dScout CEO Michael Winnick on Modern Research and How We Live Now | #ProductSF

At Product sf, Descout CEO Michael Winick shares his research about how people interact with mobile technology. This presentation was recorded at Product sf, an event hosted by Greylock Partners that brings together founders, PMs and product leaders to talk about the challenges of building new innovative products that change lives and create habits. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com now.

We'Re going to move into a section that's really about kind of data building, engagement, creating habits, and thinking about kind of the whole world. So I'm really excited to bring up Michael Winick. Michael is the founder and CEO of dscout and he's been doing a ton of really interesting research and is working to reshape the research landscape to kind of really understand how people use products, especially in this physical and digital era. Previously, he was a manager and partner at something called Gravity Tank, where he worked with a lot of industries to create exponential growth. And he has really deep expertise in mobile and digital innovation and a real passion for kind of developing teams and products that can execute better and faster. I'm really excited because I think this is research. We all heard that people look at their phones 150 times a day and nobody really knows what that means. And Michael went and started with that question and really tried to find the next answer. So please welcome Michael.

Thank you so much. It's great to be with you guys today. Really excited to talk a little bit about research in general, or what I call modern research, and then actually spend some time digging in and showing you some. Some numbers and some information. So with that, we'll just hop right in here. So I think it's a really great time to be doing research because so much is changing right now, right? So we live in a time of incredible change. We'll talk more about that where kind of everything we do is different. And that makes research a lot more interesting. Right. I've done research on like, how people buy toothpaste. It's not as interesting as a lot of the things that you guys are working on, but it's not just that it's more interesting, it's that there's a chance to really drive much more impact. I did much of my research career has really been built around understanding and kind of documenting the rise of mobile. I remember doing a project in 2009 for an organization looking at kind of the next three to five years of mobile driven by research turned into concepts.

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And that project resulted in that single project, resulted in billions and billions of dollars of value, generation of which that company took advantage of a small amount of what was discovered. But if we looked at the total impact of the insights and the concepts, nearly 90% of them were commercialized, which is crazy. Right? So that's one of the powers of getting in really trying to understand something rigorously, a change rigorously, and then figuring out how to take advantage of it. So I think a second thing that I think is interesting is really that research has always been driven by people that have this intense curiosity. Historically, research or the field of research was driven by what was called fast moving consumer packaged goods companies, which if you've ever worked with a consumer packaged goods company, is not really what they should be called in my experience. Right. But now it's technology. And I think it's because obviously you guys are in an intense competition and there's this intense curiosity. And I think, you know, Sarah's story was great because I think where that curiosity plays out is really at the intersection between numbers and people. Right. So if you're a product leader, product manager, I think it's really critical to get to the questions that are below what the numbers are telling you. Every cohort analysis, every yield curve, it's, it's showing you something, but it should be leading the questions, who, why? How is that happening? Why is it happening? How do we change that? All of the fundamental questions. And I think great product leaders, great entrepreneurs aren't happy with pat answers. They're always kind of pushing, they always have kind of that desire to dig in there and go deep. A third thing I think that's really exciting about where we are is that we have new tools to explore kind of the rapid shifting reality. As I mentioned before, most research technology was pioneered by consumer packaged goods companies in the middle of last century. Focus groups and questionnaires were built to understand what kind of flavor soap you want. It was pretty effective, relatively speaking, for those sorts of questions. But now I think we have deeper questions and harder questions and we have a raft of new research techniques and that are available to answer those questions. So whether it's AB testing, social listening, machine learning, there's lots and lots of them. At dscout, we do a lot of mobile tracking as well as kind of having people take that tracking of implicit data and then push it into explicit feedback around key moments that matter in a product experience or matter to them. So we try to combine both the behavioral side of what people are doing with a more visceral side of what they're thinking and what they're perceiving. At those moments, because I think while users can't tell you necessarily what they want and sometimes they can't tell you why they're doing something, their perceptions and understanding their perceptions I think are critically important to kind of knowing if you're heading on the right direction or to kind of start framing up what's going on. So I'm going to kind of talk about how those three things come together around a shift that we all probably know very well in this room, which is the idea of mobile eating the world. And I think what I want to spend some time talking about is to my previous slide, this is probably the single greatest change to daily life since the car. I'm not talking about most important technology change per se or, or most significant innovation. I'm talking about how people live their everyday, how rapidly every day has become very different. As Josh mentioned, publicly, privately, companies know a lot about this. Publicly there's not that much shared about what it really looks like and how it really plays out in people's days. So we wanted to take a swing and this is a small study and I'll talk a little bit about the study itself to try to understand a little bit more and add some dimension to, to what this really looks like on a daily basis. And so we did this research with Android users. We recruited them through the dscout pool. They tended to be a little bit younger, a little bit more affluent, a little bit more tech forward than the average United States, balance for gender in line with ethnicity. And the reason we had to use Android is we can't really do this kind of tracking on iOS, so love to, would be very happy to partner with Apple if there's any Apple people in the room to do this, but we can't. And then what we did is, so we recruited people and again, these people were explicitly part of the study. This wasn't blinded. They knew they were signing up for it. That tends to be the way that we do what we do. We had them do a guesstimate and a baseline just to answer some basic questions. Then we had them basically track a whole bunch of stuff for five days. And we basically tracked everything that we could, which I'll tell you about, and then we revealed their scores to them and then had them reflect on them. So in general, over that roughly five day, four and a half day period, we had 94 participants. You guys can kind of see the data here, and lots and lots of touch events because we really wanted to look at taps, swipes, clicks, in addition to just session Use. So let's look at an average user. So an average user spent about 145 minutes on their phone in the day, roughly 76 sessions. So not quite as high as the 150. With 2,617 discrete interactions, seems like a decent number. Let's look at a heavy user here. Almost double the number of interactions. Right. Many more sessions. Obviously a lot of time is spent on the phone. 5427 discrete interactions a day. Right. And so what's interesting about this data, I think, and kind of trying to look for a pattern in the data is when we talk about, obviously the session counts and stuff like that, I think that has an impact. But when people start hearing the touch number, it generally kind of starts resonating with them in a different way. Let me show you a little bit about what this looks like on a user by user basis. So on the top here, you guys, we see an average user. You can kind of see that their phone is kind of a background activity until a pretty set period of time. These are session blocks. And that really picks up kind of when they get home from work or after dinner. And it's a fairly standard day. You're going to see that none of the sessions are terribly long. Maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes on the bottom. This is Corey, who's a student in New Hampshire. And you can see Corey's data is pretty intense. Right. Basically, Corey is living on his phone and checking in with the real world every once in a while. That's pretty much what it looks like. So he's just there all the time. And while the sessions are short, they're so glued together that there's kind of like they're basically mega sessions. Right. So you can see there's very little, very little downtime. A lot of his usage was on Tinder. He was very busy. He was very committed that day. But you guys get a sense of just like what it actually starts looking like and feeling like on a per person, an individual basis. If you're ever sharing research data, the big charts are great. It's always great to bring it down to a couple people and kind of show their experience just resonates in a different way. To that end, I'll bring it to myself. So this is a birthday cake that my wife and children gave to me a few years ago, focused on something that evidently I love, which is my iPhone. It's actually my ninth anniversary with iPhone. Come on. Isn't that exciting? Thank you. Thank you. It's been an amazing run. We really love each other, sadly, doing very rigorous math, because I am definitely a heavy user. I did the test, and unfortunately, it is true, I have a problem. I've touched my phone probably about 16 million times since I've owned it, which is probably the most. I've done something over nine years beyond maybe walking. And even that is debatable. So, okay, so from my own reaction, certainly when we went back to participants, we have videos that show everybody's reactions, but I figured I would just kind of sum it up with a series of emoji, appropriately because it's very consistent. Okay. Shock, sadness, shruggy, meh. Well, so what? Okay, and then we'll kind of talk about love. And I think I'll come to that in a minute. I think the one that's really interesting in here, and we'll kind of come back to a few times, is sadness. Right. I mean, there's surprise. And I think the sadness isn't really. It's kind of a sense of guilt that people have around where their attention is going. And so there's some quotes from participants like, oh, my God, I could have been spending that time with my children, you know, or I could have been doing X, Y and Z. And I think that I'm not a tech apologist. I'll probably repeat that throughout the rest of the presentation. But I do think that the sadness is an interesting thing for us to think about, but also to innovate against. Anyways, lastly, to love. And I think part of the reason that people go through this is that people realize as you have them think about this and ponder kind of how much they're using their devices, they generally come back to the point that they feel like they are in a deeply obsessed, engaged, addictive, maybe the word relationship, that in some ways they know they get a lot of benefits from and they're kind of powerless to change. And so if we look at what that looks like, this is 24 hours, people going to sleep, sleeping, waking up. And these are basically just their interactions. And so a couple things to chart and note here. One is, during the course of our study, 83% of users touch their phone at least once between 1 and 5am, which is interesting. So almost everybody at some point was up in the middle of the night interacting with their phone. It's really the first thing they do in the morning. You know, good morning, I'm so excited to see you phone. Right. It's usually the last thing that is being done at night. The peak interaction time. So new prime time is 6:30. Okay. So that's when most people are doing most things on their phone. 6:30pm that's the new hour for when people are heavily interacting. Obviously this is a graph about obsession to a degree and our obsession with mobile technology and what it brings us in our lives. I also want to mention a tiny bit about the idea of friction. And I think one of the other challenges, I think inside of all of this heavy interaction and interaction is literally interaction. It's the thing you do between things, right. Often in certain instances it is a direct result, like kind of playing a game. But often interaction is, is kind of transaction costs, right. It's transition time or transfer time from one thing to another. And I think part of what's interesting about this data and I think part of where I see some technologies going is starting to look at this more critically about actually how much interaction friction is in the experiences that we're making and creating. Kind of build on these points. One thing that was surprising is the amount of, to kind of more the addictive side is the amount of session activity, which was purely in lock screen modes. So very short interactions, almost kind of nervous energy. Click, click and check. Extremely short interactions. Right. And the amount that was there. And then also I think how rare it was that people were really getting into deeper sessions. They were usually one app, two apps. It was very rare that they were interacting with more than four things in a given session. Again, the sessions are so short that it's not that's popping out, popping back in. So you could kind of look at link sessions. But in general, inside a individual session, the things people were interacting with tended to be very, very few. And that also points to a crazy Pareto chart, which is that 5% of the apps in our study accounted for 80% of all touches. So it's a little off the normal 80, 20. Right. Unsurprisingly, I think you guys would know very well which are the leading apps and services in here. And that's been well documented in other studies. But just to kind of drive it home, right. Facebook and Alphabet accounted for 43% of all touches. Obviously this would be a different story on iPhones, but you know, Apple would be in the mix. Aside from that, I think it would be fairly similar. What you're looking at here is the blue and the black represent Facebook, just individual days, how much share of interaction Facebook has, how much share of interaction Google has. And then the leftover right is kind of where other apps and service providers play. We also tried to look a little Bit. And we're trying to do more research on this, trying to understand the signature of particular apps and services. And we kind of noticed that there were pretty distinct sets of. Of apps and services that people were using. And so for one group, we're gonna talk about best friends. Best friends. You love interacting with best friends. You're talking all the time. Their usage is almost a contextual. And what I mean by that is it doesn't matter what time of day where you are, you're interacting with them at high volume. Right. You have this very, very deep relationship. Of course, almost all of these are communication apps. Right. So because, you know, communication is to humans as catnip is to cats. Right. So we really like to communicate a lot. I want to talk a tiny bit about Snapchat. That's a little bit of an odd, spiky chart. There's a couple things going on there. First off is Snapchat is a bit of a. From a sampling error, generally Skew is much younger, so our sample was less represented amongst a younger audience. And the second thing is Snapchat has a lot of, generally a lot of platform dynamics that lead it to perform much better and at a much higher level, typically on iOS than on Android. But I still think you're seeing a tiny bit of the fact that its usage is fairly elevated kind of throughout the day. I want to contrast that with this idea of apps that I'm calling employees. So different than best friends. You guys, I'm sure, are all familiar with jobs to be done. If it's a Silicon Valley room, I feel like jobs to be done is really hard to apply to best friends, but it works really well with employees. Employees, you have a lot of them, you bring them in to do certain tasks, and they tend to have these much clearer usage signatures in terms of when they're used and when they're invoked during the day. So Netflix, since this is a mobile study, you guys can see it's pretty light usage until late at night. That's the winding down ritual. There's probably another Netflix curve in front of that, which would be on your computer, maybe before you decide to get in bed with your phone. Uber. Really predictable when it's invoked and when it's used. I think what's really interesting. And then obviously the tinder curve is a bit spikier, but you see the biggest spikes basically are the morning check in. Right? Check in at the end of the day. How'd we do the Netflix? And Tinder spikes tend to correlate interestingly so Netflix and Chill is alive and well in our data. So I think the interesting thing here is the idea where when we typically talk about habit and engagement and obsession, I think we're often talking about what Best Friend Land looks like. We're talking all the time. We're doing everything together. It's great. Come on. More. More. Kind of this to a degree, almost like a needy assumption of high frequency. And I think what's interesting in employee interactions is actually looking at how much value you can generate per interaction and actually pressing on that. So if you think about the value generated per Uber interaction or the value generated per Netflix interaction, Tinder, Priceless. Can't put a price on that. But you kind of get the idea that there's a very different kind of thing going on, which I'll come back and talk about in a minute. Okay, so you guys might be doing the shrugie yourselves. So what? Who cares? I thought maybe we'd try to bring it, kind of close it out with a few implications. So I mentioned before that I'm not a tech apologist or a Luddite. This is a great article that was in the New York magazine recently with these really amazing illustrations of kind of very classic paintings with smartphones shoved in the middle of them. You know, I do think this kind of part of the focus on the way that we did this research and research we hope to continue doing is try to get a little bit more of a visceral feel for what it does look like to live in the moment economy, what life does look like now. To me, it's understandable that there's a desire or there's a cry like, put your phone down, but I also think that's utterly futile. Right. And I think some of our data has shown that. I think this is a problem for future technology to solve. Before I get into that a little bit, I mentioned this before. Hey, if you're a best friend in this world, congratulations. Greylock will probably write you a really big check. You're going to do really well, I think. Great place to play, obviously, very competitive. But most of you, I would guess, aren't working on best friends. If I had to take a guess, you're working on something that looks a lot more like employees. And you know what's annoying? It's an employee that tries to be your best friend. Right. And so I think it's important as you think about how your app works and what form of habit you're looking to create, to think about what a great employee looks like as opposed to a great best friend and to design the experience accordingly. The other thing is, I think it's super important to understand the moment that you're called up for what is the context of that moment? I said these are contextual. What's going on around that moment? What does the competition look like? Not necessarily in your category, but for the moment that you're invoked. And I think this is interesting in terms of as you're thinking about your product or service, understanding that the way that these things work is very different. Lastly, I think I also said on this front before, but just to kind of hit it home, low intensity interaction, high value per interaction, I think is a really interesting place to be playing. A couple other thoughts. At the beginning I talked about the idea that it's a time of rapid change in real everyday life. Of course, whatever. Every decade people say this about the decade that they're in. But what I think is cool now is like, how is this going to look in three years? I actually don't really know. Are we at peak interaction? Are we just getting started? You know, what's going to happen and how is that going to change this picture in terms of what we're interacting with and where and how? And the other thing I would say is I think what's interesting about the next generation of technologies is to a degree, I think many of them are a response to this interaction laden kind of user experience that's been developed thus far and that what you're going to start looking at is things that we might be interacting with them, but I don't think they're necessarily, if done well, they might not feel like we're interacting. So that comment I said about friction or removing that friction and kind of going directly to experience, you know, when you go to a grocery store, I don't know, people in San Francisco may not do that anymore, but sometimes I still do that. Right. And you look around, you don't necessarily think of every glance and gesture and picking things up as an interaction, but of course they are. But that consciousness of interaction I think may go away with this next range of technologies. So I don't know the answers to those questions, but I'm sure excited to find out. Okay, that's all I got. Thank you guys so much. Really, really appreciate.