Study of consumer perception towards new feature introduction mechanisms

Abstract

With the fast-paced release of features, it becomes important that users are aware of the new features before they can adopt it. We have tried to understand the behavior and perception of users with respect to new feature releases with the help of interviews and surveys. Coupled with our secondary research, we found email, blogs, and in-app notifications to be the most commonly used approaches for new feature introduction. These channels are not mutually exclusive and need to be used together for better results as we found that users had low recall when only one channel was used. The type of feature release, the time of feature release as well as the platform (Android/iOS) play an important role in the method of feature introduction whereas demographic variables like age, gender etc. do not show any significant difference. We conducted conjoint analysis on in-app notification method of feature release and found that tooltip is the most favored due to it being interactive and temporary. However, the importance of attributes changes significantly with the platform in question. Next, we find that updates with user-centric email headings fare much better than product-centric headings. For notifications, icons with clear message like “1” (number of notifications), or “UPDATE” (type of notification) perform better than unclear icons like “!”. We recommend that only certain type of features that the user might be interested in knowing about, should be introduced. Also, the features should be introduced at a time when the user is scrolling the app at leisure and not when he wants to get something done on the app or dissatisfied with the app. We also identified that current users should not be the only target audience; new features should be introduced to prospective past and new users too who can benefit from the new feature.