What Yammer needs to do for now

Yammer Application Review by Ankit Chandra [email_address]

Agenda
Signup Process Review
Questions Feature Review
Approach to Review and Analysis
Current Market Position
Business and Functional Strategy
Goals analysis
Business Application Manager (BAM!): A B2B Web Application Management product
Product Description
Role
Product Conceptualization
Development and Release Process
Metrics and Evaluation

Signup Process Review Signup Process Strategic Goals User Experience Minimalistic Registration form Communicate compelling incentive Un-compelling incentives In email content Direct access to signup on homepage Site’s clean Look and feel Customer Quotes On Homepage Connection Pages for existing users Only 3 mandatory fields for registration Viral nature of Signup invitations Undifferentiated Value proposition on Homepage Unclear, but short product description and purpose Redundant steps (Step 3) in Signup process Lack of search feature in Connection (Step 2) Lack of field level explanation in process Missing ‘Skip’ option on actually skippable steps Bug in the system 1 Lack of differentiation between mandatory and optional fields Click here for Tabular Review 2 1 4 3 See slide notes for description

Signup Process Recommendations
Recommendations
Increase signups by:
Clearly communicating tangible benefits on homepage and in email e.g. “Boost productivity”
Also targeting the Long Tail of users by highlighting the benefits for them e.g. “Build relationships beyond boundaries”
Allowing users to invite people from other companies to try Yammer
Reduce Drop-offs by:
Reducing number of steps in signup process. Move ‘Add your photo’ in Step 3 to within Step 1
Enabling quick formation of an effective initial social network. In Step 2: - Sort relevant existing users by department - Provide a search feature for existing users - Enable importing contacts from Linkedin
Addressing users’ concerns about benefits, safety privacy etc, all across the Signup process

Signup Process Evaluation Metrics
Evaluation Metrics
Deduce Performance metrics for Signup process like: - Number and frequency of signups, per organization and overall - Distribution of sources leading to the signup process (email, third party etc) - Conversion rate of all kinds of viral invitations - Percentage drop-offs and the location in the Signup process
Perform A/B testing with new and old messaging to measure any change in Performance metrics

Questions Feature Review Questions feature Strategic Goals User Experience Intuitive/easy to use interface Limited crowd sourcing with access only to followers, groups and Topics followed Lack of tools for consumption by Long Tail of users Strategic Coherence With organization’s goals Reduced Noise with thread/friend feed toggle Enhanced usability with tools like Bookmarks, tags, addressing people Effective solution to Issue of Information silos Enhanced product efficacy with email-able answers Immediately visible value-add Possible user perception of the feature as ‘distracting’ Lack of effective feature description (How to use/ FAQs) Lack of tools to improve quality of questions/answers Lack of contextual invitation to new members Lack of clearly communicated incentive for people to answer questions Lack of clear indicators Of tangible benefits like number of questions answered Click here for Tabular Review 1 2 4 3 See slide notes for description

Questions Feature Recommendations
Recommendations
Increase Crowd Sourcing by:
Enabling members to receive interest based questions independent of topics/groups followed
Enabling posting questions directly to a group without being a member of it
Improve Question & Answer quality by:
Implementing Templates. Members can use these to form well understood questions and answers
Enabling sorting out of best answers by extending tools like ‘Like’ and creating tags like ‘Resolved’
Increasing incentive to answer questions by publishing members with most liked answers
Enhance value-add by for Long Tail users by:
Enabling advance search options to effectively search through volumes of data

Questions Feature Metrics
Evaluation Metrics
Deduce the Key Performance Indicators to measure the performance of ‘Questions’
Some performance metrics: - Frequency of Questions asked - Volume of Responses/Question - Degrees of Separation between Responder and Questioner
Perform Multivariate testing to measure the correlation of recommendations with the Key Performance Indicators
Log the usage frequency and volume of different tools (Bookmarks, Likes, Templates etc) to have a finer evaluation of ‘Questions’
Log the volume of searches on Questions to evaluate its usage only for consumption by Long Tail

Understand the macro environment
Deduce appropriate growth strategy
Create a tangible set of goals for Signup process
Establish evaluation metrics for the Signup process
Approach to Analysis and Review Strategy based evaluation User Experience based evaluation See slide notes for description

Current Market Position Yammer Hashwork 2 Socialwok 2 Facebook SAP 1 S-Curve for Enterprise Social Software
http://www.sap.com/press.epx?PressID=12100
http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/yammer/competitors
https://www.yammer.com
2.5 yrs Value Proposition Enhance employee efficiency by enabling easier collaboration and communication 3
Relatively new Enterprise Social Software space
Increased market acceptance of SaaS and Enterprise Social Software
Early mover advantage; > 90000 users
Low barrier to entry
Increasing competition from:
Other startups
Established players
Open source software
See slide notes for description

Business and Functional Strategy Analysis for Yammer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29
Business Strategy
Differentiate the product in the increasingly crowded market
Increase customer awareness about the need for Yammer
Address users’ concerns and apprehensions
Achieve critical mass of users in the social network
Strengthen correspondence between product strategy, features and messaging
Functional Strategy
Develop product features inline with the differentiation strategy
Emphasize on: - need for the Yammer product - benefits to the users from it
Rapidly increase user registration to achieve critical mass of users
Use the 1% 1 rule to attract the Long Tail
Create metrics framework to monitor correspondence of product strategy, features and messaging
Develop scalable systems to: - minimize downtime - maintain service levels

Goals
Goals for Signup Process
Clearly communicate benefits for all users, including the Long Tail
Make the Initial Signup process as efficient as possible
Reduce Signup drop-offs from: - Website registration process - viral email invitations
Provide information to: - compel user to act on an email invitation - Allay users’ apprehensions all along the Signup process - guide users through Signup form - help users better understand the product (How/why to use Yammer)
Encourage viral Signups
Goals for Questions Feature
Maintain strategic coherence with Yammer’s Business and Functional strategy
Quickly and effectively deliver the Value proposition to retain new customers
Assist in increasing Yammer’s user base by: - providing a compelling incentive to people to invite others to join Yammer - providing tools to enable people to invite new users from within ‘Questions’
Provide information to: - Enable users to use ‘Questions’ effectively - Convince user of the value-add provided - Enable users to become local champions of the feature
Strategy

Business Application Manager (BAM!) Value Proposition Increase service levels and reduce maintenance costs of your online software Product Description BAM! ( www.bamtastic.com ) is a A Web Application Management System which enables Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) to easily mange their online open source software. As a SaaS product, BAM! offers a one-click approach to technically intensive jobs for enterprises with virtually no technical know-how. Role As Project Manager at Sourcefuse technologies, worked directly with CEO to understand the market needs, defined the value proposition, scope and product roadmap. Defined complete feature set, designed user interfaces , created requirements documentation, wireframes and architected the product. Led a distributed, cross-functional team of 6 to develop and launch the product. (* http://bamtastic.com/)

BAM! Product Conceptualization
Sourcefuse’s Market Scenario
Leading internet solutions provider with expertise in open source software (Joomla, SugarCRM etc)
Increasing competition created a highly price sensitive market space
Sustainable Competitive advantage needed expanding both vertically and horizontally
Sourcefuse began to launch products like Appstacks to add value around the core business
Product Need Identification
SME clients were observed to use freelancers to upgrade their open source software with new features
Exposing the live site to freelancers rendered the sites prone to unexpected downtimes
Downtime resulted in significant drop in service levels for SMEs
Many SMEs were also observed to not have dedicated technical resources or financial bandwidth to afford full time technical personnel

BAM! Product Conceptualization (continued) Product Objectives BAM! was conceived to: - Separate the often put together development and production environment and manage software releases between them - Reduce the website downtime for the websites owned by SMEs - Assist in moving from one hosting solution to another
Product Features
Create a Sandbox application space to stage a development environment
Migrate an Application with one-click from one Server to another
Create periodic backups for different environment
Easily revert to any backed-up version of software
Perform a ‘What-if’ analysis to know the changes made to software in development environment

BAM! Development Cycle

BAM! Evaluation & Metrics
Metrics
Measure user acceptance with: - Number of signups - Frequency of usage for different features - User drop-offs
Evaluate user perception by studying : - User feedback - User queries
Evaluate product efficiency by measuring: - Average time taken to complete one feature operation - Number and nature of issues reported per feature operation - Rate of failure of any operation on different hosting platforms
Evaluation
BAM! was reasonably well received by lead users in the market
Positioning was found to need refining to clearly convey the value proposition for a wider user group
BAM!’s architecture was found to be flexible to extend itself to many hosting solution platforms
Support was expanded to many open source software to meet user varied requirements

Appendix Follows Thank You! Appendix Follows…

Appendix 1 Signup Process Signup Process Click here to go back to Recommendations & Metrics

Appendix 2 Signup process Review Click here to back to Graphical review
Strengths
Direct access to Signup process from Homepage supports user base ramp up
Minimalistic registration form prevents overwhelming the user
Clean look and feel of the web pages enhances site appeal
Customer quotes encourage new users to signup
Opportunity for connecting with colleagues is provided within the process which facilitates quick formation of user’s social network
Only 3 mandatory fields in the process make the registration process hindrance free
Viral nature of signup process invitation supports user base ramp up
Weaknesses
Yammer’s value proposition on homepage is not differentiated and does not address the needs of majority of the users
Email communication does not offer clear and compelling value proposition for leads to respond
Product description and its purpose is not clearly mentioned
Number of steps involved in complete registration could be reduced
Lack of search functionality in Step 2 of process slows down connecting with colleagues
Field level explanations needed to explain why is the field needed and how will it be used
Lack of visible distinction between mandatory and optional fields could deter users from signing up
Skip option not provided even when the step could be actually skipped
There are bugs in the system which could reduce users’ trust factor

Appendix 3 Questions Feature Review Click here to go back to Graphical Review
Strengths
Inline with the strategy of offering performance enhancing Social Networking software
Effective solution to the issue of Information silos in an organization, with a Crowd Sourcing platform
Value addition is immediately visible when a question is answered
Intuitive interface makes it easy to start using ‘Questions’
Increased usability with tools like Bookmarks, tagging topics and people
Product efficacy is enhanced by supporting the ability to answer through emails
Noise is reduced with thread and friend feed view toggle
Weaknesses
‘ Questions’ can be viewed as distracting and hence counter productive
Crowd sourcing of questions is limited only to a user’s followers, groups and tags. This reduces the value addition
‘ Questions’ does not yet offer tools to improve the quality of questions and answers
Lack of effective feature description (How to use/FAQ) limits users from fully utilizing Questions
‘ Questions’ is not being used to invite more users
Questions does not offer many tools for the Long Tail of users to usefully consume content
Lack of clear incentive for answering a question might hold people back from answering
Lack of clear indicators of tangible benefits e.g. Number of questions answered, popular questions, Leading answer providers on a topic etc

Appendix 4 Bamtastic User Interfaces Quick Registration Page Go back to BAM! introduction

Appendix 5 Bamtastic User Interfaces User’s Landing Page Go back to BAM! introduction

Appendix 6 Bamtastic User Interfaces Install software page Go back to BAM! introduction

Appendix 7 Bug in the Registration Process

Appendix 8 Bug in registration process

Appendix 9 Bug Screenshot 1

What Yammer needs to do for now

by anksphenomenon on Mar 13, 2011

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 26

Statistics

What Yammer needs to do for now — Presentation Transcript