The Slippery Slope of In-Product Messaging | Hacker News Reader

The Slippery Slope of In-Product Messaging

matthewstrom.com

71 pointsskilled11 comments

I agree with the idea that there's too much reliance on in-app education, but this post quickly starts snowballing false metaphors into an extreme of a label is bad design.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the link to the inbox saying "inbox"

Users don't know what all your iconography means.

App design isn't just graphic design or industrial design. It's not airport or device design either.

The app has two purposes, the user wants and what the app provider wants. The problems become more challenging when those two parties desires don't match. Making an app that makes it easy to buy something, take a note, edit an image, or share something with people isn't rocket science with modern OSes and Libraries. These choices are central to discussion because metrics started becoming more important than the core use.

Sometimes this makes business sense, like in a social media app where they want you to stay longer after you share. But this isn't only true because it's a crowded market. Sometimes it doesn't, where a sales app loses sales because they try too hard to move people from what people came to buy to another thing (another product, a membership, a extended warranty, a social media share).

I agree that the industrial design metaphors are iffy, for a different reason. SaaS and apps are WAY easier to redistribute than physical goods and structures. In-app education works well as a way to confirm problems and iterate on solutions while en route to "fixing the underlying problem".

The choice between lengthy design cycles to fix core problems and quick fixes via in app education is a false dichotomy. Use both!

Yes! I spent 36 months at a company, which had organizational walls between product, engineering, marketing, and "growth".

With these tools, "growth" learned they could inject messaging using javascript to nudge users along instead of working to improve the underlying product. Other teams had NPS scores asking for ratings before the product was even used. Marketing put messaging on their pages to high-jack conversations and push lead-gen for sales. The customer experience and the budget was being pulled in 10 directions.

Unlike the article's issue being a product issue, this issue was an organizational issue. The messaging and tools meant that teams could actively pursue their own goals without working together.

There's definitely a communication issue going on there (those walls never help), but I still like being able to decouple "marketing" from "development" with tools like this. If you can solve those communication issues, then allowing marketing to be able to make small changes to the product without needing to get development involves means that they can both pursue their agendas without having to make work/timeline demands on the other.

I guarantee you though, without fixing those communication/direction issues, those two teams would have found other ways of stomping all over each other. Been that way since time immemorial. Dysfunctional companies gonna dysfunction.

marketing needs more accountability in general. the things they do to cheapen brands is astounding, yet they never try to measure it. spotify comes to mind, showing me new albums of artists i barely listen to, or hulu integration, or some other gimmick. around black friday, too, there's always some shitty app abusing notifications for marketing.

In my experience this is the real issue, and what I expected to read about in the post. The democratization of adding in-page content is both powerful and easily abused. There's little measurement of what the impact of these types of prompts is, save for what engagement they drive directly through the widget. They can clutter the UI and deteriorate the brand. In many cases they look out of place and are tone deaf to the customer. In the worst case, they're basically in-app advertisements.

Absolutely!

We been conscious to not add any messaging or "hints" in our app because it is a crutch.

We have a group of select users who get to see early new features so we can get feedback on usability. We thought we had the right design, but one of users couldn't figure it out. I asked him a few questions which lead him to the solution (I didn't just want to tell him how to do it, but see what his discovery experience would be like), and the users suggestion was to add a "?" icon which would tell people how to use it.

We knew we didn't want to do this and went back to the drawing board to find a new design solution. We found it, and everyone is SO much happier with the new design.

Feel the pain of bad design, and embrace it. It forces you to come up with better solutions.

> The Auvi-Q is designed with the cap and needle on the same end – and had a success rate of over 90 percent.

Not the best example. The Auvi-Q is different in more ways than that - it actually speaks its instructions aloud to the user. I would say that it has much more “in-product messaging.”

https://youtu.be/d3PntHvNiTY

https://agilemanifesto.org/ > Working software over comprehensive documentation

In-app education = documentation

An interesting situation is when the app has cues to a user's current intent. In such cases it wouldn't want to totally rearrange the UI on the fly (move the food court) for the user as the user expects consistency (and the cue might be wrong). Maybe this is a case where contextual messaging makes sense.

In app messages, guidance can be helpful, sometimes, when applied in a conscious manner. Great apps don't come with an user guide. Neither should your app.

When to navigate your app requires upfront manual reading you're doing something wrong.

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