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The pure hell of managing your JPEGs
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris were joined by none other than TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo, in her first-ever appearance on the show. She’s pretty much the best person and we’re stoked to have her on the pod.
And it was good that Mary Ann was on the show this week as she wrote about half the dang site. Which meant that we got to include all sorts of her work in the rundown. Here’s the agenda:
- Funding rounds from: Ramp, which raised $300 million at a $3.9 billion valuation; NoRedInk, which put together an impressive $50 million Series B; and Playbook, which is building a sort of Dropbox for designers. Each company gave us something different to noodle on, be it the diverging strategies at Ramp and Brex, how NoRedInk is different from Grammarly, and why Dropbox is not the Dropbox for designers.
- Then we spun the globe to narrow our focus to Latin America, a booming startup scene that Mary Ann recently profiled for Extra Crunch. In a nutshell, venture capital is helping drive an enormous wave of startup activity in the region — or perhaps a wave of startup activity is driving a boom in venture investment? — leading to huge companies, and perhaps some tech-powered inclusion of more folks into the modern banking and digital economy. (For more, here are notes on the Brazilian market’s rising exit tally! And Flink raised, which was worth chewing on as well.)
- We quickly pivoted to the hot-button issue of the moment for every startup (and business): hiring. Natasha noted how startups used to focus on runway, and now they are looking to fill empty seats amid the great resignation.
- Finally, we nattered about huge venture results from Boston, big numbers from Austin and what increasingly feels like an everything bubble. Chicago is doing well, too. Pick a city, it’s putting up big numbers.
And that’s a wrap, for, well, at least the next five seconds.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Design expert Scott Tong outlines 4 concepts founders should consider when designing products
In the last decade, high-quality design has become a necessity in the software space. Great design is a commodity, not a luxury, and yet, designing beautiful products and finding great designers continues to be a struggle for many entrepreneurs.
At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked us through some of the ways founders should think about design. Tong was involved in product and brand design at some of the biggest brands in tech, including IDEO, IFTTT, Pinterest and more. He’s now a partner at Design Fund.
Tong explained how to think about brand as more than a logo or a social media presence, what design means and the steps that come before focusing on the pixels, and gave guidance on when entrepreneurs should hire third-party design agencies or bring on full-time talent.
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Reputation
“The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation,” wrote Shakespeare. Though we often think of a brand as a logo or a social media persona, a brand is the equivalent of a person’s reputation. It signifies what the company and products stand for, and it has an element of being memorable for something, whether it’s prestige, like for Chanel, or terrible customer service, like for Comcast.
The closest word in the English language to brand is actually reputation. The analogy is that brand is to company as reputation is to person. If you can link your brand with your company’s reputation, I think it’s a really great place to start when you’re having conversations about brands. What is the first impression? What are the consistent behaviors that your brand hopes to repeat over and over? What are the memorable moments that stand out and make your brand, your reputation memorable? (Timestamp: 2:40)
Existing versus preferred
Tong outlined what design is truly about. There are many different schools of thought on design methodology and there are many different types of design. You may be thinking about product design and logo design and brand design all at the same time, and the only way to successfully hire for those tasks and complete them is to understand what design is, at its core.
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The best logos of Y Combinator’s W21 batch
Our picks for the most intriguing companies of Y Combinator’s latest batch were based entirely on substance and our endless expertise, so it’s time for something much more superficial. Here are the 11 best logos from the hundreds of companies that presented yesterday.
Watching companies go by 60 seconds at a time for like eight hours was pretty mind-numbing, even when a lot of them were cool, but I always perked up when I saw something with a nice logo. So I started marking them down, and sure enough soon a post appeared.
Sadly many of these will be bought in short order and their cool logos retired, like what happened with my favorite recent logo, DataFleets. I guess it isn’t really sad because they all get super rich, but there goes a perfectly good logo, you know?
Anyway, let’s proceed. These aren’t in any particular order except that the first three are my favorites and the rest all tie for fourth.
Enombic
A capital E always makes a lot of interesting geometric possibilities available. Enombic’s logo makes the most of this famous trisulc optical illusion while not overdoing it, giving a clear (if impossible) shape that is also obviously a letter — without any extraneous lines or materials, in fact with the absolute minimum. The clean type is also well-chosen (and avoids repetition by changing case). Gold star.
Uiflow
This isn’t the first time a U and I have been joined in this way, but it’s done here very elegantly and with complementary curves and spacing in all the right places. They use the inversion of the above as well, but I think white on black looks better than black on white.
Perfect Recall
Here’s one where the logo is informed by the purpose of the company, which records and highlights video calls. A loop with an arrow is a universal cross-lingual symbol for returning to something, and there are a few ways to do this that are flashier but don’t look as good. Getting the effect of a circle and not just a semicircle without compromising the shape of the P is a tough thing to balance. This logo does have the awkward side effect of putting a recognizable P right before the P in perfect, so you end up with PPerfect Recall. It happens a lot, but still something to watch out for.
Furmacy
Another logo actually informed by the company’s purpose, this one combined with the logotype could do with a little more work (the tail curve bothers me, the plus is too much, and the Dr Mario player in me wants a solid lower capsule half) — but it’s immediately recognizable and adequately communicates what the company does wordlessly, a rare quality. Got to hand it to them for the name, too.
Routine
It’s a bold decision to leave off half the “o” in any situation, since it can quickly become another letter or symbol if you don’t do it right. In this case using it as a rising sun works really well, also suggesting the purpose of the app. Having an uppercase R the same size as the lowercase letters is normally something that would really bother me, and might have gone badly, but it works here because of the white space left by the o. Not perfect, but surprisingly palatable.
Dashlabs.ai
I liked the idea of this one, but the graphic needs simplification. The proportions are off with the eyepiece, lens barrel and plate, and the dial is one element too many. I like the slotted D, but there’s something off about it. Maybe it’s an optical illusion, but some of the stripes look thicker than the others. Actually, now that I look closely it’s super obvious someone left an extra pixel on the bottom layer. The geometric type is solid too, but lose the .ai, it’s small and weird. Just… Dashlabs.
Mendel
This one truly seems to have no connection whatsoever to the company, or even the famed geneticist, but I just love the M-mountain. It would have been legendary if Mendel made hiking boots or camping gear (not too late for a pivot). This kind of letter-art is surprisingly rare to find done well, and this is really just on the charming side of primitive, but you can see the thought that went into it. The type isn’t great, though — I can’t stand those billowy d’s.
Nuntius Therapeutics
DNA’s double helix structure (tied in with Nuntius’s gene therapy) can be used to create lots of forms, but this capital N is really a nice one. The stylized bases aren’t exactly biologically accurate, but they work well and the sinuous curve of the helix flows beautifully into the circle.
Aspen Cloud
The muted rainbow has been used to death, but apparently they just didn’t mute it enough. Aspen Cloud goes all the way into pastels, but they’re harmonious enough that they suggest CMYK rather than other polychromatic logos. The leaf-tree combo is simple and memorable, they avoid weight and symmetry problems and the colors are nicely arranged. On a white background it recedes harmlessly and on a black one it pops. Can’t say the same about the type, though. Can’t really say anything at all.
PingPong
I hate this high-visibility color when it’s on the stupid Uber bikes that litter my neighborhood, but I have to say, it makes for a great dot. The full logotype is nothing to write home about (any logotype for a company called “ping pong” that doesn’t utilize some kind of symmetrical or two-sided motif is a waste), but what I assume is the app logo is great. The darker grey tone does a lot of work — it establishes a sort of “off-camera light” that casts a shadow, and because it’s ever so slightly narrower than the dot/ball, it gives an illusion of depth as well. I suppose it could be interpreted as being the flight line of the ball (i.e. it is zooming up and to the left) but I like my way better. It also might be a little too close to the flag of Japan.
MagicBell
I don’t know why this works, but it does. The bell combined with the chicken takes two “alarms” and makes them one cute item that screams (or rather crows) “notifications.” Or possibly “Peeps.” Let’s just hope Nintendo doesn’t sue them for infringement of a bunch of the bird-type characters in Animal Crossing (especially Knox).
Good work to all these companies and the many more I only didn’t list because I got tired. Design is important, not just for catching the user’s eye, but because it indicates attention to detail and an approach beyond the purely functional — something startups often struggle with.
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Atlassian peps up Confluence with new graphical design features
Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace, has been around for more than 15 years, and is often a core knowledge-sharing tool for the companies that implement it. But for the most part, Confluence is a business tool and looks like it, with walls of text and the occasional graph, table or image. But user expectations have changed, and so it’s maybe no major surprise that Atlassian is now bringing a stronger emphasis on design to the service.
Today’s update, for example, brings to the service features like cover images, title emojis and customizable space avatars (that is, “icons that denote a ‘space’ or section of Confluence”). The team also recently introduced smart links, which allow you to paste links from services like YouTube and Trello and have the service immediately recognize them and display them in their native format. Other new features include the ability to schedule when a new page is published and the ability to convert pages to blog posts (because, as it turns out, Atlassian has seen a bit of a resurgence in corporate blogging — mostly for internal audiences — during the pandemic).
Image Credits: Atlassian
“We ended up doing something that we called ‘love sprint,’ where we prioritize about 30 features for the enhancements, which are all — if you think about the themes — about how you design information in this world where you have to read more, where you have to write more,” Natalia Baryshnikova, the head Of Product Management for Atlassian’s Confluence Experience Group, told me. “And there’s the attention span that’s kind of pushing its limits. So how do you design for that situation? How do you discover our content?”
Baryshnikova tells me that the team took a close look at how content production, management and delivery works in the social media world. But some of the new features are also purely a reaction to a changing work environment. Take the ability to schedule when pages are published, for example. Employees who work from home may work especially late or early right now, for example, in order to prioritize childcare. But they still want the content they produce to be seen inside the company, and that can be hard when you would otherwise publish it at 11 p.m., for example.
Image Credits: Atlassian
And having your content get noticed is getting harder because Confluence usage has dramatically increased in the last 12 months. As Atlassian noted today, more than 60,000 companies are now using the service. And inside those companies, those users are also far more active than ever before. The number of Confluence pages created from March 2020 to March 2021 increased by more than 33%. The average user now creates 11% more pages, but the product’s superusers have often doubled or tripled their output.
The use of Confluence has also helped many companies reduce their number of meetings, but as Baryshnikova noted, “not only are pages competing with meetings — but pages are competing with pages.” So using good graphics, for example, is a way for a user’s content to stand out in the noise of corporate content production. Which, I have to admit, strikes me as a somewhat strange dynamic. But I guess that just like on the web, in order to stand out in a corporate environment, you have to make the documents you produce stand out in order to get noticed. Maybe that — as well as the lack of watercooler conversations — is also the reason corporate blogging is seeing an uptick right now.
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Top 20 iOS homescreen customization apps reach 5.7M installs after iOS 14 release
The iOS 14 home screen customization trend is driving a new set of apps to the top of the App Store charts, and delivering record downloads for sources of inspiration, like Pinterest. According to new data from app store market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, installs of the top 20 home screen customization apps reached 5.7 million total downloads worldwide in the first four days following the release of iOS 14 on September 16.
Remarkably, the three most-downloaded apps — Widgetsmith, Color Widgets and Photo Widget — account for 95% of these 5.7 million downloads. That indicates that the rest of the app customization market today is much smaller. But this could still change over time if more apps embrace the trend and expand to include innovative and unique features.
Sensor Tower’s study on the home screen customization market only focused on those apps that were used to create home screen widgets or existed primarily to service them, like calendars, clocks, memos and others.
To determine if the app offered home screen customization tools, Sensor Tower analyzed the app metadata of all the apps that ranked at any point on the App Store after September 16, then manually reviewed those apps to confirm their functionality was home-screen-customization related.
The report’s focus was also more on widget apps, rather than apps that helped users make custom icons or existing apps that added widget functionality, as Sensor Tower decided it wouldn’t be able to determine how many had done so based on their metadata. It’s also difficult to determine, in some cases, if an app with a larger purpose beyond widgets is moving up the charts simply because it has now added widgets.
The top 20 list, in order, includes the following:
Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, Photo Widget, Photobox Widget, MemoWidget, Home Photo Widget, Motivation Widget, Ermine, Date Today, Hey Weather, TimeDeck, Widgeridoo, Glimpse 2, Widget Wizard, Widget Web, Locket, ItemMemo, OMDZ, Clock Widget for Home Screen and Photo Widgets.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Combined, the group has generated a collective $400,000 in consumer spending in four days — from September 17 through September 20. Widgetsmith dominated the group, accounting for $370,000 of that total, followed by an app called Date Today with close to $20,000, per Sensor Tower estimates. (We should note Widgetsmith’s figure comes in a bit lower than some of the other estimates that were floating around.)
Though Sensor Tower’s study had a narrower focus, there are signals that plenty of apps have benefitted from the customization craze beyond the widget makers themselves.
Design inspiration resource Pinterest, as noted above, saw record daily downloads. TuneTrack, now the No. 18 free (nongame) app on the U.S. App Store appears to be gathering steam in the absence of an official Spotify widget. Its app offers both Apple Music and Spotify widgets for showing off favorite music on your home screen.
Sensor Tower says TuneTrack saw 552,000 installs between Sept. 17 and 20, for example — a figure up 1,840% from the prior week (9/10-9/13). The Motivation widget saw 431,000 installs, up 798%.
Meanwhile, design tool Procreate Pocket is now the No. 2 paid (nongame) app in the U.S., and PicsArt is the No. 31 free app. An app that simplifies icon changing, Icon Changer+, is No. 40 on the Top Free Apps charts in the U.S., followed by an app called Shortcuts, which is not the same Shortcuts app from Apple. (And surprisingly being allowed to use the same name!)
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Because there’s not a specific category for home screen customization tools, some of the new apps can be found in the Productivity category, while others categorized themselves as Utility apps or something else entirely. This makes it more difficult for a consumer who wants to compare the rankings of all top apps offering home screen customization functionality in one place.
Given that iOS 14 has effectively created an entire new category of apps, it’s possible that Apple would consider adding a customization category to the App Store in the future, if the trend continues long term.
For now, however, Apple is addressing the discoverability issues with new App Store editorial content. A featured story on the App Store’s “Today” page, for example, is titled “How to Set Up Widgets,” and recommends a number of apps that have added widgets — like Todoist, Carrot Weather, Timepage, Apollo, Spark Mail and others, in addition to Widgetsmith.
There are new widgets still arriving, as well, as developers roll out their iOS 14 updates. Fantastical, for example, just launched 12 home screen widgets today.
What’s unfortunate is that Apple didn’t give its developer community enough time to prepare for launch day. The company announced iOS 14’s release with less than 24 hours’ notice and without the final version of Xcode available to developers. As a result, when users began to customize their home screens, they may not have found all the widgets they would have wanted.
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Zoom UX teardown: 5 fails and how to fix them
Valued at over $60 billion and used by millions each day for work and staying in touch with friends and family, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped make Zoom one of the most popular and relevant enterprise applications.
On one level, its surge to the top can be summed up in three words: “It just works.” However, that doesn’t mean Zoom’s user experience is perfect — in fact, far from it.
With the help of Built for Mars founder and UX expert Peter Ramsey, we dive deeper into the user experience of Zoom on Mac, highlighting five UX fails and how to fix them. More broadly, we discuss how to design for “empty states,” why asking “copy to clipboard” requests are problematic and other issues.
Always point to the next action
This is an incredibly simple rule, yet you’d be surprised how often software and websites leave users scratching their heads trying to figure what they’re expected to do next. Clear signposting and contextual user prompts are key.
The fail: In Zoom, as soon as you create a meeting, you’re sat in an empty meeting room on your own. This sucks, because obviously you want to invite people in. Otherwise, why are you using Zoom? Another problem here is that the next action is hidden in a busy menu with other actions you probably never or rarely use.
The fix: Once you’ve created a meeting (not joined, but created), Zoom should prompt and signpost you how to add people. Sure, have a skip option. But it needs some way of saying “Okay, do this next.”
Steve O’Hear: Not pointing to the next action seems to be quite a common fail, why do you think this is? If I had to guess, product developers become too close to a product and develop a mindset that assumes too much prior knowledge and where the obvious blurs with the nonobvious?
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Figma CEO Dylan Field discusses fundraising, hiring and marketing in stealth mode
You’d be hard pressed to hang out with a designer and not hear the name Figma .
The company behind the largely browser-based design tool has made a huge splash in the past few years, building a massive war chest with more than $130 million from investors like A16Z, Sequoia, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Index.
The company was founded in 2012 and spent several years in stealth, raising both its seed and Series A without having any public product or user metrics.
At Early Stage, we spoke with co-founder and CEO Dylan Field about the process of hiring and fundraising while in stealth and how life at the company changed following its launch in 2016. Field, who was 20 when he founded the company, also touched on the lessons he’s learned from his team about leadership. Chief among them: the importance of empowering the people you hire.
You can check out the full conversation in the video embedded below, as well as a lightly edited transcript.
Raising a Series A a year behind schedule while still in stealth
I actually had approached John Lilly from Greylock in our seed round. For those who don’t know, John Lilly was the CEO of Mozilla and an amazing guy. He’s on a lot of really cool boards and has a bunch of interesting experience for Figma, with very deep roots in design. I had approached him for the seed round, and he basically said to us, “You know, I don’t think you guys know what you’re doing, but I’m very intrigued, so let’s keep in touch.” This is the famous line that you hear from every investor ever. It’s like “Yeah, let’s keep in touch, let me know if I can be helpful.” Sometimes, they actually mean it. In John’s case, he actually would follow up every few months or I would follow up with him. We’d grab coffee, and he helped me develop the strategy to a point that got us to what we are today. And that was a collaboration. I could really learn a lot from him on that one.
When we started off the idea was: Let’s have this global community around design, and you’ll be able to use the tool to post to the community and someday we’ll think about how people can pay us. Talking with John got me to the point where I realized we need to start with a business tool. We’ll build the community later. Now, we’re starting to work toward that.
At some point, John told me, “Hey, if you ever think about raising again, let me know.” A few weeks later, I told him maybe we would raise because I just wanted to work with him. We talked to a few other investors. I think it’s pretty important that there’s always a competitive dynamic in the round. But really, it was just him that we were really considering for that round. He really did us a solid. He really believed in us. At the time, it wasn’t like there were metrics to look at. He had conviction in the space, a conviction in the attack, and he had conviction in me and Evan, which I feel very, very honored by. He’s a dear mentor to this day, and he’s on our board. And it’s been a really deep relationship.
How to recruit while in stealth mode
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Five ways to bring a UX lens to your AI project
Debbie Pope
Contributor
Contributor
Debbie Pope (she/her) is senior manager of product at The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth. A 2019 Google AI Impact Grantee, the project is building an AI system to identify and prioritize high-risk contacts while simultaneously supporting more youth.
As AI and machine-learning tools become more pervasive and accessible, product and engineering teams across all types of organizations are developing innovative, AI-powered products and features. AI is particularly well-suited for pattern recognition, prediction and forecasting, and the personalization of user experience, all of which are common in organizations that deal with data.
A precursor to applying AI is data — lots and lots of it! Large data sets are generally required to train an AI model, and any organization that has large data sets will no doubt face challenges that AI can help solve. Alternatively, data collection may be “phase one” of AI product development if data sets don’t yet exist.
Whatever data sets you’re planning to use, it’s highly likely that people were involved in either the capture of that data or will be engaging with your AI feature in some way. Principles for UX design and data visualization should be an early consideration at data capture, and/or in the presentation of data to users.
1. Consider the user experience early
Understanding how users will engage with your AI product at the start of model development can help to put useful guardrails on your AI project and ensure the team is focused on a shared end goal.
If we take the ‘”Recommended for You” section of a movie streaming service, for example, outlining what the user will see in this feature before kicking off data analysis will allow the team to focus only on model outputs that will add value. So if your user research determined the movie title, image, actors and length will be valuable information for the user to see in the recommendation, the engineering team would have important context when deciding which data sets should train the model. Actor and movie length data seem key to ensuring recommendations are accurate.
The user experience can be broken down into three parts:
- Before — What is the user trying to achieve? How does the user arrive at this experience? Where do they go? What should they expect?
- During — What should they see to orient themselves? Is it clear what to do next? How are they guided through errors?
- After — Did the user achieve their goal? Is there a clear “end” to the experience? What are the follow-up steps (if any)?
Knowing what a user should see before, during and after interacting with your model will ensure the engineering team is training the AI model on accurate data from the start, as well as providing an output that is most useful to users.
2. Be transparent about how you’re using data
Will your users know what is happening to the data you’re collecting from them, and why you need it? Would your users need to read pages of your T&Cs to get a hint? Think about adding the rationale into the product itself. A simple “this data will allow us to recommend better content” could remove friction points from the user experience, and add a layer of transparency to the experience.
When users reach out for support from a counselor at The Trevor Project, we make it clear that the information we ask for before connecting them with a counselor will be used to give them better support.
Image Credits: Trevor Project (opens in a new window)
If your model presents outputs to users, go a step further and explain how your model came to its conclusion. Google’s “Why this ad?” option gives you insight into what drives the search results you see. It also lets you disable ad personalization completely, allowing the user to control how their personal information is used. Explaining how your model works or its level of accuracy can increase trust in your user base, and empower users to decide on their own terms whether to engage with the result. Low accuracy levels could also be used as a prompt to collect additional insights from users to improve your model.
3. Collect user insights on how your model performs
Prompting users to give feedback on their experience allows the Product team to make ongoing improvements to the user experience over time. When thinking about feedback collection, consider how the AI engineering team could benefit from ongoing user feedback, too. Sometimes humans can spot obvious errors that AI wouldn’t, and your user base is made up exclusively of humans!
One example of user feedback collection in action is when Google identifies an email as dangerous, but allows the user to use their own logic to flag the email as “Safe.” This ongoing, manual user correction allows the model to continuously learn what dangerous messaging looks like over time.
Image Credits: Google
If your user base also has the contextual knowledge to explain why the AI is incorrect, this context could be crucial to improving the model. If a user notices an anomaly in the results returned by the AI, think of how you could include a way for the user to easily report the anomaly. What question(s) could you ask a user to garner key insights for the engineering team, and to provide useful signals to improve the model? Engineering teams and UX designers can work together during model development to plan for feedback collection early on and set the model up for ongoing iterative improvement.
4. Evaluate accessibility when collecting user data
Accessibility issues result in skewed data collection, and AI that is trained on exclusionary data sets can create AI bias. For instance, facial recognition algorithms that were trained on a data set consisting mostly of white male faces will perform poorly for anyone who is not white or male. For organizations like The Trevor Project that directly support LGBTQ youth, including considerations for sexual orientation and gender identity are extremely important. Looking for inclusive data sets externally is just as important as ensuring the data you bring to the table, or intend to collect, is inclusive.
When collecting user data, consider the platform your users will leverage to interact with your AI, and how you could make it more accessible. If your platform requires payment, does not meet accessibility guidelines or has a particularly cumbersome user experience, you will receive fewer signals from those who cannot afford the subscription, have accessibility needs or are less tech-savvy.
Every product leader and AI engineer has the ability to ensure marginalized and underrepresented groups in society can access the products they’re building. Understanding who you are unconsciously excluding from your data set is the first step in building more inclusive AI products.
5. Consider how you will measure fairness at the start of model development
Fairness goes hand-in-hand with ensuring your training data is inclusive. Measuring fairness in a model requires you to understand how your model may be less fair in certain use cases. For models using people data, looking at how the model performs across different demographics can be a good start. However, if your data set does not include demographic information, this type of fairness analysis could be impossible.
When designing your model, think about how the output could be skewed by your data, or how it could underserve certain people. Ensure the data sets you use to train, and the data you’re collecting from users, are rich enough to measure fairness. Consider how you will monitor fairness as part of regular model maintenance. Set a fairness threshold, and create a plan for how you would adjust or retrain the model if it becomes less fair over time.
As a new or seasoned technology worker developing AI-powered tools, it’s never too early or too late to consider how your tools are perceived by and impact your users. AI technology has the potential to reach millions of users at scale and can be applied in high-stakes use cases. Considering the user experience holistically — including how the AI output will impact people — is not only best-practice but can be an ethical necessity.
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How to profit from valuable peer referrals hiding in Slack
Colin is Senior Director of Analytics and Strategy for Cloudinary, the co co-author of High Performance Images, and passionate about data, web performance and user experience.
Brands are often left to act like the person who searches for their keys under the streetlight simply because that is where the light is better. However, when brand marketers focus only on engaging with the customers they can more easily see — where online activity is visible — they risk overlooking the valuable opportunities hiding in darker spaces.
One of the most valuable of those dark web spaces is in the realm of what we call “microbrowsers” — the messaging apps like Slack, WhatsApp and WeChat. We call them microbrowsers because they display miniature previews of web pages inside private message discussions. These previews, also known as ‘unfurled links’, create your brand’s first impression and play a big role in whether or not the person on the receiving end will click through to buy, or read or engage.
Google Analytics lumps all microbrowser-generated web traffic into the ‘Direct’ bucket, which we often just ignore. This means we look for customers where we know how to create campaigns easily — on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and buying Google Ad Words.
And as more people rely more heavily on messaging apps for primary communication, these link previews from microbrowsers are becoming the leading segment of your direct traffic visitors. In Cloudinary’s 2019 State of Visual Media Report, which drew on data from more than 700 customers and 200 billion transactions, we found that 77% of link sharing in Slack occurs during working hours and that the vast majority of the click-throughs are reported as ‘direct’ traffic. The rise of microbrowsers gives us an opportunity to engage and attract customers through word of mouth discussions.
The good news is that the ‘leads’ that microbrowsers send to your brand site are usually highly qualified and close to the bottom of the traditional sales pipeline funnel. When consumers arrive on your site they are often ready and eager to buy (or read, view and listen to your content).
Whether it be for sneakers, tickets to a concert, a birthday gift idea, or an article to read — a trusted peer recommendation typically happens in that fleeting moment when the appetite to buy is right now. That isn’t just valuable, it’s the holy freaking grail!
Top tips for creating links that engage
Image via Getty Images / drogatnev
The way to get the most value from microbrowser traffic is by helping along this peer influencing that happens in the dark. By creating compelling, informative links with images, video and text information specifically for microbrowsers, you increase the likelihood that peer-to-peer recommendations in groups convert into sales and reads.
What follows are some top tips to ensure that the links unfurling within microbrowsers have the greatest impact.
First, remember the golden rule: your audience is human. When creating content for microbrowsers, design it for humans, not machines.
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‘The Operators’: Understanding your user – The art and science of UI/UX behind Facebook, Google, Mint, and Edmodo
Tim Hsia is the CEO of Media Mobilize and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Neil Devani is an angel investor and venture capitalist focused on companies solving hard problems.
Welcome to this transcribed edition of The Operators. TechCrunch is beginning to publish podcasts from industry experts, with transcriptions available for Extra Crunch members so you can read the conversation wherever you are.
The Operators highlights the experts building the products and companies that drive the tech industry. Speaking from experience at companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Edmodo, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Mint, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc., these experts share insider tips on how to break into fields like design and enterprise sales. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs to hire and manage experts in fields outside their own.
This week’s edition features Gülay Birand, UX Lead and Product Design Manager at Facebook, and Tim Rechin, Head of Design at Edmodo, the leading education technology company. Gülay and Tim share their experiences and explain design, UI/UX, how to build a career in these fields, and how entrepreneurs should think about them.
Gülay and Tim bring experience from other great companies including Google, Amazon, Mint, and SAP. Having seen and grown in their disciplines from a variety of companies and customer types, they share deep insight from across tech.
Neil Devani and Tim Hsia created The Operators after seeing and hearing too many heady, philosophical podcasts about the future of the world and the tech industry, and not enough attention on the practical day-to-day work that makes it all happen.
Tim is the CEO & Founder of Media Mobilize, a media company and ad network, and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Tim is an early-stage investor in Workflow (acquired by Apple), Lime, FabFitFun, Oh My Green, Morning Brew, Girls Night In, The Hustle, Bright Cellars, and others.
Neil is an early-stage investor based in San Francisco with a focus on companies solving serious problems, including Andela, Clearbit, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Vicarious Surgical, and Kudi.
If you’re interested in becoming a designer, doing UI/UX research, furthering your career in that field, or starting a company and don’t know when to hire or how to manage this discipline, you can’t miss this episode!
The show:
The Operators highlights the experts building the products and companies that drive the tech industry. Speaking from experience at companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Edmodo, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Mint, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc., these experts share insider tips on how to break into fields like design and enterprise sales. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs to hire and manage experts in fields outside their own.
In this episode:
In Episode 3, we’re talking about design and UI/UX. Neil interviews Gülay Birand, UX Lead and Product Design Manager at Facebook, and Tim Rechin, Head of Design at Edmodo.
Neil Devani: Hello and welcome to The Operators, where we talk to the people building the companies of today and tomorrow. We publish every other Monday and you can find us online at Operators.co.
Today’s episode is very special, we are talking to two UI/UX experts who have designed and researched products that have been touched by billions of people. I’m your host, Neil Devani and we’re coming to you today from the Vault of Joi here at Digital Garage in downtown San Francisco.
Joining me is Tim Rechin, Head of Design at Edmodo, the leading classroom and education community with 100 million users globally. Also joining us is Gülay Birand, a UX lead and product design manager at Facebook.
Gülay works on the newsfeed product used by billions of people every day. Thank you for joining us, if you could tell us more about yourselves and your work it would be great to hear more.
Gülay Birand: Thank you, my name is Gülay Birand. I’m a product design manager at Facebook . I’ve been at Facebook for about three months. Prior to that I was at Google for about 8 years, and I led a horizontal team on Google Cloud Platform for about four years, leading growth and engagement, support, and product excellence initiatives.
Prior to that I did a bit of a tour to Google, so I worked on search, identity, a couple of other areas like mobile ads, and before that I was at T-Mobile where I was building mass market and franchise home experiences, mainly on Android. And prior to that I was at Amazon leading experiences for the very first Kindle, so that was a lot of fun.
Devani: And Tim tell us more about yourself and how you got here.
Tim Rechin: Yeah, so I’m currently at Edmodo, leading up design and that’s really across the entire platform that serves our teachers, students and parents in the US and globally. And before Edmodo, I was at Facebook, and I was on the Feed Ads team and responsible for the lead ads product that we launched that year. Before that I was at Mint, so doing personal finance and some of you may be using Mint.
Devani: I’m definitely using Mint, its great, I love it.
Rechin: And then before that SAP, Yahoo, eBay, and then Elance very early on which is now Upwork.
Devani: Very cool, all companies that I’ve used, products that I enjoy, thank you for helping create them.
Birand: Thank you.
Devani: So it’d be great if you could tell folks more about what you do every day. Who are the folks in your company that you are interacting with, what are your responsibilities, what does it mean to do the job that you do?
Rechin: That’s a good question, it’s a bit mixed. Just for some context, Edmodo is a company a little over 100 people and so our product teams are in the 6-7 product managers range. I lead a team of 3 designers. So my day to day is really getting to work and really trying to figure out what’s going on, so this year is a particularly busy year as we get ready for back to school.
And so we have a lot of concurrent projects going, so one of the things I like to do when I get in is level set, kind of see how my day is and I’ll go check in with the different teams. That’s part of the work I do, working with the different product teams and the strategy.
So like I said, we are working on lots of different projects, so it’s really just keeping everyone aligned and making sure that designers are delivering things on time, that any issues or gaps are being filled and we can go answer those questions that are coming from product managers and designers. In some cases too, there is a project that is about to be kicked off, so everything is not clean, phased, there are always these things that kind of pop up.
So I will find myself in meetings in talking about strategy to figure out how to kick off those projects or what our go-to-market is for back to school.
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