Ask HN: Do any small profile changes increase usage in your app?
rypple.com
We found that adding an avatar can increase response rates in Rypple by 20%.
rypple.com
However, I've got to be that guy because "natural experiments" like this one are tempting and highly suboptimal. Finding a correlation between uploading a picture and higher response rates isn't useless, but it isn't fabulously useful, either: the photos might well be a symptom of an account that someone has put more effort into, and people could be responding to the higher quality pitches, etc.
Happily, there is a solution: the humble A/B test. Take the SAME company with the SAME text targeting the SAME list and let half of them see your mug shot, while half of them get nothing there. THEN you can have a statistically quantifiable amount of confidence that the lift in response rates is actually due to the photo, as opposed to due to unmeasured causes.
I spoke to the team about the stat, and we agree with you that the uploading of a logo might not be the only cause for that increase in response rates, but we feel it is a big reason. Based on a sample of our enterprise customers, we feel this is a valid stat that shows the increase in usage across all users.
We A/B test a lot of different things in our app, and I agree it would be interesting to further test this stat.
Thanks for your comments!