

Ask HN: Do any small profile changes increase usage in your app? - nr123
http://rypple.com/blog/2009/09/21/uploading-your-logo/
We found that adding an avatar can increase response rates in Rypple by 20%.
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patio11
Yes, small profile changes increase usage in my app.

However, I've got to be that guy because "natural experiments" like this one
are tempting and _highly suboptimal_. Finding a correlation between uploading
a picture and higher response rates isn't useless, but it isn't fabulously
useful, either: the photos might well be a symptom of an account that someone
has put more effort into, and people could be responding to the higher quality
pitches, etc.

Happily, there is a solution: the humble A/B test. Take the SAME company with
the SAME text targeting the SAME list and let half of them see your mug shot,
while half of them get nothing there. THEN you can have a statistically
quantifiable amount of confidence that the lift in response rates is actually
due to the photo, as opposed to due to unmeasured causes.

~~~
jsatok
Hey, Jordan here from Rypple.

I spoke to the team about the stat, and we agree with you that the uploading
of a logo might not be the only cause for that increase in response rates, but
we feel it is a big reason. Based on a sample of our enterprise customers, we
feel this is a valid stat that shows the increase in usage across all users.

We A/B test a lot of different things in our app, and I agree it would be
interesting to further test this stat.

Thanks for your comments!

