The Very Human Art of Knowing What to Say — Engaging and Retaining Mobile Users in an Age of Content Profusion
By: Ezra Nanes
Tags: Messaging, UX, Weather, Product Management, Product Design

The Very Human Art of Knowing What to Say — Engaging and Retaining Mobile Users in an Age of Content Profusion

This post is based on my presentation at The Mobile Innovation Summit, New York City, March 10, 2016

With upwards of 2 Million apps on the iOS App Store and 2.4 Million on Google Play success at engaging and retaining users has never been more important than it is today. In fact, according to eMarketer, in 2016 retention rates continue to slip for all app categories. If you’re growing a business that depends upon digital product usage to drive monetization then these statistics should set off alarm bells.

Once you’ve managed to be heard above the din of these millions of competing voices, how do you connect with your newly won users, provide them real value and keep them from falling off the edge of the retention cliff?

At AccuWeather, where I lead the User Experience and Product Design team for all digital platforms globally, we take these questions very seriously.

I recently had an epiphany about this important challenge that led to the topic of this piece: The Very Human Art of Knowing What to Say.

SCENE ONE

Imagine you are standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City on a beautiful early summer night. People throng around you, and your visual sense is completely filled by pulsing lights, colors and signs both static and alive with movement. Words, pictures, videos, brands, faces, products. Hundreds of messages vie for your attention. To a small number of these messages you grant a few precious seconds of focus, but for most you simply relax your eyes and let them blend in to the fuzzy tapestry of the electric scene.

Times Square makes for a compelling illustration of the challenges one faces in the realm of app development, especially in our age of content profusion.

In the weather space, advances in forecasting science and technology by the AccuWeather team have made new forecast and weather data types available to us for inclusion in our digital products. Forecasts are more granular in terms of time and location (MinuteCast). They go farther out chronologically (90-Day Forecast). They encompass new parameters and data types (Pollen Count and Air Quality). They express new and more advanced meteorological concepts (Forecast Confidence.)

All of this innovation represents valuable new content that we can offer to our users.

However, if we do not prioritize that profusion of content what we end up with is Times Square. Many messages jostle for attention but none of them truly succeeds in connecting.

Walking through Times Square at night is a thrilling, awe-inspiring, overwhelming and fun experience — but it cannot be the model for a daily mobile application experience. In particular for a weather app, where the user will often check multiple times per day and most sessions last less than a minute, we can ill-afford to lapse in to a Times Square-like user experience.

If we fail to make tough prioritization decisions and communicate messages with appropriate context, users will burn out, lose trust in us and eventually abandon our products.

SCENE TWO

Now contrast Times Square to what you might experience along the trail to the Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal. As you climb you see ahead of you a fork in the trail and next to one path stands a bold yellow sign with large black letters and a big red arrow. WAY TO MOUNT EVEREST BASE CAMP →

A singular message with perfect clarity and context with no distractions and surrounded by a scene of absolute wonder and beauty. When you are on your way to the Mount Everest basecamp and you see this sign, you know which way to go.

There are certain weather situations that allow for this kind of “bold sign on the trail” clarity.

Take the major blizzard of January 2016 that crushed the eastern US delivering feet of snow to major metros like New York City, literally shutting down the city and causing unfortunate loss of life. My mother, a longtime city resident, didn’t leave her apartment for 2 days during the storm.

When you have a major weather event such as this impacting a large number of people, it is not hard to know what to say. The story needs to be told. At AccuWeather we place an incredible focus on helping people to prepare for and be safe during events such as this.

But this not the everyday reality in which we exist.

EVERYDAY REALITY

Most days are far more complex and nuanced than the examples above, and people’s personal priorities, goals, values and interests play a much more important role in prioritizing messages.

Thus the AccuWeather Mission:

“We Personalize the Weather so People Can Improve Their Lives”

BUT… How do you personalize the weather? How do you make it meaningful?

Because in the end it’s about people. And it’s about creating digital experiences that are human.

How do we bring our humanity to digital and how do we build a relationship with our users that helps us know what to say?

I believe we should start by trying to answer to this deceptively simple question:

What matters to your users?

I will show that the key to answering this question and acting on that knowledge lies in the human act of friendship.

Friendship is the ultimate communication enabler. That’s why we are talking about the Very Human Art of Knowing What to Say.

But what about friendship makes it such an incredible enabler of communication?

First I will share the story of my recent epiphany that illustrates how friendship enables communication. Then I will illuminate the dimensions of friendship that make it a powerful communication enabler. Finally we’ll begin to explore how to apply these ideas to product development.

Friendship may sound like a bit of a squishy topic, so I will provide concrete examples of what we at AccuWeather do to humanize our products and bring the power of friendship to bear on the communication of the weather. But I’m also going to take you beyond what we do and share some ideas about what further actions and areas of exploration might be available to us.

THE EPIPHANY

So let’s start with the original source of my epiphany. I want to tell you a story about my favorite source for personalized weather forecasts.

Before I reveal this important resource I have to warn you that you will most likely not be able to obtain direct access. Distribution is extremely limited.

In fact there is only one.

Meet Henry.

Henry on the AccuWeather Operations Floor

Henry is a Senior Meteorologist at AccuWeather, a member of one of the earth’s greatest meteorology teams, the team the powers all of AccuWeather’s products relied upon by billions of people around the world every day.

Henry has been at AccuWeather for 30 years. In the course of my 4 years with the company we have become good friends.

Henry and I talk pretty much every day. Henry’s a mountain and road biking buddy of mine. As outdoor adventure sports enthusiasts the weather is naturally a big topic for us.

The thing I love about Henry (as a weather source, that is) is that he knows exactly what to tell me — what I care about, what weather impacts matter to me — and he gives me insights in to things that would take great effort to figure out on my own. He’s also a great storyteller.

For example, some days I will see Henry and he’ll say something like this:

Henry: Better get your ride in over lunch EZ, looks like the rain is coming in around 4pm today.

How long did that take, 15 seconds? I didn’t even have to ask Henry about it. He just told me.

Here’s another example. I seek Henry out on Monday:

Me: Henry, I’m heading to Menlo Park tomorrow, flying out of State College at 11am to Detroit and then SFO. Am I good?

Henry: Yeah, you’ll be ok, the ice isn’t coming in until the early afternoon.

Now that was a complex travel planning example, and how long did that take? 30 seconds?

My interactions with Henry around the weather are an incredibly efficient, effective and frictionless experience for me. And the reason why Henry is able to deliver such targeted, relevant and timely information to me is because he knows me.

Because we are friends.

But I have to confess as amazing as Henry is, he does have a few shortcomings. Henry’s memory, processing power and uptime are fairly limited compared to what’s available these days.

To be fair, for a human being he’s pretty stellar, but compared to cutting edge mobile and cloud computing technology and infrastructure he’s pretty limited.

So, I actually have another favorite weather source, and that is the AccuWeather app for iOS.

I love this app for a host of reasons.

One — My team created this app, and I am truly proud of their work.

Two — This app is beautiful, and I enjoy looking at it

Three — This app provides all of the relevant current condition and forecast information I could possibly want for more than 3 million locations around the world, going out 15 days and down to the minute with severe weather alerts, visualizations, graphs, videos, maps and user reports.

Four — It fits in my pocket and I can keep it with me day and night. It’s always available.



As the person responsible for the experience users have with AccuWeather’s digital products, I am always thinking, how can this app be more like Henry?

More specifically, how might we bring some of the magic of the Henry interactions — efficient, effective, frictionless, personal, great storytelling — to our digital products? Let’s start by looking at what kinds of interactions Henry and I have and see how they might map to digital analogs.

HENRY MOMENTS

Here is a list of what I call my “Henry Moments”. These are the key interactions and conversation types that Henry and I have about the weather.

• Daily Morning Conversation

• Unexpected Drop-In: Henry shares something important that he wants me to know.

• Event Tracking: When Henry knows about an event that I have coming up and provides me updates on the weather for that day in the days and weeks leading up to the event.

• Travel Planning

• Weekend Weather Talk

• Activity Planning: For example, Me: Heading out for a hike with my family tomorrow. Henry: Great. Should be beautiful.)

• Two Week Outlook: This might sound like, “It’ll be warmer this week but the cold is coming back next Tuesday and will stick around for another week.”

• Seasonal Outlook: In 2015 with the El Nino pattern Henry was talking about the warm winter before we even got to Labor Day.

• Banging on Doors: This is one of my personal favorites. You see Henry cares a great deal about people and he wants to make sure that important stories get told. When there’s a major weather event with dangerous impacts likely Henry stalks around the AccuWeather headquarters saying things like “Do we have videos, do we have news stories, is it in the apps and on the sites?” He’s banging on doors to make sure the story gets told.

I’d like to bring to life one of my Henry Moments — Event Tracking — with a story that will highlight the value of Henry’s communications to me.

Every January, Henry and I and a bunch of friends and fellow bike peeps ride an insane event called Frozen Fat. It’s a 30 mile fat-tire mountain bike race through the wilderness of central Pennsylvania. The first year I rode the race in 2015 it was 14 degrees Fahrenheit, an icy wind blew all day and the ride took 5 ½ hours. My hands went completely numb from cold twice.

It was one of the best days I’ve ever had on a bike.

Frozen Fat Pre-Race 2015, Bikes on the Trailer, Ice and Snow on the Ground

As you can imagine, weather is a very important facet of the experience.

This past winter (Jan, 2016) with El Nino was different. About a month out Henry began giving me his thoughts on the weather for that day. It’s gonna be warm. It’s going to rain. We might actually get some snow. We’re gonna be sweating! It’s going to be a mud fest. Etc.

Turned out to be low to mid-30’s, very little snow on the ground. Took us more than 6 hours to finish, and my fingers never went numb from cold.

Henry’s updates leading up to the event served two important purposes:

1. Henry helped me to prepare and to pack the right gear for the day in the saddle. I wore lighter gloves and lighter socks. As a result I didn’t sweat as much, and my hands didn’t freeze.

2. They satisfied a deeper need I had to feel in control of my destiny — even though there were some shifts in the forecast in the month before the race, hearing what Henry thought gave me confidence, helped me to think through the various contingencies I would need to be prepared for.

It turns out that my Henry moments — the interactions we have, the topics we discuss — map really well to digital experiences.

Henry Moments and their Digital Analogs

The daily morning weather chat when we cover activity planning, event tracking, weekend planning, two week outlook, seasonal forecast — maps really nicely to the Daily Weather C heck.

Seeking Henry Out, as in the Travel Planning example, maps really nicely to a Weather Planning Session.

For the Unexpected Drop-In, when there’s new news or an update to share, well, we have push notifications and other forms of pro-active communication.

Finally, for Banging on Doors, when there’s a big, impactful story, well that’s where alerts and headlining news come in to play.

So, this is a good. The basic types of interactions that friends have are possible within our digital products as well.

We are on our way!

Now let’s move beyond the interaction types and start digging in to the sources of the real communicative power and magic of friendship.

THINGS FRIENDS DO

Here is a list of 4 things that we do as friends that help us have a friendship.

1. Listening

2. Sharing

3. Facial Communication

4. Organic Interactions

These are actions and gestures that not only enable the qualities of friendship but that are also applicable to the process of product development.

LISTENING

Listening is fundamental to a friendship. Whether it is verbal or non-verbal. So much is built upon sensitive listening.

What can we do, as developers of digital experiences, to listen to our users?

We can:

• Read app store reviews

• Analyze product usage metrics

• Conduct user testing

• A/B test

• Engage in social media channels

• Review customer service inquiries and feedback

• Conduct surveys

• Talk to people (interviews, focus groups, informally)

At AccuWeather we do all of these things.

One message we’ve heard loud and clear from our users is “weather maps are important!”

Here’s an example of how we listened to our users around maps.

AccuWeather iOS App — Maps Evolution with Nudge Bubbles and FAB

On the far left above is a previous version of our iOS app. You enter the app on a landing screen and scroll down the strip to consume various forecast and content types. At the bottom of the strip is maps. From anywhere on the strip a simple swipe to the right reveals the app settings page sitting just to the left.

Users told us that maps mattered by making it one of the most used pages in the iOS app. They also told us in the same manner that settings did not need to occupy such prime real estate.

So we placed maps where settings were and made settings always accessible via a floating action button (FAB) at the bottom right of the screen.

To help our users adjust to the new normal we placed some friendly little nudge bubbles in the app to direct them to the new feature locations. These nudges differ from tutorials in that they are simpler and more gestural in a manner of speaking. You have a single word or phrase (like “Maps”) and an arrow. And the bubble moves or points towards your target to indicate the new gesture.

Then at the bottom of the strip where maps used to be, like a good friend waiting for our users to come down the old path, we placed another bubble directing them to the new maps location. If the user swipes on the bubble or taps in to the maps view the bubble, having done its work, disappears.

App store reviews and app usage data following the launch of these changes validated the new design. Users repeatedly thanked us for listening to their feedback in their app store reviews and they weighed in with their ratings.

Following the launch of the “maps” update our free app was rated 4.5 stars out of 5 on the App Store. All time we were rated 4.0 stars with over 100K reviews. Our platinum (ad free) version of the same app achieved a 4.7 star rating after the maps changes. So the new version far outperformed the historical average.

Here’s another compelling example of how we listen.

In 2015, We conducted a survey of 2400 mobile weather consumers in 6 strategic markets — US, UK, Germany, China, India and South Korea.

We asked what attribute of a weather experience was the most important to survey participants, and the answer was resoundingly clear — accuracy.

Accuracy ranked as the number 1 or 2 attribute in every country. At AccuWeather we place a tremendous focus on accuracy in our science and in our presentation of forecast information.

In fact, ForecastWatch, a leading third party accuracy verification platform issued a report ranking AccuWeather as the most accurate public weather provider on a number of key metrics. In 2015 AccuWeather was the most accurate for daily hi and low temps in the US and Hi temps in Europe among other metrics.

Our focus on accuracy represents another way in which we listen.

SHARING

From listening to sharing. After all, friendship is a two way street.

In 2015 we launched our first weather crowdsourcing feature, called AccUcast, enabling our global user base to report weather conditions for their current location.

AccUcast reports from our mobile application users provide real-time “ground truth” and when plotted on a map help the user to see precipitation and weather impacts as they unfold around the world even in areas where we don’t have radar coverage.

Following the launch of AccUcast we experienced some exciting outcomes, in particular around the reporting of hazards and severe weather.

Hazards represent the impacts of weather, the actual things that matter to humans. And what’s amazing about AccUcast Hazard reports is that you can see things on an AccUcast map during a storm that you don’t always get from the forecast models and that you’d probably need someone like Henry to tell you about.

Screenshots of AccUcast Feature in the AccuWeather iOS App with Live Report Data

Take the screen on the left above — this is a screenshot of the AccuWeather app I took during the Mid-Latitude Cyclone that hit the United States in November of 2015. In layman’s terms, think of this like a mini-hurricane sweeping across the continental US.

You can actually see the damaging wind reports (the orange triangular hazard reports) out ahead of the precipitation on the map.

The other two screenshots are from the deadly blizzard that struck the Northeastern US in Jan 2016. One thing we’ve observed is that reporting dramatically increases during severe weather events. There’s an incredible density of reports on the right. People feel the impact of this weather and they want to share that experience with other people to help them. This spike in reporting during severe weather offers another clue about what matters to our users.

What we have in these sharing examples is humanity at global scale.

FACIAL COMMUNICATION

Now to one of my favorite UI concepts — Facial Communication.

User Interface: let’s break this term down.

USER — we know who that is.

INTER — something “in between”.

FACE — yes, a face.

The human face has a remarkable ability to communicate a range of emotions and information with unmatched clarity, nuance and simplicity.

It is the most expressive and readable interface of them all.

The face of an app can also communicate. Here are two examples of Facial Communication in an app.

RESERVED SEATS

We’re all familiar with the concept of Reserved Seats. You keep seats open for VIP’s at an event.

We can apply this concept to an app when there is very urgent, impactful information to communicate.*

Reserved Seats

On the left we have a “calm” app face and on the right you can see the Reserved Seat now occupied by a severe weather alert. The space in the User Interface remains essentially empty allowing the user to focus on the current conditions. The current temperature takes top priority in this screen.

However, when the reserved seat is filled, that message or information becomes the top priority and the primary focus of user attention.

*Credit to my colleague, Brandon Marsh, for coining this usage of the term Reserved Seats.

THE BLUSH

Now in contrast to Reserved Seats, which is great for urgent information with high confidence, we have The Blush.

We all know what a blush is. It’s a slight reddening of the cheeks, which signals that an emotion is being felt.

The Blush is a good way to signal less certain or potentially more complex information because the user needs to pick up on it and seek out the cause.

The Blush

In this image one of the days on the right is blushing because there is potential for a storm with dangerous impacts that day.

What we are doing is showing respect for the user’s attention. The Blush says “I am concerned about something that I think is important to you. Right now there is still some uncertainty in the forecast, but I want to make sure you are aware there is potential for danger.”

You see, feelings are feelings. Try as one might, they can’t be controlled. Emotions exist, they happen to us, and for that reason there is credibility in emotion. Emotion is genuine.

ORGANIC INTERACTIONS

And now we move to Organic Interactions. What I mean by “organic” is naturally occurring as opposed to planned. On most days Henry would walk by my office and we’d end up chatting for a few minutes in the doorway. It was an unplanned but no less valuable interaction that we had on a daily basis.

In the same way, we want users find their own natural cadence with our products. So we do things to help them to make the experience their own. For example, we enable smart personalization, like the reordering or even hiding of content sections, that lets people place content where they want it and make the experience their own. We also offer a choice different app color modes so that the app feels right to the eyes of each of our users.

FRIENDSHIP

And so finally we arrive at Friendship and the core of the idea that underpins The Very Human Art of Knowing What to Say.

What dimensions of friendship make it a standout communication enabler? What qualities of a relationship should we be trying to achieve with our design and development efforts?

To Start, Friendship is built upon the sharing of these things:

Empathy

Trust

Mutual Respect

Shared Experiences

Common Interests

Understanding the other’s values, goals and desires

The ability to predict and parse behavior, needs and emotional state

The “Things Friends Do” we discussed earlier contribute to the creation of these enablers. These aspects of friendship form the foundation of the relationship, and can be woven in to the relationship we build with our users.

So how do we begin to move towards this ideal?

From a technology standpoint we can do things like enable log-ins and user accounts to apply more information about users’ demographics or interests to the challenge of providing relevancy and context. We can sync with calendars so we have the context of events and routines.

These are existing capabilities that are widely available and used today, though they have some limitations, in particular users’ reticence to share personal information or undertake a lengthy set up process — but they can help us know our users better.

There are also some newer technologies that could help us.

Bots (chat bots in particular) enable more human-like two way communication. You know we actually have users regularly posting to our Facebook page asking for the weather in their location. People crave human interactions. If we can inform a bot with the ability to respond appropriately to an ever broader range of inquiries there could be great power in these interactions.

(chat bots in particular) enable more human-like two way communication. You know we actually have users regularly posting to our Facebook page asking for the weather in their location. People crave human interactions. If we can inform a bot with the ability to respond appropriately to an ever broader range of inquiries there could be great power in these interactions. Natural language processing of spoken questions and commands allows for communication by the user that feels more like talking to a friend. Spoken interactions have become widely available in recent years through AI’s like Siri, Google Voice and Cortana among many many others, and these interactions are gaining ever more traction with users as the technology improves.

But let’s shift our focus away from technology enablers for a minute.

What if we viewed our apps through the lens of a persona? We use personas to better understand and empathize with our users, why not do the same for our products? What if a product could have imagined demographics, goals and motivations and care about things too? What if the thing that the app cares most about is making sure you have the information you want and need and that you are safe and happy? Then we could imagine an app having a thought like: “I’d really like to give you this warning, but I’m not 100% certain and I don’t want to confuse you.” Let the software express its own desires and feelings. This might really change the way we think about how the app communicates with the user.

At some point, it’s likely Artificial Intelligence will solve many of the product challenges we currently face and we’ll have other problems to solve. Meanwhile we need to continue to attack this challenge from many angles at once.

A CHANGE OF MIND

The Very Human Art of Knowing What to Say is about more than prioritizing content. It’s about forging relationships that are greater than the sum of their many parts.

The good news is, we are well on our way to forging the bonds of friendship with our users.

As we have seen, there is much that we are already doing and much that we can do today to continue down this path

However, the greatest potential lies in a shift in the way we think:

A shift from thinking of our products as dumb pieces of technology to imbuing them with personas and allowing them to pursue goals and intentions and to communicate emotions of their own.

And a shift from simply analyzing our users and optimizing them to thinking of them as valued friends.

The potential that exists goes well beyond what I’ve covered today, and it will be achieved by passionate and creative minds focused on providing ever greater value to people and dedicated to making a difference in their lives.