How would you improve Google Hangout?

1- Description: What is Google Hangout? GH is a unified communication service that enables text, voice or video chat either one-on-one or in a group. Google Hangout is aimed at enterprises communication and consisted of 2 main features: Google Meet (video communication service); Google Chat (instant messaging service).

2- Could you please clarify the objective of the improvement: would you like to increase revenue? or increase the number of active users? Improve retention or engagement? Increase the number of new users? On which platform would you like to have improvements: mobile, tablets, PCs?

3- Let’s assume that there is a lot of churns from the application on a mobile platform, so let’s focus on improving the retention on mobile.

4- User groups:

a. Personal users

b. Professional users

c. Enterprise-users

Given the fact that the personal and professional users are market segment dominated by other applications like WhatsApp, Skype, we will focus on developing a good experience for Enterprise-users.

 

5- Let’s identify some pain points met by the enterprises-users on a mobile platform:

a. During a video call, the application forces the mobile phone to restart;

b. Sharing multimedia files is very difficult because it takes too much time;

c. Since the last update, users do not get notifications anymore;

d. Since the last update, users have difficulties opening the application: the home screen freezes

e. It is not possible to share a group chat by a link

f. Users meet difficulties to join already started conversations

g. Users get undesired update requests

h. The application consumes a lot of battery

i.  The users would like to have vocal calls

 

6- Let’s list some solutions the pain points encountered:

Solution	Impact on user	Complexity
Identify and correct the bug which restarts mobile phones during the video calls	High: lots of complaints about it Create a very bad user experience which is very dissuasive	Medium: the feature is already functional; the bigger part of the job is already done
Add a feedback toolbox after every video/vocal call: 5 stars to rate and a message area for qualitative feedback	High: let the users know they are listened, easily identify the pain points of users	Low: easy to implement the feature
Implementation of a compression algorithm	High: accelerate the experience of sharing multimedia files Which is very regular for enterprise users	Medium: depends on the architecture of the application, but a lot of solutions are available, there will be a need for adaptation
Activate the notifications	Medium: important to improve the retention	Low: easy to do, because the solution existed in the previous update versions
Identify and correct the bug which freezes the home screen	High: create a very bad user experience at the entry of the app	Medium: need time for investigations, to identify the source of the problem and correct it
Add the sharing feature, for a group chat	Medium: improve the number of users able to join a call, less critical than high problems listed up here	Low
Add an invite feature in a video call	Medium: group call is frequently used in an enterprise environment	Low
Allow users to join an already started video call	Medium: improve the number of users able to join a call, less critical than high problems listed up here	Low
Refactoring activity in order to lighten the application and its effect on the battery	Medium: bad user experience	High: need lots of resources
Add the feature that allows users to change the theme	Medium: Nice-to-have feature	Low

 

7- To evaluate the improvement of GH, let’s identify Some metrics to focus on:

Growth of mobile user WoW

Growth of # of video call/user/week

Avg Time spent / Week / user

Growth of Pro class users WoW

 

8- Wrap Up: the goal of the improvement is to improve retention on mobile users. With assessment based on impact on user, and complexity of development. Let’s prioritize 5 solutions as following:

Add a feedback toolbox after every video/vocal call: 5 stars to rate and a message area for qualitative feedback

Identify and correct the bug which restarts mobile phones during video calls

Identify and correct the bug which freezes the home screen

Implementation of a compression algorithm

Activate the notifications

Clarification Qs:

1. What is it that we are attempting to improve? – Assumed revenue
2. Is it scoped to a particular segment of the market/users? – No
3. Is it for a particular platform? – mobile/desktop – No

Google Hangouts description: It is a product that allows users to communicate with one another over chat messages, audio call and video call. Group calls are also possible. There are special versions of this product for education and enterprises. Users can share docs, images etc and also share their screen

What is the problem that Google Hangouts solves? : Enabling communication with one or more users and collaboration

Goal for improvement is to monetize it and increase revenue.

 

Personas:

1. Business professionals
2. Students
3. Long distance couples
4. Health professionals
5. Gamers
6. Shoppers

I want to focus on shoppers as the product is already quite mature and serving the #1, #2, #3 personas well.

Shopping/Fashion industry is a multi billion dollar industry alone in the US and even if we get ~10% of the business, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

The criteria I used to prioritize the above is : Most market share, most impact, willingness to pay

 

Usecases/Needs

Now, let’s look at the usecases/needs for this persona, keeping goal of the product in mind:

1. Personal shopper: Need expert and professional opinion on what to buy – what’s the latest fashion, trendy

2. Friends and family opinion: Need others’ subjective opinions (family and friends) on what to finally buy, what looks good

3. Make videos and share with others about the collection they own

4. To look at all the options at a store/interact with the store while sitting at home

 

Prioritized based on impact on user and impact on product as a whole:

I will be going ahead with #4 : To look at all the options at a store/interact with the store while sitting at home. As for the other pain points, i dont see much of scope from a reven stand point as it is either not very impactful or there exist other solutions like simply video calling or reading up on blogs.

But a big need for shoppers is to get to know all of the options at a store without going in. This saves time and energy for them even if it means splurging a little extra $$

 

Solutions:

1. On-call advisor: Stores will have a dedicated hangouts chat room wherein users can ping then and ask questions pertaining to their store or items that they carry, discounts etc. This can be also done through bots with google assistance before the store person comes online. (at some point users pay for this)

2. Using AR: Store apps/websites have Hangouts extensions and user can try out the items on their avatar or an image of themselves live. This will help users to try out items from the comfort of their homes. (at some point users pay for this)

3. Host video tours: Have google calendar integration with hangouts and allow users to book appointments for stores to show their collection in the form of a video tour. (at some point users pay for this)

 

Prioritization matrix:

	customer value	tech effort	Scope for revenue	scope for future expansion
Solution 1	high	high	more	#3 and #1 can be combined
Solution 2	highest	high	most	Most (all 3 solutions can be integrated in this one sol. Also ads can be introduced and it can be turned into a two sided marketplace)
Solution 3	medium	medium	low	#3 and #1 can be combined

Go-to-market strategy:

Right off the bat, there is no incentive for the stores to pay for this service and have hangouts integrated with their app or site. So fiurst step is to acquire a large user base who adopts to this feature which will then compell stores to also adopt and can be turned into a two-sided marketplace with integration of Google Pay as well.

So to do so, we need to incorporate ML and google assistance at the beginning that would present to users the choices with the items they are lookign for and AR technology will help the users to try on the items. At a later point, we can integrate the #1 and #3 solutions into this which will involv the stores too and eventually both sides start paying.

High tech is involved and probably, will take more time to develop but it is high reward if we get even a small % of the market share.