Later, I sent J. some mail about this and after several exchanges he told me they don't normally care what people have to say until they've used it for about a week or so. Thud. That's the sound of my jaw dropping in disbelief. A week? You lost me in the first few minutes! There was no week for me to get used to anything because I -- like lots of people purportedly -- abandoned it. Again.
Twitter is hardly unique, of course. Every app probably has about a minute or two to engage you. If you don't, you'll be abandoned -- either outright deleted, or ignored until the user does a sweep of the deadwood cluttering up their home pages. Maybe you get one more chance, but that's probably it; some day I should try to grind those stats out for Phresheez. Since I was probably harsh on J., I decided to look at Phresheez from that perspective as well. It of course completely failed too. Phresheez is a particularly hard sell: people download it because they think it has something to do with skiing. Since Phresheez is a tracking app, unless you're already skiing at the time your gratification is not instant. From what I can tell with the data, lots of people load it either far in advance (ie in the months leading up to ski season), or load it days in advance (ie, leading up to a trip). Both require a pretty big leap of faith on the part of our users: that we'll entertain them if they use it. I don't doubt that quite a bit of our abandonment rate is nothing more than people forgetting about the app in their excitement to get on the mountain.
I don't think that explains all of it though. In fact, I suspect that the reason for abandonment of Phresheez is probably much like Twitter's. With Twitter, you are invited after joining to write something. So you do. Nothing happens. Why did I do that? This app sucks. So I never see the vast amount of content that Twitter actual has. Phresheez is sort of similar: you load the app and after you join it tells you to go outside. So you go outside and it gets a GPS fix. In pressing buttons, you'll see yourself on a map, and maybe some not terribly exciting charts and stats. Ok, maybe there's some there there, but you don't see all of the gaming, awards, cool charts, etc, etc, in full action. Maybe you see some potential and don't delete it outright, but there's a good chance you'll forget about it when the time comes.
So we're both guilty of the same sin: we failed to instantly gratify. Strangely, I have a much better idea about what Twitter should be doing than what Phresheez should be doing. Twitter has a huge amount of content, and it probably wouldn't take too much to coax some idea of the kind of content I'd like to see: Twitter is amazingly good at finding out about fires in SF in real time, for example. So I -- like lots of people -- am likely to be interested by default about what's trending in my home town. Why didn't they entertain me with that in the first few minutes? And why don't they try to figure out what might interest me either explicitly like the Netflix playlist suggestion machine, or making it obvious that searches are as important if not the most important in the first few minutes? Instead they make me feel stupid for typing in a tweet that I know that nobody will read. This is a huge advantage that Twitter has: it's not difficult to be passively entertained. Yet Twitter squanders that advantage. I don't get it.
As for Phresheez, it's still a tough problem. People do seem to respond to notification meatballs, so I added some pre-populated notifications upon join with cool days from our users. That seems to get some response. In an unreleased version, the app will also have as a top level option to view a video which shows you what the app can do. I'm not as optimistic about that because it's not all that different than the screen shots in the app store, but you never know. What I'd really like is for people who load it at home to just go out, take a bike ride, walk, etc and then check in again, but that seems to be asking for too much. Aside from the blinders of "it's a ski app!", asking for that violates the two minute rule.
One thing that really did make a big difference in the abandonment rate, however, is streamlining the join process. If you don't need or can postpone a join process, you're already ahead of the game: people hate typing, and are rightfully suspicious of giving up information. For Phresheez, we need a username, password and email address. As it happens, you can get the gmail address on Android so I use that for email, and use the local part to guess at a unique username. For the password, I just auto-generate it so that the only thing that the new user has to do is press the join button. There is no equivalent on iPhone, but I recently did a similar thing using Facebook to auto-populate these fields -- a "Join with Facebook" flow. For Android it was pretty obvious that it made a big difference, though I haven't quantified it. The "Join with Facebook" feature hasn't been released yet, but it will most likely help on iPhone.
In conclusion, my scolding of J. only managed to show my own inadequacies with Phresheez. This is a really tough problem for a Phresheez kind of app, or any sort of app that demands delayed gratification. The first step, however, is realizing how important the problem really is. So I grok that now. But still it's tough.
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