How Pocket meets the five qualities of a truly great product

I stumbled upon a great post by current Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner titled – What makes a truly great product. It enlists the five great qualities that a product should have in order to be a class apart. Having been an Android user for long now, I started using the Pocket app two years back. As a long-time customer of Pocket, I realized how well Pocket was able to satisfy those qualities. That pushed me to write this post wherein I'll try to map how the dimensions that Jeff talked about relates to Pocket as a product.

Delivers on a singular value proposition in a world-class way

Pocket is a productivity app with an amazing user experience. Its value proposition is "Save your favourite articles, videos and other web-content and view it later anywhere, anytime even when you're offline". 

It has focused on delivering this proposition by making itself available on almost any device (tablet, phone, computer) and platform (chrome, android, iOS). I can actually read any saved article anywhere without worrying about the device I'm using or whether I've internet connectivity or not. I can read it in a flight or while I'm on a hike in a dense forest. Practically anywhere and anytime! This is perhaps the main reason why customers are so impressed - its android app has a rating of 4.5 stars on Google Play after 200K reviews!

Simple, intuitive, and anticipates needs

Pocket's user interface is so simple, clean and beautiful that it doesn't need to do any user onboarding the way FB, Twitter, Quora and other internet services do. It's apps across different devices and platforms integrate seamlessly. It anticipates user's needs by making available the saved article in day/night viewing mode, with custom fonts and other formatting options. Pocket gives you unlimited storage space to store your articles, videos and other web content. 

It recently started the Recommendations feature, which suggests the most interesting articles saved to Pocket by millions of users. The recommendations are personalized just for you, based on what you save, read and watch in Pocket. It anticipates the user's interests and serves interesting personalized content. 

Exceeds expectations

If you're a person who enjoys uniformity and consistency while reading, you'll love Pocket. Pocket removes clutter from articles and allows you to adjust text settings for easier reading. This enables standardization of fonts and formatting for all articles available on the web. You'll be reading all your stuff in a single consistent format. 

Its almost as if you're reading different chapters (articles) in one book (the web). However, Pocket never marketed this as a feature, but anyway exceeded users expectations from the product. What Pocket does extremely well is making available all of the articles you wish to view in one place. 

Emotionally resonates

I tend to be a procrastinator at times. Pocket is a procrastinator's delight and a productivity enabler. If you add anything to Pocket, your job is done. It will permanently save that read for you and make it accessible on any device. I discover a ton of content on my phone but I prefer reading them on my laptop, because of the larger form factor. Pocket auto-syncs the content on my phone and laptop, enabling me to read more and save time. 

We don't necessarily need to be connected to the internet while using Pocket, which gives the user a sense of freedom and empowerment. I experienced this while using the app when I was on a long flight and didn't have anything on my hands. I ended up browsing and reading all the good content that I had saved in the past on my phone.

In case you're interrupted while reading, Pocket remembers your last read position and opens the article where you left reading. These kind of small tweaks don't take much effort to develop but subtly make the users feel that the product values your time.

Changes the user's life for the better

Being a voracious reader, I read things related to politics, tech products, investing, current affairs from all over the internet. But it is impossible to read all the stuff that you discover at the moment. I used to bookmark a ton of articles on Chrome browsers on Mobile and Desktop separately. Apart from this, I read Quora and Medium for which I use their reading list and favourite post features. Similarly, many other publishers that I visit have their own "favorites list" feature.

Do you see the problem with the individual bookmarking above? After a while, it became impossible to manage all the awesome content that I discover everyday even after the bookmarks and the reading lists. Pocket greatly simplified my life by helping me track all the good things that I read. Further, Pocket introduced better features to organize and search the saved content if I wish to revisit any content a few years down the row.

Quora's Onboarding, Engagement & Virality Mechanics

Onboarding Users

Quora's sign-up page starts with a powerful value proposition - The best answer to any question - subtly suggesting the user about Quora's ambitions. Quora has a very smooth user onboarding process. It allows you to sign-up either via the most popular sign-up accounts - Google, Facebook or Twitter. This saves the user time, which increases the likelihood of a signup. Otherwise, you can complete a tiny 3-field form to register.

Once, you've completed the registration, it asks you to select at least 10 topics from a list of most popular topics. It asks you to "Find your Facebook friends" by stating that an average person has "34 friends with 17 answers" on Quora. A smart technique to collect more user information by "bribing" the user to see what his FB friends are doing on Quora. It also shows a progress bar on the top so that the user doesn't get impatient with the whole onboarding process.

What follows next is Quora's personalized news feed - a page where you can see the latest happenings with the topics and people you've just followed in the previous step. On the left-hand side, it shows the top stories and the topics trending now. 

It follows with sort of a small introduction note to various important components - News Feed, Answering, Upvoting, Following. The introduction note is always displayed in the right sidebar. It would be more intuitive if the arrows are used to show what part plays what role. For example, if it is talking about upvoting, it should point to the Upvote button, as shown below. Unlike the website, Quora's mobile apps does this highlighting, enhancing the experience.

After the step-by-step introduction, it takes you to page with a semi-completed checklist composed of a few things that will make the user familiar with Quora's basic features. The list shows some of the points to be completed and rest to be checked - It employs a psychological phenomenon called endowed progress effect - people are more likely to finish something if they think they've made progress. Pretty neat!

No matter how simple the product is, it still needs to teach new users how to use and navigate it. If you don’t teach users, the abandonment rates post-signup will be high. In that sense, Quora’s onboarding process is very clean and intuitive, helping new users find friends, people to follow and topics they’re interested in.

User Engagement Tactics

The hardest thing after the user has been brought onboard is to make sure the user regularly uses the product. Once Quora has onboarded a user, it employs several tactics to keep the user engaged and maximize the time he spends on the product. 'Time on product' is an important engagement metric and currently Facebook is the king, with every user spending 20+ minutes every day on the average!


Notifications: Quora notifies the user if someone starts following them or someone has commented on his answer or if there is a new answer to a question one is following. Quora shows notification alerts when user is on the site, and also sends emails for notifications that you are subscribed to.

Quora Weekly Digests: To engage users via email, Quora frequently sends a Quora Digest. For me, I've set it on a weekly schedule, which means one email from Quora per week containing all the popular Questions & Answers related to the topics or the people that I follow. The email's subject is an interesting question instead of some obvious and boring line like "Your Quora Weekly Digest: Most popular topics this week". Personally, the question in the email's subject itself invokes so much curiosity that I'm compelled to open the email every time.

Related Questions: On the right hand side bar of every Question page there are a set of related questions, facilitating question discovery.

Popular Questions in your feed: At the bottom of most pages Quora also shows the "top stories in your feed" bar - Questions and answers that have become viral.

Driving Virality

Social Media Integration: It is very easy to integrate Quora into social media. It allows users to post any Quora activity on their FB timeline. For example, I upvoted an answer on Quora and it is instantly reflected in my facebook feed.

When answering a question, user has the option to share the answer to Twitter and FB through a simple checkbox. This many a times introduces Quora to the user's FB friends or Twitter followers - playing a huge role in getting the word out about Quora.

Whenever you open a Quora link shared on FB, Twitter or any other service, Quora allows you to read the specific post shared without signing up primarily to give you an initial look-and-feel of the service. However, if you get curious and click on any other question or topics on the page, it'll and hide the content in the background until you sign-up or sign-in.

Sharing: At the bottom of every answer, there is an option to share the specific answer to your networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn) or your blogs, or even via email. Personally, I've seen so many of the people on Twitter sharing posts from Quora. Just search "My Quora Answers" on Twitter and you'll know.

Quora's Growth Story

Launched in mid-2011, Quora has fast become one of the top sites for “knowledge” in the QnA space. Quora’s goal is to be “your best source of knowledge” and in many ways, it’s been been able to hold up to this value proposition.

It’s been almost 4 years since I joined Quora - and it has been a curiosity-invoking experience. I’ve seen numerous incremental improvements, making the product better each time. I joined Quora was because of my peers back in college days. The reason why I've sustained is because of my never-ending curiosity and because Quora never disappoints.

Focus on Quality

Since its inception, Quora has maintained razor sharp focus on providing quality content. I think that quality is a precursor to getting quantity, but quantity is not a precursor to getting quality. If that were the case, then Yahoo Answers would be improving in quality over time. You can clearly see the difference in the content quality of these sites.

Quora has moderated the questions, answers and other content really well. During its first year or so, the site was only moderated by admins and other users. With the user-base growing to millions in the recent years, it is now actively moderated by both humans and bots. "Quora Content Review" - is form of Quality Control on Quora's most critical currency - the Question. I've seen hundreds of questions become clearer or less cluttered, courtesy of "Quora Question Bot" and "Quora Content Review".

Quora glorifies good authors (answerers). It awards 'Top writer' awards each year to users who have given the most influential answers and have contributed most to the community. Recently it has added the 'Published Author' and 'Author's expertise', 'Number of views' features to the user profile. It has gamified the site for users through such incentivization.

Competitors

Some directly competing websites in the QnA space that come to mind are Yahoo Answers, Reddit, and StackExchange. Yahoo Answers has a lot of content and users, but lacks behind in content quality. Reddit has a lot more number of users compared to Quora, but it's answers are not very well thought out.

StackExchange comes close to Quora in many ways, however it is very focused on finding the "right" answer rather than the many right answers to a question. In this sense, Quora is more focused on knowledge rather than the "exact" answers. It provides the "best answers" to a question.

In my opinion, Quora beats each of these sites in content quality, but definitely lags behind in content quantity and diversity. Personally, I find the Quora site to be more user-friendly: it has no clutter due it its minimal UI and no annyoing ads (yet). My views maybe biased because I use Quora a lot and that affects how I view other QnA sites.

Slow but Steady Growth

As per some estimates, the site has >10 million registered users and around 1.2M MAUs (monthly active users). The numbers aren't very flattering considering that it's been here for more than 5 years; to say that Quora has experienced explosive growth would be an overstatement.

However, Quora's database of questions and answers has grown massively. These answers, for many reasons (including timelessness, quality, content, structure) are often at or near the top of any web search on the question or related keywords. With ever-increasing top quality content generated on Quora, the company is going to be valued higher and higher.

Despite Quora having a relatively small number of subscribers, the fact that its answers are so highly ranked on largest search engines such as Google - means that it is already the #140 most visited web site in the world, with most visitors not being pre-existing subscribers. As per compete, Quora had more than 9M visitors in April'15. Since there are an only around 1.2M subscribers, this means that Quora has a larger visitor community as compared to subscribed users.

The founding team was able to attract a lot of interesting people in tech and that attracted a lot of core tech industry users, including some high profile folks. Due the "network effects" of many smart people from tech, design, science, politics, etc, already active on Quora, it is bound to attract the masses. Its network of answerers and askers is getting stronger and valuable with each every great answer.

Challenges

Quora has gained traction over years and it is going to stay. However, its user-base is not growing fast enough. Most of the people visiting Quora are not subscribers as is evident from the metrics - 9M total unique visitors in May'15, out which only 1.2M were subscribed to the website. The company has been criticized by at different places online due to its heavy-handedness in content moderation - many a times leaving the user frustrated.

The company has already raised 3 rounds of funding with a whopping total of $160M but hasn't seen a dollar of revenue. The most obvious way to monetise would be through contextual advertising. There's no limit on the revenue generation possibilities but it will all depend on how they pivot. CEO D'Angelo has hinted that Quora will start displaying advertising from the next year.

Another concern is that Indian users now result in 35% of total traffic on Quora. India has the unique dichotomy of extremely large user numbers and extremely low monetization per user. As of now, ad based models are not so effective in India when compared to the US or even China.