Operation is a bridge between products and users, so operations must constantly meet user needs, but cannot be completely user-oriented. The author of this article teaches you how to coordinate and balance the relationship between the two by analyzing some pitfalls that he stepped on in the early stage of user operation.
has always believed that easily throwing away opinions on things is like eating instant noodles.
Not long ago, the fertile soil of WeChat gave birth to an explosive article "Liu Qiangdong rarely gets angry", like the ever-increasing street lights in the night city, once again lighting up the lonely and peaceful hearts of the majority of netizens.
Brief summary of the incident:
In , Zhanjiang, Guangdong, an entrepreneur invested alone and built 129 villas with a total of 258 villas, which were planned to be donated to villagers for free.
This is a good thing. Unexpectedly, some villagers proposed that their children are already married, and they hope to have one or two more houses;
There are villagers who not only want villas, but also demand high compensation.
The villagers are noisy and noisy, and the entrepreneurs are very annoying.
Because the requirements were not met, some villagers sneaked into the villa at night, smashed the new house, vandalized it wantonly, and the house has not been divided up to now.
The Internet is almost full of reprimands to the villagers, but after expressing their joy, people seldom look at the logic behind these "unreasonable incidents" with a trace of "warmth".
is like Gustave Le Pen in "The Crowd" clearly interpreting why gentlemen with their own independent opinions, once they join the group that is bewitched by the ideology of people's worship, why they become like a chemical reaction A bunch of crazy and evil guys.
is usually unbelievable or counterintuitive, and there must be an extremely reasonable logical chain behind it for explanation.
And I think this free donation event is actually a relatively failed user operation case.
In fact, we can regard this event as a marketing activity for the target user group: users can obtain material rewards provided by the sponsor (entrepreneur) after meeting certain conditions (local people, registration with the village committee) (villa). The reason why
classified it as a failure after the event is also clearer. In my opinion, there are two main points:
1. The reward rules set for the event are very vague:
did not specify who can be allocated a room, how many suites can be allocated, etc. Qualitative and quantitative provisions are made for the content. This made many residents wandering in the middle ground have some ideas. (Dong Ge has done a very good job of this. When he returned to his hometown during the Chinese New Year, he only found gold for the elderly in the village over the age of 65)
2. The benefits are too great and inseparable:
This activity is not a "one more" after unscrewing the bottle cap of Uni-President Black Tea "Bottle", you can change it if you can, just laugh it off if you can't. The target of
's current activity is the house, and everyone will keep their eyes open to seek their own optimal solution under the established rules. Coupled with the indivisibility of the house, it is okay to grant it to one person, but in rural areas, the family usually shares it with brothers and sisters, and how to distribute it has become a new contradiction among the people.
At this time, their best solution is indeed to ask the entrepreneurs or the village committee for more housing allocation, so they will not expand internal conflicts first. Although
had a good intention at the beginning, it did not consider the possible psychological changes and usage scenarios of users, which led to unsatisfactory results.
In fact, there are many similar "traps" in the initial stage of Internet user operations. Let me list one or two for warning:
1. Providing an experience beyond expectations is equal to meeting user needs as much as possible. As a start-up, we often exchange business operation experience. After many discussions with
, I found that their idea of cultivating seed users is very clear, allowing users to have a sense of participation and providing them with an experience beyond expectations. But their specific implementation surprised me a little bit, and their operators are trying their best to meet the needs of users.
The two are essentially different. To put it bluntly, the former is to make users happy in the scene you set, and the latter is to make users happy in the scene set by the user.
in the scene you setIn China, the company guides users. Users are very clear about the rules in the scene, and everything is controllable. As long as you can meet the basic needs of users in the scene, your additional services will naturally have a positive impact on users.
The latter is the user guiding the company, because you continue to meet the user's needs in the scene, the user's rules for the scene will gradually become blurred, and they will start to put aside the rules and use their own likes and dislikes as the only criterion for evaluation. This kind of user operation can only be reduced to a place where everyone can't agree.
We also encountered similar problems in the early stage of user operation, because of the "maternal halo" of the operators towards users. Users of
keep giving us some incredible requests: for example, they want to build a wall in the tennis court, so that one person can play; they want to expand the court, but the bottom line is too short; they want to have a place to take a shower after playing and many more.
You must know that we are only the renter of the site, and it is impossible to carry out any above-ground transformation or expansion of the scene. And they were quite unhappy with the last polite rejection of the operation personnel, and the satisfaction they had cultivated in vain was lost unconsciously. The more sensible approach for
is: must conduct a preliminary analysis of user needs, and if it is indeed a pain point for users, it must be included in the scene rules of the entire company.
In user operations, favors can only be within the rules, not outside the rules.
Second, the lack of cost awareness of user operations
financial thinking is lacking in some operators, and its most prominent manifestation is ’s disregard for costs, especially non-cash costs (hidden costs). In the early days of
’s start-up, the development of an informationized event management system was not intended to be promoted. In order to demonstrate the effect of the product, our operators will help the event sponsor to operate the system offline.
Everyone is very satisfied with the effect of the product, and they expressed that they would use our system in the next competition.
Then a new problem came up: because they maintained a good relationship with the operators and these KOLs, they felt that it was too troublesome to learn the operation of the system (the instinctive rejection of changing old habits in the face of new things has almost nothing to do with product design), Every time, let the operation personnel perform the system operation on their behalf.
The consequence of this is that although these KOLs have been served well, it takes up a lot of time for the operators: firstly, the product cannot be vigorously promoted; secondly, our purpose of influencing the KOL to leverage the value of larger users has also temporarily failed. . The reason for
is very simple: it is because the operation personnel spend a lot of time helping these KOLs, so that they only know how to enjoy the convenience of the system, but do not know how to use the system, let alone introduce our products to other users.
Later, our solution became to use mobile phones to record the screen and cooperate with the commentary to solve the user's system operation problems. Many users said that the system operation is actually very easy to get started, and they praised our video products even more.
Many times we always feel that we should spend enough time on users in order to leverage more value-of course this theory is valid.
Just remember as an operation: Our mission is to leverage the value of tens of millions of users. It is okay to ignore your own time cost in the early stage, but you can only suppress your energy and market price in the later stage. The best way for is to use products to solve problems that can be solved with products.
3. After meeting the basic needs of users, we will talk about popular activities
In the early stage of user operation, we made similar mistakes: in order to increase the user usage of the competition app, we held several unprecedented tennis matches in Shanghai. Due to the generous bonuses, our competitions are naturally expensive in Luoyang, and there are many participants. The first question that
flocks to is reporting calls. What was supposed to be a thing of the past in general amateur competitions is raised to the level of sportsmanship and principled issues in the face of generous bonuses. At that time, we were almost all in customer service, busy dealing with it, and were often threatened by certain teams to retire collectively due to unsatisfactory handling. After
, the competition ended successfully, and our app registrations increased by nearly 5,000 within a few days, but the number of active people was still lacklustre. The reason for
is that the product cannot be stable in terms of satisfying the basic functions of users, and the functional modules are not fully built, so it is impossible to pass the continuous online price.Value output retains users, let alone activates their activity.
And the subsequent development is even more dramatic: as long as the prize money is lower than the previous one in the events we hold in the future, many users will complain that our user experience is not as good as before. The pitfalls that
stepped on about user operations are mainly the above three points.
Many people say that inspiration comes from life, in fact, this is especially true for us in operations.
But this requires us to constantly mobilize product thinking to see our surroundings. In my opinion, product thinking is actually more of an attitude to look at things, and treat things that happen around us as a problem to be solved. Then use our thinking to analyze and obtain value.
Those who have taken the college entrance examination all know that the answer only counts for two points. If you want to get more points, the key is your problem-solving process.
So in the era of flying opinions, please maintain a "warmth" to re-interpret things, maybe this will create a steady stream of "inspiration" for you.
This article was originally published by @Levax on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reprinting without permission is prohibited. The title picture of
is from Unsplash, based on the CCO protocol