#007 - Experience: How a small app saved 60.000 people 12.500 days of lifetime or why user motivation is enough to build a successful product

Note: This is an experience article. It contains information on personal experiences that I was lucky to accumulate over the years.

Reading Time: 9 - 12 Minutes.

Reader's relevancy check - What you can expect by reading this article:

1. (Digital) product development insights
2. Product market fit advice
3. MVP development without substantial resources
4. User base growth possibilities

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This article lays out the process and mechanics behind product development from having an idea to building a scalable product. The example to illustrate this is based on my own personal experience from building an application, which led to saving at least 60.000 core users about 12.500 days of wasted lifetime.

In 2013 my business partner Stefan Strobel and I developed an application to simplify our own life, while working for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) with ~280.000 employees at that time. Our singular motivation was to get rid of a small, but unbearable annoyance in our own daily working routine: Dialing into conference calls multiple times a day.

We wanted a simplified and safe solution to dial into all common conferencing systems of various major market providers. Therefore, we called this application simply "Easy Conference". 

Fast-forward 4 months into 2014 our application was globally #1 of "Utility Tools" downloads in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise App store with around 40.000 users and additionally 60.000 downloads in general app-stores..

We were surprised and didn’t expect, that 14% of a global IT company would like this application also considering that none of us were core product developers back then – "just" consultants.

So how did this happen? It turns out that one of the most critical elements of product development motivated us to build our first commercial product and many more over next years.

Let’s give this critical element a name first: User Pains or – what I prefer – User Motivations.

Users enjoy the satisfaction of achieving their motivations. User motivations help us in solving meaningful problems for the user. If we design with the user’s motivations in mind, in the best case we will help them achieve their goals, at worst we stand out of the way.

In our case it's easy to identify the user motivation of our app "Easy Conference" – the annoyance of dialing into conference calls multiple times a day.

A Set of core user motivations

Here a statistic first: Most Android apps’ users stop using an application within the first 3 days, and up to 90% by the first month.

That’s why it is important to understand your users well. Place yourself in their shoes. In order to develop a useful service, you need to know users and how to improve their life based on user motivation. This allows you to address customers’ needs and expectations to solve their problems.

The reason behind many successful product and service developments can be described by the following user motivations.

Time.

It is of the essence. Time is something so elusive and yet the one thing that has undeniably great, if not the the most impact on each of us. How we spent our time determines what we get in life and where we get to be in live. It determines our success and our wellbeing. Time flows, no matter what you do. Its existence is given and every person has their own portion of time granted here. Lost time is never found again.

Time as User Motivation: Time is dear to people. It moves them in so many ways. And most people at all cost don't want to waste any of their time with e.g. bad experiences, bad work, bad processes, bad places or bad people. For this reason, time is considered as valuable and not replaceable.

Safety.

It is a basic need of human life. Our society is built around the very goal of keeping humans safe in daily life. Without a feeling of safety our brain loses the ability to utilize available resources. If you are in fight or flight mode or constantly stressed, your body releases stress hormones like cortisol that will alter your body functions negatively. In the end, without the feeling of safety, it will impact body and mind on short and long-term negatively.

Safety as User Motivation: Safety is necessary to people. They need it to feel well and be productive. We don't want to feel fear, stress or anxiety about things and situations. Safety first is a principle applied in many business, factories, machines, software and other things. Therefore, it is a basic requirement for building a good and stable life.

Convenience.

It is a drive to ease our life. Convenience in its essence is described as the state of being able to proceed with something without difficulty. So basically: Keep it simple. Complex routines and processes repel many of us as it takes time, effort and sometimes it is perceived as dreadful. Hence, convenience is requested by most of us in everyday life. Even the food industry made the term "convenience food" their own – a fast and easy way to satisfy hunger.

Convenience as User Motivation: People love convenience. Whatever makes their daily life easier has a significant value to them and forms habitual behaviours. As a result, people will always be striving towards adding convenience to their life.

Hitting the user motivation mark is key to success

With our application we covered those three substantial core user motivations, which appeal to many users all at once: Easy Conference dials in and connects you to calls with different conference IDs automatically, which saves you time, prevents mistyping (safety) and therefore creates a convenience.  There are also other key motivations to consider and which play a vital role in many successful products:

Power, Independence, Curiosity, Social Acceptance, Order, Saving, Status, Eating, Health, Safety, Social Contact, Family, Physical Exercise, Idealism...

By the way, this all happened without any substantial market research as we know it from modern User Experience Design. We did not run validation studies, conducted design sprints or started any prior market research. All of which are very important aspects in modern product development.

Yet we did things guided by a logical process (why – how – what) that led to the fact that thousands of users became aware of the application and its merits. Let me take you through the logical steps of building a product with the following preconditions:

• No previous experience on iterative product development.
• No previous practical experience of app economics of scale.
• No previous practical experience of community management.
• No previous practical experience on securing investor and partner support.
• No previous practical experience on user psychology and good UX.

All we had was the idea, career experience and motivation. So, why, how and what did we do to get to that point?

And that shall act as a reminder that you can build great and useful things from scratch.

Why did we do it?

While working for HPE in 2014 my colleague Stefan and me were working as consultants: Advising clients, building strategies & architectures, running workshops and other typical consultant work.

One primary part of our work back then was loads of remote conference calls with clients and colleagues. Looking back, I would say each of us at best had 3 of those a day and at worst had 8+ of them a day. Sometimes all we did was spending our time in conference calls. In my experience in the longterm this cannot be substantially productive and is a cultural problem, yet many employers don't promote a change in this working habit in their companies to this day.

Let me stress again this was in 2013/14 – MS Teams and Zoom were not around or popular and Skype for Business was not optimal in terms of user experience. Therefore, I think many of you who did some client-oriented work, will know the "joy" of these calls. And still today the problem remains as integration of all available systems has not yet been done and is super complex. If you don't know the struggle: Consider yourself lucky.

A more or less accurate description of the standard user process would be something like this, which is definitely based on personal experience:

1. Barely remembering you have a conference call upcoming, ideally not just 30 seconds after it started.
2. Having the additional trouble of being in the car while trying to open the calendar entry with the details.
3. Scrolling through long non-formated text buckets to find the dial-in details
4. Finally finding them but then encountering the painful need to switch multiple times between calendar app and phone app to correctly type in all relevant details (while still driving at 120 mph on the highway - safety first).
5. And dare if you just hit one wrong number - you could do the whole process again.
6. Finally being in the call, now struggling to connect your phone to your bluetooth headset which just lost connection.
7. Ultimately realising the quality of the call is so bad you barely can hear what others are saying and thus disconnecting in silent rage.
8. ... insert your own experience.

Step 1 to 5 of the user flow described above are tied to manual steps, which the user must take in order to reach his desired goal. And here we reached the point of how we translated those manual steps into an automatic process..

Core application mechanic:

This is where the core mechanic of our application released its power. When manual steps are involved there is often a chance that you can insert automation routines to simplify or enhance the experience. In our case, we analyzed the following As-Is situation and requirements:

• Run on all Android End Devices (Android was the main mobile OS at Hewlett Packard back then --> Design Applications for your Target Group).
• Access all Calendars.
• Now the tricky and valuable part: Building an algorithm that is sophisticated and powerful enough to identify 99% of conference calls from different systems by the format of the calendar entries. Why tricky? Imagine you have 50.000 users that have their own way of inserting conference details into calendar entries – again this was 2013/14. 90% are easy to fetch but the last 10% - believe me when I say users can get really creative at normally simple things. Sometimes all we did as support work was improving the algorithm to identify yet another personal style of inserting conference details. Additionally, we had to consider international clients with then-unknown conference systems and international dial-in numbers. Below are some examples.
• Displaying these conference calls in a simple intuitive way to the end user thus enabling a one-click dial-in.
• Creating user activation triggers to help users dialling in with enough time upfront.

Look and feel Version 1:

Remember: Back then we had no to very little design experience so the focus was evolving around functionality and core user benefit.

Another critical insight I learned: As long as your core product mechanics yields a substantial benefit to the user you win. Everything else is secondary. Nail the core user benefit with your product always first then proceed.

Hence, this was the first version of the application.

What did it cost us? Few weeks of thinking, research and coding. No external money (free source coding) and big investments required. Developing applications today is mostly for free. You just need your mind, your body and a set of goals. Everything else will be provided by a huge ecosystem of application development resources.

Your first version also does not have to be perfect. We were nowhere near perfect. A famous example of "done is better than perfect" is the first version of PayPal that was created by Elon Musk. It worked. But after the first big investment came in, the much more experienced engineers decided to throw away the existing system and build it completely new from scratch. Still, what counts is your core product mechanic. If you nail and scale that - everything can be (re-)built around it.

Scaling and community management

Talking about scaling. After the first version was finished it had two users. Stefan and me as we built the application to satisfy our own core motivations first. Then with a more or less structured plan, we began scaling to more users with the following steps:

• Expand the test group: We expanded the test group by colleagues from different departments to gain feedback on user experience and problems. Soon we had a huge list of improvements in our backlog but also some positive feedback that some colleagues already started using the app daily. A habit was already evolving after one week. For us tremendous! With the feedback we were gradually improving the app.
• Leverage scaling platforms: HPE had an internal app store back then. It was an application that all 280.000 employees globally could use to download internal apps. As I recall around 100.000 employees globally had this app store installed. One of our early test users was Mike, who happened to be the internal manager of the app store. Mike suggested that we prep our app and put it on the productivity section of the store – within 4 weeks we had already 8.000 active installations. Wow! What was happening? – Community mechanics kicked in. The word spread, ratings promoted the app and obviously many users shared the same user motivation as us. "Support" became the most intensive part of our side project. Day by day around 20-30 support mails came in with questions on problems and general app usage as well as feature requests.
• Engage the community: HPE had an internal event which was called InnoBlast that among others showcased internal innovative projects to a global broad audience. We were invited to present the app. The presentation was live streamed and available for replay later, which helped to spread the existence of Easy Conference. By week 8 after release into the HPE app store we had 16.000 users.
• Diversify distribution channels: At that point we had enough feedback and confidence to go live. After 8 weeks we put the free version of the application on the Google Play Store available to everyone. From then on user numbers surged without any marketing effort. The mechanic of the app convinced users and led to a widespread growth. Interesting fact: The biggest user group was formed in India where around 20.000 of 60.000 users at that time originated. This was mainly due to the fact that in India phone support is a huge job market. Our application helped many people simplifying the way they conduct phone support. Looking back, we should have pivoted and build a specific app for the India-Market to tackle this problem.
• Going commercial: With a growing user base and qualified product diversification potential we split the app into a free and a commercial version, where the commercial version had additional features. This promoted sales and gave us more freedom to act. At one point the app was used to win a commercial Telco enterprise customer of HPE in Australia.

Summarized: A successful product scaling strategy is always connected to systemic mechanics that lead to an increase in reach (the number of users that hear from or see your product) and conversion (the number of users that decide to actually use or buy your product). Ideally these mechanics can be repeated and automated. In this case we used existing platforms and the community to work for the distribution of the product.

The important part about scaling is: Every industry, every market, every business segment, every user base has a different set of conditions that need to be considered if you want to hit substantial growth. But if done right it is definitely possible for all of them.

Societal and economical impact

For me an important part of working is about generating positive impact on my environment. The world is a better and more productive place if we act cooperative. Various economical studies have validated that, especially in the last two decades since the sustainability debate is accelerating globally. We can create positive change and be commercially successful at the same time. We only have to choose to do so.

Also, with Easy Conference we asked ourselves this question: Does it do any good for our users? So we directly talked to them and conducted around 100 conversations about how and why users are opting in to use the app:

• Many of our users have at least 5 calls day, a big portion of them 6 days a week (e.g. in India).
• The average time it takes a user to dial manually into a conference call is 30 seconds.
• If we calculate with 60.000 users (which was our final user base at HPE alone) over 5 months of extensive usage in average the number of seconds saved is: 1.080.000.000.
• Therefore, broken down to days we can say with confidence that Easy Conference saved at least: 12.500 days of lifetime, freeing that time up for other productive work.
• And as time is money for businesses - if we apply a very moderate internal company value of 300 € per day to a consultant these 12.500 days are worth 3.750.000 € in total as time saved as this equally means time gained for productive tasks.
• Next to these numbers the social impact is: Stress reduction & increased safety while driving on the road. Both factors, which cannot be easily measured.

Conclusion

If you can combine successful product mechanics with economically beneficial metrics you've found a product that can sustain a healthy business.

And successful product development should always start with the question of the core user motivations you are trying to solve for your customers & users. The basic core motivations are almost always very simple in their nature and applicable regardless the complexity of your work area. Consider the following examples::

• Successful restaurant: Core user motivations? --> Satisfaction of hunger / Maintaining social status / Having a good time while being out.
• Technically complex yet successful global trading platform: Core user motivations? --> Increase of wealth / Security of deposits / Saving time and stress during the process of trading.
• Medical practice: Core user motivation? --> Health and personal safety.

Only after being able to identify and satisfy your users core motivations with your product mechanic you should beginn to evolve a business around that, otherwise you will lose valuable time and resources.

Now go on and build something amazing that will make your user's excited.

And any questions and feedback are welcomed.

Best,

Johannes

One last note: In case you want to use Easy Conference or need any support in product development let's connect.