App Recommendation - Business goal doesn’t need to be against a good user experience
To be honest, I learned the word “Monetization” only when I worked on the project “App Recommendation”. This is a revenue-driven project, a partner approached to my company that they can generate revenue by having user downloading apps through their mechanism. The revenue share of each app downloaded depends on the campaign they dealt with app developers, it’s floating. The partner can even help to build this feature in our device setup process, contribution on our side is only the user who bought our devices.
The original proposal is having a page at the end of the device setup process, popular games and new apps are listed for users to download. There will be some apps pre-selected, this means even user keeps tapping Next button and we will still earn some money from each device setup. I strongly don’t agree on this proposal, but I know clearly I am not able to stop this proposal by merely a bad user experience concern. Since it is so, I start thinking is there any way we can make it a win-win feature?
Download apps is not a bad thing at all, actually user needs to download apps to empower their smartphone. The bad thing is to cheat on users and have them to do things they don’t want. I ask myself, how can I make user want to download apps through our mechanism? Long story short, with runs of brainstorming literally run in my own brain, I pivoted the approach to help users downloading apps they need in once. There is something cool of our partner’s mechanism, they can extract all apps from the app store and even have them to be updatable. These apps will be just as normal apps downloaded from app store after updated. And since we build the downloading & installing experience our own, we can just download+install multiple apps in once. To think it this way, now the challenge is about how we get user noticed about the benefit and wanted to use our service.
Nowadays, users are well trained to ignore commercials, not matter how appealing this feature we described on the feature page, user will simply ignore whole page without noticing. But there are some apps user uses everyday, the first thing they get their new device is to install those apps, ex. Facebook, Twitter, Spotify…I have those apps positioned at the obvious place of the page even though we make zero money with their download. No surprise, there are some fierce discussion with PMs and the partner. In one way, I have different KPI from theirs, PM and partner’s KPI are both about the revenue. The partner even built the feature for free and wanted to get rewarded by the revenue share. But in the other way, we all want this product to succeed. We eventually have a consensus that we can try my proposal first and if the revenue is not good, they will just update it to be as what they proposed. I won’t say I have no pressure at the time, nicely it turns out well that the revenue reached 2,000 dollar/day and user’s satisfaction rate is 94% according to a survey. The partner told me it’s actually the best result they ever get with this business and they just rethink/rebuild their other services.
This experience enforces my believing that a good user experience is valuable, I mean truly valuable. We could have lost our customers if our goal is opposite to their needs, and I don’t believe it will ever earn more money accumulatedly. I am happy not because I am right, I am happy because this case proves that we can build up business by making good to people.
