Product Manager Intern in Meitu
BeautyCam
is the number one camera app in China, with more than 10 million active users. It is an app dedicated to turning the mobile phone into a selfie hack. It subverts the traditional photography effect and automatically beautifies it in an instant.
My Role
During my internship, I worked as a product manager who focuses on photo effects. Mainly, I was responsible for effects innovation and photo-shooting experience.
Contributions
1. For 70% of inactive users, specify beauty parameters to guide the adjustment scheme, output PRD documents and improve the photo conversion rate and storage rate by about 10%.
2. led User surveys: conduct offline user test of “help shooting” function, conduct in-depth interviews with users and formulate 10 + optimization solutions such as “strong guidance”, role assignment, and icon modification
3. needs identification： Through background data tools such as dataface and dataworks, interpret and analyze the user group and function performance effect of beauty camera from the indicators of user transformation and retention rate, and formulate improvement plans.
Selected Problem
2/3 of the users never adjusted the parameter setting
Problem Insights
Root cause： Users don’t know much about beauty parameters
Status quo:
1. Users don’t know how many layers of the effects have
2. Users don’t know much about all the hacks effect
3. Users don’t have the habit of adjusting beauty parameters
Results: users are dissatisfied with current beauty effects
Why does it matter?
1. Actives users fluently adjust the beauty parameter
2. Complaints of effects mostly comes from this 70% of users
So we believe a parameter adjusting guide can
1. Make such users know more about Beauty Cam
2. Increase user’s satisfaction towards Beauty Cam’s effect
3. Encourage users’ engagement in Beauty Cam
4. Ultimately boost # of photos taken per user
User Personas
New users: who have just downloaded the app. They are curious about all the features, they are more tolerant towards pop-up guidance, they have the potential to become loyal users.
Active users: they are loyal and dedicated. Dedicating a lot of time and energy to BeautyCam, they frequently took photos and adjusted parameters. They are okay with some push-up messages and in-app recommendations, but most of the time they have already grown their own approach and preference of using BeautyCam
Old and inactive users: who have downloaded the app for a long time but seldom adjust the parameters or take photos using BeautyCam. They didn’t understand the app so well, they might be intolerant towards complicated pop-up actions., and less interested in learning more about the app. They have a strong purpose when using BeautyCam
Who is the focus?
The main focus group is the “Old and inactive users”, which was the 70% of the users who didn’t adjust their beauty parameters. Not only because they are the largest among all the three groups, but also because they have the lowest cost to become loyal users. Also, there was little effort to be done to convert these groups of users into active ones.
Solution Proposals
Solution 1
the idea of solution 1 was to create a strong user tutorial that breaks all the paraments into different categories and leads users to go through them step by steps. Also, a warning window would pop up if the user wants to leave in the middle.
To evaluate solution 1, its most significant benefit is that user can learn a lot from this tutorial, so in general, it is a very effective proposal. However, at the same time, a lot of users, especially old users could be reluctant to be involved, so discontent might emerge. What’s more, the development cost is also very high, since the tech team and UI team need to develop something new.
Solution 2
To reach a simpler approach, instead of showing every parameter and introducing a detailed tutorial, I proposed another tutorial that only has two steps. During each step, users choose a set of parament combinations. In this way, users do not need to go through everything, so their effort is way lower. And this solution could be easier to develop. However, hiding away all the paraments could still make users unaware of all the useful features and parameters, so the ultimate problem cannot be solved effectively.
Integrate Solution 1 & 2
This third solution is a hybrid of solution 1 and 2. It has the advantage of being simple and representing the features at the same time. The basic idea is to select two parameters, which matter most in all in terms of beautifying effects. So the users could still be introduced to parameters, but they would not be overwhelmed by too much information.
As for effectiveness and development cost, this hybrid solution lays in between of 1 and 2.
In the end, we chose the third solution, and the conversion rate went up by 10%.
