i agree with you here but sounds like you are mostly talking about "Early Adopters"?
Power users of a product who get deep recurring value from your product are get to analyze. they may be mostly earlier adopters at first but hopefully will grow to be your core customer.
thanks for the comment. agree that chasing after the "wrong" customers is a whole pitfall unto it's own. Nothing here says you need to chose your user based on existing top of funnel. Often times those are earlier adopters who try something and leave.
When thinking about your products critical user journey you need to think about ideal cases: who is the User, what is their Goal and in what Context they are using your product. Lots of work goes into understanding each of these to hone in on specifics for each product and definitely much more detail than this first article.
completely agree. most "Critical User Journey" articles are written by UX or product designers.
this article was meant to be an introduction to show how any product, startup, or company can use User Journeys as a framework for product development (not just product design) and how if executed in a systematic way can unblock growth.
thanks andrew. glad that you thought it was valuable.
you summed it up quite well. it is very easy to lose sight of what your users go through for the first time every day when you are the one adding to the system to extend or expand it.
Sorry everyone for the sudden notice. This has been wrecking us for some time and we went back and forth about how to handle this timeframe. Having a long graceful transition period for our users would have been great but for reasons that we could not control Fridge as it currently stands had to be shut down quickly.
Unfortunately there are tough decisions (especially in startups) to make and tougher consequences to live with even if they come with a silver lining at the end.
We remain dedicated to building great products and hopefully things will become more clear after the dust settles.
Public groups or events on FB could work but they suffer two things:
- people not invited, not involved, or random people start to get messages about the event and it becomes noise and adds to the clutter. Interactions around specific and esoteric groups, events or interests in a public forum isn't really the best way to spur real conversations.
- be yourself: post, message, comment, heart what you want in the confines of that topic, event, group. Fridge takes permissions and privacy around access to profiles, pictures out of the picture and lets you post and share what you want with exactly the right people
it all comes down to social context and not having a one size fit all hierarchy of relationships.
Fridge lets you connect with friends, family, strangers you just met, co-workers, soon to be acquaintances, etc... around specific events, relationships, or groups.
Don't have to add anyone as friends or worry about privacy or permissions. Clustered social graphs mimic how you meet and interact with your real life network.
Some of these may work on FB but many topical, time and event based relationships would not work within the FB friend request structure.
Yeah… we completely agree. The idea of a "personal network" is definitely right but the real problem is that not everyone fits the same mold of "friends". much less a subset of 50 people? do you give your cousin the cliff over your coworker of 5 years for that 50th spot?
The notion of "clustered social graphs" where you can share and update what you want/when you want and ignore/archive/or leave when you are done is more accurate on how people interact.
The Frid.ge has been contemplating how this maps out as a mobile experience and sharing what you want when you want with who you want. How is that limited to just a one group of people all the time?
The idea of a personal network is a good one but the problem is that there isn't just 1 personal network but clusters of networks. how do you address the different type of interaction in a limited network of only 50?
definitely... in the middle of a large rewrite to address server side things as well as front facing speed/usability issues.
after the dust settles and we get the fridge humming we should be able to have some meaningful data...
not sure the fridge is "another" social network but rather clusters of networks where people follow interests rather than other people... eh, semantics i guess but feeds into how we are growing the product.
not quite. (and definitely welcome the discussion)
all Fridges will always be accessible to only those in the group. if you aren't in the group you don't have access to it. we are already seeing users create Fridges for larger and more "open" groups like conferences, events, interest groups, etc... and the members are the ones that share the invite URLs to add members.
the main point here is that members of one group do NOT have any information or access about the others groups you are in unless you share it. the group members of a Fridge can decide how open or closed they want their group to be.
in the future an administrator can customize group settings to enable a group to be "listed" or "discoverable" allowing organizations or events that want to open to be open. it would definitely be transparent to the members and settings ONLY for that group with their other groups closed, private, and not listed...
the social graph we are building are around specific context, relationships, events, and interests that you actually care about versus linear connections that linger in a 1 to 1 friend based social graph. single Fridges might be single serving and temporal but as more are created the relationships that are built/formed/carried on to others are what is valuable.
monetization is definitely in the works with a few things cooking and not necessarily from freemium offerings only.
while the right acquisition is fine and dandy we are trying to build something that has legs...
Power users of a product who get deep recurring value from your product are get to analyze. they may be mostly earlier adopters at first but hopefully will grow to be your core customer.