Starholder

The Last Network - Chapter 12

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The Push

Paolo’s ass had been torn apart by Rabbit, then by Kendra, and finally by both just to make sure he understood what was at stake. He didn’t need those calls, though. He knew exactly what was at stake. Peared was dead in the water and bleeding money. It wasn’t his fault that the product was a dud, but it was his responsibility to fix it.

The bitch of it was, when Paolo’s team sat down and explained how it worked, users loved it. The challenge was taking that in-person demonstration and turning it into an app-based experience. For the last month they had worked around the clock testing demos, videos, tutorials, and prompts. All their efforts only slightly improved conversion rates. They never came close to how the in-person demonstrations performed.

There was something fundamentally different about Peared. His AI could not find it. His data scientists could not find it. His user experience specialists could not find it. They were following best practices and previously successful patterns. By every known measure of the modern internet, the thing should work.

He sat down with Cristina Gomez, NAM’s director of customer feedback. Her appearance was always presentation-ready. You could pick her out of the break room and drop her on Madison Avenue and she wouldn’t miss a beat. Today though, she was all tired eyes, chipped polish, and dark roots. She had just completed her third round of customer surveys. The first two had been rather clinical and specific. For her third pass, she decided to go blue sky and see if it was something beyond buttons and interfaces.

“So, what do we have?” Paolo asked, hands running through his hair.

“Awkward.”

“What?”

“Embarazoso.” She flipped into Spanish to make sure he got it.

“In what way?”

“They describe it a lot of different ways, but it happens right at the beginning. There’s this pause, an emptiness. Neither side knows what to do. It just sits there, getting bigger and bigger and then they bail out.” She broke eye contact with Paolo, looking past him, out the window, her gaze drifting further and further away as she described the gap.

“When we do the demos...” Paolo thought out loud.

“Ah yes, the demos.” Cristina snapped back to the table. “Where we welcome them in, spend five minutes chatting with them over coffee. Where they get to see someone else using the system while we tell them what we are going to do and what they should do. That whole setup time is about getting rid of the awkward.” She finished.

“We tested an in-app tutorial with simple tasks to perform.”

“And?”

“People did them, but it didn’t solve the problem of abandonment. They were another dead end.” Paolo hunched over the table, rubbing his forehead, mentally recounting all the ways they had failed.

“That’s because afterwards, the awkwardness kicked in. You need to figure out a way to get past that. You need to give them a push.” Cristina said.

“A push. Interesting. That’s something new we can look at.”

“This is a psychology problem Paolo, not a design problem. You have to get them engaged in a common cause before that awkward moment happens. Have them chase Pokemons or something.”

Cristina was right. They had been looking at the problem the wrong way. That was the thing about data. If you have enough of it, you think it can solve any problem. It was time to put the machines aside and take a different approach. Paolo realized he needed someone skilled in a different set of dark arts. It was time to call Evan Willis up.

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Scene 12


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