It is interesting to look at an internet product or service on its one-year, five-year, and ten-year anniversaries. Let’s take LinkedIn for example. I have a low six-digit LinkedIn user number, which means I was in the first 150k customers. A few years into its existence, I decided I was getting enough value and that I would pay for a premium membership. A few years after that, I decided I was not getting any value for what I was paying and I cancelled my subscription. Somehow in the middle of that experience I went from being their customer to being their product.
There is a similar sort of feeling I get when I play online games. I have played World of Warcraft off and on since The Burning Crusade Expansion. We had a two-to-three season run with Fortnite in our household where even my wife would jump on the PS4 and squad up.
This weekend was the first time I reopened Fortnite to take a look at it in a long time. I gotta admit it was a pretty alien experience.
So what happened? Let’s try to figure that out.
Fortnite’s early seasons did some very interesting things. They attracted a reasonably casual audience. You could log in every day and pick up a new quest. The quests were largely simple and you had a window of multiple days to complete them. The advantage to this system was that if you were terrible with shotguns, for example, then you could let that quest time-out over a couple of days and you would still get other interesting quests on a daily basis. The threshold of risk and commitment was exceptionally low for a pretty significant payout. I think this was a magical system and if it was on Yelp, I would give it five stars.
A curious thing happened next. A competitive battle royale game that was a better “gamer game” came out called Apex Legends. It was by all of my measures a better product, except it was not as popular as Fortnite. We can only guess at the reasons for that. While the gameplay felt better, the graphics were clearly “less cartoony” than Fortnite. Also, they had a pretty rigorous meta system that I considered more challenging and required more risk and a higher degree of commitment to be successful.
I think you can probably see where this is going.
I must not be the only person who thought their meta system was better. It made itself felt a few seasons later inside of Fortnite. The more complex meta system was more “gamery”, and as a family of filthy casuals we just did not find it appealing.
While I can appreciate the thought process that went into it, on the surface you could make a snotty comment about doing “fast follows” on less successful games. I do not recommend racing another company to second place if you are already winning the race. I do know that we went from an eye-popping amount of cosmetic goods purchases each month to zero very quickly.
I mentioned World of Warcraft earlier as a business that struggles with the same issue. There is this dichotomy between the casual gamer and the core gamer. I will say that World of Warcraft has done a better job of servicing both groups at the same time than most live online games out there, which is a tremendous feat.
Believe it or not, this has something to do with LinkedIn. Much like there are casual gamers and core gamers in online games, there are also different kinds of professionals who use a service like LinkedIn. Initially LinkedIn catered more to a casual crowd and focused on empowering and rewarding people for building and maintaining networks. I remember having conversations with people about how high the bar used to be to get someone to accept an invite to your network. LinkedIn figured out that the casual network building also serviced another customer with deeper pockets: The hiring manager. At some point there was a transition inside of LinkedIn to provide greater product support for the higher margin business.
At that point there is this weird free fall in feature development for customers you have, in favor of making features for customers you want.
It is a difficult place to be and, unfortunately, it is a common one. I have found that if you stare long and hard enough at any successful internet company, they go through a painful transition like this every three to seven years. I will tip my hat to Apple here. I think they have probably done the best job of managing their customer expectations over their multiple transitions from business to business.
I think that most consumer internet companies struggle with this when they get to scale because of the pressures of public companies and investors. Nowadays I generally do a pretty good job at realizing when I stop getting value from an internet company, and I turn off the cash-and-eyeballs spigot pretty quickly.
The most painful application I use today that has undergone this kind of transition is Google Maps. Before I say anything further I want to acknowledge freely that I should probably use a different Google product like Waze. There is some stubborn get-off-my-lawn part of me that refuses to use two different mapping applications from the same company. Is it a form of philosophical protest? I do not know. I do know that any time I get selected for feedback and reviews on my experience with Google Maps, I am very unkind in my feedback.
What makes Google Maps so painful for me is the street-by-street directions. I generally have a route mapped out for me on my phone when I travel. Sometimes I will very safely open up the street directions so I can figure out the exit number, or street name for my next turn. Yes, some of us do not have navigation systems built into our cars yet. You can fax me your disappointment later.
The part that burns my soul is when I do open up the application to get the listing of directions, someone inside of Google put me into some sort of A/B test group that indicates that the most important thing that I need to see is an ad for ride-sharing, a parking garage, and a nice little bar graph of how busy the destination is.
The name and number of the exit that I am looking for is accordingly buried deep under the fold (that means it is off the screen for all of you UI/UX language impaired readers).
That is correct. The most important piece of information I consistently need immediately requires an additional swipe to bring up into view.
I am cheerfully including a screenshot of this horrible state of affairs for your viewing pleasure.
Somewhere along the way Google Maps, much like Fortnite, stopped thinking about me as a customer.
I am writing about this because it is a pretty insidious problem. Not a lot of businesses think carefully enough about the customers they have while they are chasing after customers that they want.
When you get into work tomorrow I hope you sit down and think about this.
Are there applications and services you are using that used to be great products and suddenly feel frustrating?
Are you reading feedback from customers that indicate that maybe your own product is one of these?
I could argue that this is a consequence of businesses being heavily fixated on growth. I also think that this is a systemic issue that affects most companies, and that it generally does not get significant mindshare.
Now that I have made you all aware of what is wrong with your once-favorite applications and angry at the lack of mindfulness in thirsty growth-mongering businesses, I want to thank you for reading along! I try to focus on engineering leadership topics, and I cheerfully admit I went a little off topic today.
Let me know by comments, faxes, or carrier pigeon if you approve or disapprove of the randomness of this week’s conversation.
