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Rebuilding at Scale
- 2. BITLY WAS BORN OF A SIMPLE AND SINGULAR PURPOSE: To make the Twitter experience better.
- 3. WHAT BUSINESS IS BITLY IN? Optimizing the link so you can own your customer experience.
- 4. GUESS WE’RE GONNA DO SOMETHING NOBODY WANTS TO DO BUT TURNS OUT WE HAVE TO DO ANYWAY. OR, MAKING PEACE WITH THE INEVITABLE
- 5. BUNDLES UNLIMITED BITLINKS COMMENTING GLOBAL HASH BITLY SIDEBAR QR CODES YOUR NETWORK J.MP PUBLIC PROFILE WORDPRESS PLUG-IN RT.LY BRAND MONITORING NOTES TIMEZONES
- 6. THERE WAS STILL A VALUE GAP
- 8. OLD PLATFORM COULDN’T SUPPORT NEW VALUE
- 9. AFTER ALL THAT, WHAT’S LEFT? How to make a UI featuring short links NOT be about shortening links.
- 10. THE PROBLEM WITH SHORTENING
- 11. THE PROBLEM WITH SHORTENING
- 12. THE PROBLEM WITH SHORTENING
- 13. SHORTENING BECOMES LINK BUILDING
- 14. SHORTENING BECOMES LINK BUILDING
- 15. “I find it easy to create Bitlinks” AGREE: 82.5%NEUTRAL: 11.3% DISAGREE: 6.2%
- 16. SO MUCH PRAISE, YOU GUYS. OR, WHAT TO TAKE AWAY FROM THE MEANIES
- 17. IT’S THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION
Editor's Notes
- Intro Thank Phil and Staton for the opportunity to speak. Thank you audience. Tonight talking about rebuilding the Bitly platform at scale Dan Brief review of Bitly’s evolution Discuss primary reasons that lead to the decision to rebuild our platform Jen Present a case study of one of our most important features / how it was updated during the rebuild Discuss how we measure performance of the new platform Finish with a dramatic reading or two :)
- Main talking points Bitly was founded in 2008 to solve a specific problem -> sharing links on Twitter Over the next 5 years we saw some impressive growth, 300M new Bitly links / 10B clicks a month Hooray tons of users. Not hooray, not a business. Claimed to be SaaS but not in practice or product Got lost along the way, but still had a lot of potential Free product separate from our Enterprise product (free was the biggest competitor to Enterprise) By the end of 2013 new leadership that set out to clarify our purpose with a new mission
- Main talking points During these 5 years, the Web has changed a lot. For Bitly: Social networks became walled gardens (keep users in data in) Engagement moved to mobile and became fragmented proliferation of channels) More difficult for marketers (personal to enterprise) measure, optimize, and control their customer experience The link is one for the very few fundamental elements that connects all channels (click, tap, swipe) and penetrate these walled gardens This new focus left Jen and myself with questions: What does this mean for the product? How do we remake the product in our new image?
- Main talking points We tried really, really hard to figure out how adapt the old platform and not rebuild. Needed to assess, how much value were we working with Realized there was solid value Usage stats 300+ paying customers Getting lost in the cruft
- Main talking points A lot of cruft - rainbow colored cheetah Created by different people, different times, with different technologies Needed to slim down, examples Bundles Encode tiering Wordpress plug-in RT.LY Got great at sunsetting - feature assessment, communicated, replaced with value add features
- Main talking points Free and paid were fundamentally different product - no conversion through upsells, teasers, or trials Free users never knew what our Enterprise offering was or if had one Often times the first time hearing of it was during a conversation with our sales team Ultimately too hard convert users from free product to paid product
- Main talking points The old platform couldn’t meet the needs of our business Changed the conversations we were having Broke mental models and expectations Things were about to get a lot more complex
- Main talking points Needed to start providing more value to current customers and attract new customers Built out features like Deep Linking (app links), Audience analytics, and Campaigns: Created a product for digital marketers to manage complex cross channel campaigns Easily able to create Bitly links for channels they care about Single view of performance Campaigns was isolated, couldn’t be integrated
- So after the long road to redefining our business model, going through the painful process of sunsetting old product and identifying markets for new product, we’re left with the challenge of representing all of that in an interface. What’s the best user experience to drive and support our business and how do we execute it WITHOUT losing users and customers who’ve found value in our product all along? There are many pieces of the new experience I could talk about, but in the interest of time I want to focus on one of the most deceptively challenging pieces of design work we undertook: the evolution of our link shortening experience. It’s something that on the surface as a UI element appears simple but is totally core to being able to do anything useful in Bitly. However, it’s not the be-all end-all of using Bitly and the UX needed to better reflect that. I’m going to walk you through a mini case study of the redesign process and the tools we’re using for validation and iteration going forward.
- Let’s talk about our dirty little secret: The problem with shortening. So simple! So easy! Just shorten your link and copy it…and go away and never return… If the free product was the biggest competitor to the paid product, then the anonymous shortening experience was the biggest competitor to the free product. We used to have a standalone shortener with its own URL. 15% of our traffic to the former anonymous shorten page came from direct entry - repeat visits arguably Pretty clear these are people who should have had a free account
- Bitly’s original UX had advantages for a user who was all about shortening links, copying them, and leaving. An open field shorten bar put that premise front and center and did such a good job promoting that experience that most users AND paying customers spent little time on any other sections of the product. Good news & bad news… There were also a couple of persistent, often-noted usability issues with the open-field shorten bar. Users generally expect a UI component such as that to be a search field, and in fact our users & customers often complained of accidentally shortening when they wanted to search - even longtime users, even people working at BItly. It’s SUCH an ingrained UI pattern that an open field in a header = search that even people extremely familiar with our particular interface would go on autopilot and forget. The limited space within the open-field made it very difficult for users with long and/or customized URLs to be sure they were shortening the correct link. This became very important for our customers once we introduced Campaigns as marketers using these features often have painstakingly created, long, complex URLs and want to be able to see what they’re doing while they’re doing it - a reasonable request.
- This modal is what users would see after shortening a link. I want to point out some of the limitations here that Dan touched on from the business side before. The experience is very tied to promoting copying & sharing - actions that promote making a Bitlink and then taking it somewhere else immediately - this does NOT highlight the idea of building out your Bitlink so that it can, say, be a part of a complex campaign involving multiple channels or act as a deep link so that your iOS, Android and desktop customers can all have customized destinations in which to experience your content The value gap problem is very much in high relief here - where are we promoting these deeper features? How do we bring them to a user’s attention so that she can understand how to get more value out of Bitly? The only thing we do note is that you can upgrade in order to have more access to customizations for your Bitlinks. However, this is not highlighted well, an unfortunate fact since branded, customized Bitlinks enjoy a 34% boost in click-through. So you begin to see the limitations in the UI. And they were limitations with which we were largely saddled since the code base we were wrestling was so brittle that even minor text changes could end up being a sprint or two of work after testing, validating, hunting down rogue broken code, etc.
- Onward to the new UI and focusing on the new design for creating Bitlinks within our product - notice we’re not talking shortening anymore… Answering usability problem #1 (the shorten bar/search bar confusion) while trying to set up a UX that creates a funnel for deeper interaction with Bitly’s feature offerings - more on that design on the next slide. Things we considered and wanted to track in this new design: No more shorten bar, instead create CTA (What will happen? Will users hate us and leave forever? The stunning answer to that comes later…) Retain actual number of clicks required to create a Bitlink and see if users notice - spoiler alert: they won't see it that way Click button - panel opens, field is highlighted automatically & you paste - same as click into entry field & paste Include new keyboard shortcut to drive home idea that it’s still super simple to create Bitlinks
- Answering usability problem #2 - limited ability to actually see the URL you’re shortening before you create your Bitlink, closing our value gap, and supporting our core business Ability to select a domain BEFORE shortening Users can have multiple branded short domains or use bit.ly Include new keyboard shortcut to drive home idea that it’s still super simple to create Bitlinks We’re now able to tackle our value gap problem by including direct upsell CTAs within workflow to highlight more valuable paid features You can see here the progression of the panel from a free user w/ upsell to a fully featured enterprise customer with deeplinking into iOS and Android apps as well as the ability to create campaigns Campaigns are now fully integrated into and core to the product - Bitlinks can be added to them on the fly, they can be created on the fly and users may batch import series of links into campaigns This new Bitlink creation UX was specifically built around the tasks we know that marketers are trying to accomplish Tracking the effectiveness of different channels for distributing their content Being able to customize the destination (in app or on the web) their customers are sent to dependent upon the platform and device This is not shortening, sharing, leaving. This is creating a highly valuable marketing asset that tells you about the performance of your efforts and gives you control over the way your customers experience your content
- Recap: We reframed our business, derived from that new product goals and roadmap and created a new design that endeavors to support those goals and deliver on our new business promise to our substantial user and customer base. We released the first tier of our new platform to our free user base. There are inherent challenges there Free users are not all marketers, and thus, not all our target persona. HOWEVER, we have a vested interest in keeping them happy to come back and use the product. We have A LOT of free users, so it’s a big stage on which to debut So how are we validating all of this? On the quantitative side: Weekly active users Retention rates Number of Bitlinks created But I want to focus a little more on how to validate in a qualitative landscape (ie humans are flakes) and how not to go crazy in the process. Even surveys are not really quantitative since we’re asking humans to use their human imaginations to assess what they see. We sent a short survey to free users through Intercom - about 100 respondents, which is pretty good for this sort of thing. Keep in mind that the folks who respond are probably more likely to be your fans in the first place. What we asked 1) Overall interface 2) Ease of creating Bitlinks 3) Ease of understanding performance graph 4) Ease of managing/finding Bitlinks 5) Ease of copying and sharing
- The results of our survey looked promising. But what happens when we go take a glimpse at social or look into our support emails? This is where the difficult task of reading between the lines with frustrated users and using your best empathic mindset come in to keep you from losing focus on your goals. “What have you done? You have turned a simple, easy way to shorten links and keep track of your clicks into a totally unusable mess. Congratulations. I'm leaving. Someone in your department needs to be fired and the old format returned. Good luck staying in business with all the customers you're about to lose. Bring back the old format. It was so much easier to post a bitlink. Two clicks and it was done. Now it's a frigging federal project with too many steps. Also, the old analytics format was so much more easy to read and understand. The new format is way too busy. You should fire the idiot who designed the changes and the even bigger idiot that approved them.” “The #newbitly is a huge step backwards. An extra click, and unintuitive UX for renaming a link. @bitly think about your core flow first.” “#newBitly" is totally "red shiny gizmo" syndrome=@Bitly NOT asking users what they want/need #BitlyIgnoresUsers” “It's as though they are trying to get out of link generation and into analytics as their primary business focus.”
- With a software rebuild it really is the journey, not the destination. So what are the takeaways? Rebuilding at scale WILL piss people off, but it has to be done to support business goals. If you accept imperfection as just a jumping off point for targeted iteration, you can avoid panic and doubt. As far as Bitlink creation goes, the survey feedback along with the inbound support and social feedback has given us some food for thought: Despite shortening being the same number of clicks - some users perceive it to be more. Is this perception enough to affect Bitlink creation numbers? Will it be something that people huff over and then forget in a week? We’ll continue looking at inbound support themes and see if it remains a consistent complaint or if it tapers off Planning another round of feedback with users who specifically DON’T like some of the product changes, but who have been active and loyal users