Micro-innovative Design of Internet Products from the Perspective of User Stickiness—Illustrated by the Case of 360 Applets

The originator of micro-innovation is Steve Jobs, who once said: “Small innovations can change the world”. Zhou Hongyi, chairman of Qihoo 360, is the first to propose micro-innovation theories in China. In 2010 he claimed: “The innovation of user experience, which is called micro-innovation, is the key to determine whether Internet applications will be popular or not. Micro-innovation has two principles of innovations. The first one is the focus on details and keeping a close eye on user needs. The second one is moving quickly with constant trial and error” [1].

With the rapidly development of the Internet, the amount of user in the Internet has been increased continuously, and user experience has become the leading role during the development of Internet products, and micro-innovation has been increasingly valuable. Today, micro-innovation has become an innovation approach which aims at touching the users from a single perspective. By continuous accumulation, it changes gradually from quantitative to qualitative, and finally becomes a transformative product [2], which is also more suitable for lightweight applet developer companies.

User stickiness includes user’s length of access time and the ability of social networks to retain users. User stickiness refers to long time usage and frequent access to social media platforms [3]. In the era of the experience economy, user stickiness is an important indicator for evaluating the quality of Internet products. Applets rely on super APP or platform, and provide a ready-to-use and scene-oriented application form. It absorbs the advantages of the original website, which is click-to-use, and use-and-go, and offer user experience of active user interaction of APP meanwhile. The 360 applet is attached to the 360 Safe Browser in which the user’s usage scenario is basically an 8-h office scenario. This paper analyzes users’ characteristics and studies several factors that affect user stickiness.

The 360 Safe Browser has 400 million monthly users, of which male users (52.2%) are slightly higher than female users (47.8%). The users are younger and the urban coverage is balanced. From the perspective of user demands of the 360 Safe Browser, Search, Q & A, and online tools are all in high-frequency demand; Usage scenarios of shopping, social, news, and videos are relatively infrequently demanded; online education, financial management are the needs of special groups, and different types of demand determine the means to increasing user stickiness. From the perspective of user behaviors, IiMedia Research shows that the browser’s feedback speed, the rationality of the information structure, the visual effects of the interface, and the way of prompting information are important factors that influence users to stay or not. In addition, the 360 ​​browser is a highly active product for white-collar who use it more frequently and for a longer period of time. The advantages of the 360 ​​browser provide the services that white-collar users cannot enjoy in mobile, such as the depth and breadth of content, the richness and thoughtfulness of operations, and the intuitiveness of the interface when users are engaged in work and learning activities. The development of the 360 ​​applet should make full use of the advantages of the platform and the user characteristics, and be highly compatible with usage scenarios, and match the usage time to better retain users. As of the end of 2019, there are nearly 1,000 360 applets officially launched, covering more than 30 fields such as education, office, tools, e-commerce, video, life services, games and with 1.5 million daily active users and an average stay of about 7 min.

3.1 Micro-innovation of Demand Design

Micro-innovation is demand-driven innovation. It aims at meeting user needs better [4]. The KANO model defines user needs as three types: basic demand, expectation demand, and excitement demand. This section mainly explains that applet design can better serve users by inspiring the users’ basic needs, as well as continuously innovating the design of expecting and exciting needs.

Basic demand is the core attribute of a product. For example, office tools are more necessary for PC users. Such products are based on expectations demand and their user stickiness can be improved through innovation and excitement. Some products with low-frequency basic demand have to stimulate user needs through tiny designs. For example, shopping is not a necessary high-frequency requirement for users, but some online promotion design will stimulate users’ desire to buy, and some gamified functional designs will enhance user stickiness. Products with very low-frequency basic demand, such as moving, renting, and weddings, especially need to use micro-design to create usage scenarios for users.

The basic demand of office and tool products in 360 applets are strong, and the large-screen features of products such as stock and funds, and online education meet users’ expectation demand. Micro-innovation in demand design requires different attributes of optimization and development for different types of products, which must be integrated into the iterative update process of the product, and the designer must fully understand users to satisfy, guide and retain them gradually (Fig. 1).

Micro-innovative process of demand design

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3.2 Micro-innovation of Interactive Design

Interactivity is used to explain the communication between people and the emerging media in the Internet age. Many researches have shown that there is a positive correlation between interactive design and user stickiness. Compared with mobile products, PC products have natural large screen as an advantage and are more suitable for interactive design.

Now, interaction design for user and system on internet products is mature, such as loading waiting pages, button special effects, screen switching effects, and so on. The interaction between users and content is mainly reflected in two aspects: content customization and content selection [5]. Personalized content customization improves user self-satisfaction and user experience. Products through algorithm recommendation can provide a better browsing experience for user content selection. Although the time for the user of browsing 360 applet content is limited, the message pop-up window and sidebar of the 360 ​​browser can be designed to remind the user to enhance user stickiness. User-to-user interaction is difficult to implement for the 360 ​​applet because of the difficulty of forming a complete user system. The solution is enabling users to log in via WeChat scan code, computer QQ account, and a 360 browser account. Based on this, office tool products need to strengthen collaboration functions or payment functions, entertainment products need to design malls, sharing and community functions, stocks products and online education products need to maintain consistency with WeChat Mini Program experience.

Micro-innovation of interactive design requires optimization and innovation in terms of product interface design, content design, and functional design. It is necessary to make full use of the unique attributes of the product to design, and the product-related functions to improve product interaction, to better reflect the “strong interactive, highly immersive” product features.

3.3 Micro-innovation of Emotional Design

Micro-innovation focuses on the user experience of the product. As the key to improving the user experience, emotional design is the main area where the product should continue to innovate in the process of development.

Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” proposes that human self-emotional needs are the highest-level needs. As people’s consumption level increases and market competition becomes more intense, people’s emotional psychological needs receive unprecedented attention. The rapid development of Internet products makes people no longer satisfied with the basic functions of Internet products, and people’s demand for Internet products is moving in an emotional direction. The product design of applets should retain users for a long time with the characteristics of emotion and humanity. The popular WeChat applet “Little Mochi” (an electronic photo album making tool) that rose to fame in 2019 captures the social needs of the elderly, meets the emotional needs of users who desire to be expressed and understood, and has attracted countless users through simple interface design. At the end of each year, the emotional billing features such as the annual bill introduced by Alipay and the annual song list introduced by the NetEase cloud music have also firmly grasped the hearts of millions of users and enhanced their trust and sense of achievement.

For small program products, emotional design should fully understand user needs, touch user emotions, serve as the basis and starting point for product design, and carry out detailed innovative design based on the integrity of the product (Fig. 2).

Micro-innovative process of product iteration.

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Product design is a gradual process, which requires to meet different needs at different stages [6], and continuous innovation through continuous trial and error. Micro-innovation design is integrated into the product design process through requirements design, interaction design, and emotional design, which can continuously improve the product and achieve good performance.

This chapter takes the 360 applet design practice project I participated in Qihoo 360 as an example to analyze the micro-innovation of demand design, interaction design and emotional design in the process of product design. The positive correlation between the above three micro-innovation design directions and user stickiness is verified through the analysis of user visit duration, user retention rate, user conversion rate and other data analysis (Table 1).

The 360 ​​applet “Good Luck Perpetual Calendar” was originally an online calendar based on daily fortune analysis, with a single functional interface and less user traffic. Our team designed a series of extended requirements based on the high-frequency needs of users to watch the calendar every day during the applet iteration process, such as daily fortune, daily signing, and tricks, etc., which increased the duration of applet users’ stay. When the number of users reached a certain level in the medium-term, our team launched online small game functions (receiving rewards for tasks) by using the gamified operation strategies, and the game rewards cooperated with the 360 ​​Little Vest Charity Program to meet the psychological needs of users to achieve their own value and increased user stickiness. The calendar query and seeking sign functions are the strong interaction points of the good luck perpetual calendar applet. The functional design of the AI ​​fortune robot has enhanced the interaction between the user and the system. During the continuous optimization of the interaction design, the user retention rate has been effectively improved. It is expected that the store and community functions will be launched later in the product to enhance the interaction between users and content and users.

Figure 3 is a data visualization of effects of some product iterations on user sticky growth. The average daily active amount, the retention rate and conversion rate of the user the next day show an upward trend during the update iteration. The length of the user’s stay fluctuates greatly in the early period while the data has gradually stabilized with the continuous expansion of the scale of users.

User visit duration data display.

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The advent of the applet Internet era has brought many opportunities and challenges for product developers and enterprises and user stickiness has gradually become the focus of creators. This article takes the new 360 applet platform as the research object, and proposes three micro-innovation design methods of demand design, interaction design and emotion design. Based on this, applet products can effectively improve user stickiness through the iterative process of micro-innovation. These three design directions will also provide methods and ideas for micro-innovative design in the era of applet Internet.