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 supermarket—you can draw analogies to virtual products).
Or, for products with infrequent use-cases, users won't remember to come back and use your product when the time comes. Zillow is a good example of this. The real value is when you are buying, selling, (or renting) a house, but that happens so infrequently. So they've built other ways to keep their app on your phone and their brand in your mind, like the Zestimate score (where homeowners or potential home buyers will check that score on a more frequent basis).
Also, engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product.
So it's not so much about what you do and don't do, it's more about _how_ you do it. Do you track engagement AND solely optimize it?
In any case, loved the article and agree with most of the discussion... just would encourage people to take a more pragmatic method to avoiding the engagement trap.
It's pained me to listen to people who have elaborate ideas of promoting disengagement with their web sites (e.g. apologizing for having ads) in the context that engagement is such a precious thing because it hard to get.
If there is an "art of seduction" there is also an art of driving people away and the two are closely linked. Søren Kierkegaard wrote his notorious Diary of the Seducer to drive away his fiance Regine Olsen who never quite fell out of love with him despite Kierkegaard demonstrating what an awful person he was to come up with that text.
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.
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.
For us, getting more users onboarded and introduced to the value offering (we're calling it engagement) seems like a perfectly valid challenge to address — does not feel like a dark pattern at all, but is "useful and meaningful to the end users".
We're also tracking "engagement" with different features in the platform to help us decide on 1) onboarding gaps, 2) whether the features are any good (both, of course, then researched further with interviews). Here it also feels like our work qualifies under the author's core tenets.
I’m in exactly the same boat with my B2B SaaS — particularly with the champion finding time to onboard the rest of their team.
Our app takes a bit of setup time, and I put a lot of work into making a really user-friendly “onboarding guide”, basically a checklist of things to do to set up the account, accompanied by visual call-outs for each step in the UI.
Before we had this, we forced companies to complete the full setup before they could use the app… As you might expect, many just gave up.
But since adding our onboarding checklist (and changing our platform to assume lots more defaults, reducing the number of actions required to get started, and allowing it to be used “out of the box”), we now have a new problem: more companies are using us actively, but many of them never complete the full setup, so it isn’t fully tailored to suit them.
The checklist UI dismisses itself automatically after all the steps are complete (there’s only 5, and honestly it takes 2 minutes, but there we go). I often look at active user accounts over 6 months old, and so many of them are using us daily but with a big “Getting Started” checklist still following them round the site!
I guess that’s users for you… Not sure how to improve this, practically speaking — we’ve already reduced the checklist down to the bare essentials — but open to any ideas…
I'll reply to you, though there are a couple others in this comment chain that it seems relevant (but possibly not...) to - Airtable has one of the best API guides I've seen, because you can load it up in a table you already have, and it creates examples _with your table_.
So no longer do you have docs that say "suppose you want to create a new entry for a sedan, which can be either red or blue", but instead has content from your actual existing table.
It sounds like a small thing, but it greatly reduces that bit of cognitive dissonance/overhead ("why are we talking about cars, I want to update the contact options for this customer") when trying to learn a new system (especially critical for less tech-savvy users), so might be applicable to other products.
Personally I hate those getting started checklists. They tend to be full of a bunch of stuff I observably do not need to do to use the product for my job, because I never have to do them to do it.
I know in the past I've just ad blocked the UI elements for those lists because they contain things which don't matter - or worse, which I can't do because the organization has disabled that feature for regular users in the company.
I'd be pretty curious to know what's on your list - I bet even with 5 items, your data is probably actually telling you you might not need it at all.
Curious to know whether that checklist is framed in terms of things to do or benefits they would get. I would guess they would perceive it as less daunting if you present them with what they would concretely gain from doing the thing.
No idea what you'd do beyond that though... Maybe I introduce some competitive aspect, like "you're already more involved than 60% of our users. You can get to 90% with this"? Or translate it in terms of real value gained from finishing the onboarding? Idk
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.
We have the same issue in the B2B company I worked at.
Currently we're implementing strategies to reduce the barrier of entry by making the product onboard the new customer. We just started and we still have a long way to go but I think it's the right solution.
Reducing the cost of onboarding for the customer and making it easy to invite other member should help avoid churn.
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.
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.
> We charge users a fee, .. to sign up. This friction causes users without a strong intent to do financial investments to drop off. .... The mere act of signing up does not create a user.
This is so obvious.
It amazes me, that one needs to swim against the tide, on something as obvious as this.
That’s an old trope, but it’s not really true. My TV has a user guide, so does my fridge, my brush cutter and my soldering iron. And, while I wouldn’t say that “hooked” is a term used widely across the whole software industry - though obviously in this context it’s more common - nevertheless, it’s hardly a term we share exclusively with drug consumption.
In fact, without thinking about it much, I think the nearest similar industry may possibly be day-time TV.
Hook/hooked aren't limited to drugs and software. Books, shows, songs, news articles, etc. all have hooks. They just don't use the term user because the mode of interaction is different.
Excellent approach - I hope it is part of a trend.
I also wonder if after decades of VCs pumping trillions of dollars into apps and platforms seeking shallow 'engagement' user metrics, and at least the vanguard of the population starting to get sick of it, and it becoming a zero-sum-game, the landscape has fundamentally changed.
E.g., iirc Google originally used the metric of short user time on their site to indicate success - the users who quickly found a useful result would navigate away from Google sooner. They grew rapidly with this approach because people found G actually useful, not engaging, and came back. I wonder (hope) if development & funding will more focus on abandoning superficial 'engagement' metrics in favor of actual utility metrics - such as briefer and repeated usage vs your competitors' products.
Google minimizing its own screen time is smart, but I think it's harder to encourage this at the ecosystem level. For example, a useful but flawed metric for deciding whether a search link is good is that the user clicks on the link and doesn't come back for a while.
A user bouncing off a website immediately shows that it's probably a bad choice for them, but unfortunately not bouncing off it sometimes means that the website is gaming the metrics by wasting people's time through whatever means.
In particular there are websites that are automatically generated in a way so you don't figure that out immediately. They look like they might answer your question, but under closer inspection it's nonsense.
Videos that look like they might answer your question are another example of a time-waster.
In a way, websites where you can see immediately that it's not what you're looking for are better than the ones where it's unclear. Best would be actually finding an answer. That can't be judged by screen time, though.
Yes, these are real problems - it is a whole lot easier to measure 'engagement' with the proxy of [screen time in our app], which is a very good proxy, whereas measuring app effectiveness is much harder as you point out.
The problem is that measuring 'engagement' is like the drunk looking for his lost key under the lamppost because that's where the light is, not because that is where it will be found - and almost he entire industry is using the wrong metric like that hapless drunk . . .
People have to stop measuring things and need to start justifying things with arguments.
I like to compare "data driven decision making" and "reason driven decision making." Animals make data driven decisions, you don't want to behave like an animal. Sure it's better than being blind but your data should inform an argument not be the argument.
I don't know anything about the company but I applaud the sentiment. But is it obvious to note that a lot of companies start with similar ideas... and then any number of forces -- the market, shareholders, the board, management changes, black swans -- cause the screws to tighten? And then the ideals begin to erode.
I guess I'm sort of implying (without any empirical proof) that there are darwinian reasons for state of things that are inherently difficult to avoid.
I agree, It seems like we are in a race to the bottom in which, where if we don’t target engagement in the manner derided here, we fear having our lunch eaten.
Make no mistake, I am 100% with the author here (at least philosophically), but it’s really hard to avoid in practise. In my forthcoming project, on the one hand I want to have a soft touch with users in terms of engagement, but on the other hand the wrong investors will not care. And as I learned in my previous project, you can’t always know if you have the right investors until it’s way too late.
Engagement (in the classical sense) is essential for a successful product, and I’m really hopeful that we can find, agree to, and implement limits around what we will do to manage it. But in an industry where this behaviour is the norm, it also becomes the expectation.
But not written with an intention to market themselves I guess. If merely expressing their true intents works in their favor while not boasting about it, I would not call it marketing.
Nevertheless, it nearly costs $0 to host the site, so even if this is marketing, no spending on it.
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.
Your idea about marketing might not be entirely correct. Sending out notifications on important announcements (could be regulation-related changes, acknowledging an outage, confirming that a trade was successful) is indeed for keeping the user better informed. Sometimes Kite also gives out notifications for new Finshots blogs - which again deeplinks to a web URL, not the app.
The "ads" you are talking of aren't really ads. They are partner startups who solve specific problems around the same financial ___domain. Like Sensibull, Quicko and all. I believe it's a nudge to the user to check out some of their partners (and often their invested-into startups) who happen to share similar philosophy with Zerodha.
Another peril with making engagement a north star kpi is that you quickly get into a local design maxima. I saw so much of this in my time at a well liked consumer tech company. It becomes almost impossible to evolve around new business requirements because the current thing has been perfectly “optimized” for “engagement”.
Here’s an example.. imagine a photo carousel with a critical button beside it that drives revenue for the business. At some point a PM spent a few months “optimizing” the photo carousel. Subsequent changes all tanked engagement on that magic button. Experiment after experiment all thrown out because they didn’t result in enough button clicks, despite huge improvements in photo experience.
Eventually I took over the team that owned those little revenue buttons and even more eventually I figured it out:
A lot of users fly through the photo carousel clicking the right-arrow very fast. At the final photo the right arrow disappeared and there was a small layout shift and it put a portion of the revenue button to where a portion of the “>” button used to be. Many many users accidentally clicked that revenue button.
You can’t a/b test yourself to PMF and organic growth, even when used appropriately it is only accurate but not precise.
If u want to maximise revenue, wouldn’t it make sense to measure the revenue coming from those button clicks as well as the button clicks? Perhaps that would be more precise.
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 is harmful).
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 pop-up or ad or basically any kind of nudge from Zerodha regarding signing up for any of their products. There are third-party add-ons (like Tickertape), but they explicitly make people aware that these are separate products with their own terms, conditions and fees if any. This is very much appreciated by users, and they tend to have fewer complaints per user in comparison to the competition[2].
They've grown primarily because they're good at what they do, and there is no catch regarding any of their products. Rest of the financial industry in India is a cesspool with a massive buyer-beware attitude, which is an instant turn-off for most people, but there weren't many other options until recently.
The one thing I find wrong about the post is that they aren't track-free; I notice Google Analytics being blocked on ublock origin. Hard to disagree with anything else.
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.
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 more VC money or sell to a bigger sucker) so that's the "best" you can do because your actual ARPU is negative.
They do work. You can draw a straight line from “Engagement metrics” to a working business model that generates real revenue. There are several B2C products that derive their value from engagement. And it is frequently a leading indicator of how viable a product can be.
But like all metrics, one should not over optimize on any one metric - be it engagement, revenue, growth rate etc.
The biggest issue has been a lack of balance between engagement and usability which unfortunately has been dominated by engagement over usability.
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.
This blog post reminds me of older HN posts about in the Silicon Valley area schools try to be more low-tech/hands-on in their learning whereas schools elsewhere get Chromebooks and ed-tech offerings to the brim. Both the “Only do what is truly useful and meaningful to end users” and “Don’t do unto others, what you don’t want done unto you” characteristics are relevant because of how technology is dropped on the laps of teachers and students without necessarily have a clear direction of how to improve educational outcomes.
I wonder about measuring something related to both engagement and disengagement.
Some customers will disengage because they're not going to be a customer, never were, and it just wasn't going to happen. Recording that type of disengagement and saying "oh no that's bad" is a mistake.
I think they do sort of address that with "We charge users a fee, albeit nominal, to sign up.". That seems to narrow the field a great deal and seems useful to find the folks who are good potential customers. Very nice.
I've worked at so many B2B places where they chase big company or rando crap company for business and you can just tell that "These guys are not a good fit, if they walk that's not bad, it's good." But measuring that / understanding it is hard.
Related story. I recently heard about a perspective customer, a big company, could be a lot of revenue. But then I found out they pretty much ran on spreadsheets emailed to each other, had a whole staff whose job it was (as I understand it) was to be a human form of "git" to rectify conflicts as they got emailed around... and the spreadsheets were never right anyway. That was just the tip of the iceburg. A demo call involved the folks at this big company arguing over what they even DO now... just the most basic things. It was ugly.
The issue is we're a small company and these guys needed a consultant to come in, be the bad guy, tell everyone what to do (and take all their money) and probably fail at it before their management really realizes what is going on ... thankfully they passed on us.
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.
Zerodha built a market leading company with conservative tech choices, about 30 devs, and no VC funding. Conservatively estimated to be worth about $2 billion, last I checked.
Very hard to pull this off, especially in a market like India, with a lot of stupid money folks chasing companies with flimsy / non existent business models.
Great piece. At least the philosophical first half. As a designer, I often see raised eyebrows when I say the user should get into our app, get stuff done in 5 seconds, and gtfo, ideally without even consciously realising they used the product :-)
> I have come to realise that the term user “engagement” in software, more often than not, is a thinly veiled proxy for user entrapment, whether intentional on the part of software designers or not.
I do not think anything is veiled. Good software does lots of work and grab a little attention while bad software needs more attention than necessary for the sake of business needs.
Engagement metric is a measure, but should it be a goal depends on the product.
e.g. for google search low engagement is better, but for youtube low engagement might mean good or bad depends on the users objective
Most users do not understand what software is for themselves: most do not even understand the difference between local and remote, proprietary or FLOSS, perceiving just the UI, locally seen, as a thing in their hands...
The sole possible positive engagement is in a community, so FLOSS, mandatory by law, a PUBLIC academia who led research so most new ideas come from public money, for public interests and the private sector just pick what it want but do not led the development toward dangerous situations. Something that can't happen with enough Citizens comprehension of the issue and it's meaning for our society.
In a near future entrapment can mean you are locked out of "your" car due to a private third party service issue, you pacemaker can cease to function from a remote order or you cant be identified because some private-owned "public" ID service does not work properly, ... you? ... Oh, yeah, us, all.
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 supermarket—you can draw analogies to virtual products).
Or, for products with infrequent use-cases, users won't remember to come back and use your product when the time comes. Zillow is a good example of this. The real value is when you are buying, selling, (or renting) a house, but that happens so infrequently. So they've built other ways to keep their app on your phone and their brand in your mind, like the Zestimate score (where homeowners or potential home buyers will check that score on a more frequent basis).
Also, engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product.
So it's not so much about what you do and don't do, it's more about _how_ you do it. Do you track engagement AND solely optimize it?
In any case, loved the article and agree with most of the discussion... just would encourage people to take a more pragmatic method to avoiding the engagement trap.
*https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/13/disrespectful-design-us...