
CATEGORY
Experiments
Secret Goals
User Engagement
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Embarassing Launch

We’ve just launched secretgoals.com and it’s far from complete. I think we would even consider it somewhat embarrassing.

Secret Goals

Why Not?

Well it’s embarrassing for one. People who use the product right now are probably going to be disappointed. There isn’t that much functionality, the functionality that is there is half-complete, and we’re not yet satisfied with the design and user flows. If we do get anyone to register we’ll probably lose them rather quickly just because there’s not much to do on the site yet.

Why?

We’re trying to push ourselves to validate our assumptions early on. We can launch early, use clixpy.com to see what people are doing on the site, and make better decisions about what to prioritize, hopefully allowing us to get to the right product a lot faster.

It’s hard to look past the embarrassment, but we need to be efficient. We need to figure out what people are engaged by on the site and where people are getting confused. We learned from our efforts on TheMatchingGame.com that we can’t rely on our own assumptions without frequently validating our ideas. We spent way too much time on TheMatchingGame.com building features that were complex and made the site more complicated, but had little impact on the way people used the site. Had we been more incremental in our approach and less afraid of embarrassment we probably could have saved ourselves a month of work.

How’s It Going?

We’ve just launched it and ran our first test. Already we’ve identified one page on the site (the page for a new goal that no one has take on yet) that is just killing everyone’s experience. Right now it just looks like a registration page, which may be suggesting to people that you have to register in order to do anything on the site.

We’re going to focus on changing that page now and then run another test. We’ll let you know how it goes.

2010
12/10
CATEGORY
Company
Experiments
Secret Goals
The Matching Game
User Engagement
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A Leaderboard

Add a highly visible leaderboard to TheMatchingGame.com.

Why Not?

Leaderboards can be very discouraging for new players, especially with something like The Matching Game where you can constantly earn more points (there’s no end to the game), so someone who is new may never be able to catch up to someone who has been playing longer. Also we’ve already experimented with a leaderboard a bit and it led to one person playing across multiple accounts so that he could take over the leaderboard. As with any game mechanics it can lead to undesirable behavior as people figure out how to game it.

Why?

A lot of people play The Matching Game because they consider themselves good matchmakers and enjoy putting their skills to the test. We want to celebrate the best matchmakers out there and a leaderboard is a great way to do that. Since you are competing against other great matchmakers you would get a lot of satisfaction out of being at the top of the leaderboard and may feel inclined to let other people know about your accomplishment, helping us to spread word about the site. At the very least it would encourage some of the best matchmakers to play more, allowing us to make more great matches for the people who are dating on the site.

How’s It Going?

It’s not, at least not yet. We’re still debating whether we want to build it in a more public way (it already exists, but is a little buried in the site and very hard to understand). We’re also considering game mechanics such as badges and levels, so we’re not sure if one of those would be better. Maybe we should do all of them, but we don’t want to make it too confusing. We’ll let you know if we decide one way or the other.

2010
11/11
CATEGORY
Distribution
The Matching Game
User Engagement
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