Mike LaVigne, Co-Founder and Head of product - Clue

So, thank you for the invitation to come and speak today. I was very excited to come. I'm told that I cover a lot of information in a very short period of time. I'm not going into a lot of depth on some topics, but I do bring you inside of some of the thinking that we have as we've developed Clue. I wanted to give a shout out to my team who is definitely watching. This is the team. I would like to say it's not just me that's delivering this. It's a whole team of people. I would also like to emphasize that the design is only as good as the engineering because without great engineers, they can't do anything really innovative with the design. We have done some, I think, pretty innovative things with the design. The original founder of Clue is Edith Hinn, and she's sitting here in the middle of the couch. That's her. I'm going to jump right into it. This is Clue. You might not know of Clue. I've had this problem before. I know how to fix it, though. I got it. It's my earring. That happened before. This is Clue. It's an app for tracking health. It usually gets described as a period tracking app. I prefer to describe it as a health tracking app. What's happening here, and usually this is seen as just an app for women. I'll tell men why maybe you should be paying more attention. Here, what we're seeing in this visualization, and you'll see this now a couple of times through the presentation, this is a representation of somebody's cycle, the menstrual cycle. Here you see the period, the fertile window, which is when conception or pregnancy can occur, and then PMS. Usually when somebody sees this for the first time, the thing that they're surprised by is how few days actually it's possible to get pregnant during the cycle. Here's some insights that people can get when they see this visualization, when changes happen in sleep patterns, when maybe hunger changes, changes in sex drive, also mood changes. Now maybe the guys in the audience are starting to think of why this is maybe more relevant to them as well. We aim to be the number one health tracker globally, and we're on our way. Right now we have about 2 million active users. Those are active users. Those are not dead. Our download numbers are quite a bit higher than that, of course. We believe that technology will have a profound impact on family planning globally. So when we think about the population explosion that we have on the planet right now, we think that we can actually play a role in affecting that. Coming back to a conversation about the team and what I'd like to – this will be a continuing thread through the presentation – is that we have a lot of big brains on our team, very deep thinkers. This is one of the most talented teams I've worked with. I'm very happy to be with this very creative pile of people. What I would like to say is that along with the intellect comes a lot of compassion and a lot of insight. So the theme that's going to be coming through this is empathy, a lot of empathy that we have with our users and what I call affectionate design. What's on our minds a lot is this. So this is the pattern of hormones that changes throughout the fertility – throughout the menstrual cycle. So there's a lot going on, and that's why that there's a lot that we can do in terms of insights for the people who are using Clue. The process – I'm not going to go into detail about process, but in conversations with people about how we do our work and also with our team, really our process is empathy. So how do we get to know our users as much as possible, get deep understanding, deep compassion? How do we get to know? And that's really the process. This is one topic I'll go into more depth on. Another topic I'll go into more depth on is science and design and the combination of the two and how they reinforce each other. And then the third topic is what I call affectionate design. So we talk a lot about user-centered design, but I'm trying to cast that as more affectionate design for us. So starting first with the process of empathy. So first thing I would like to talk about is – what it's like to design for women. The first question that I was asked the first time I presented about Clue was, what do women want? I was a little bit confused because I was like, well, my first response was, I can't answer for all of women, and there is no singular thing. What that did, though, is it sparked a little bit of investigation for me as trying to answer, what is woman? What do we mean when we say that? Does my hearing pop back up? No. So it's complicated, obviously. So if we think about designing for women and we were to say, put them on a matrix here, start building a matrix and say this was age. And so on the left side we have young and the right side we have old, and then say that there's a goal that they're having in their life. So they want to get pregnant, they don't want to get pregnant, they're trying to understand their bodies, the rhythm of their cycle more. And then we say maybe there's different sexual orientations, and so then we put that into a different – we put that into a different vector. And then pretty soon then we say, okay, now we can plot everybody on this, which of course we can't really, and you're probably starting to see the problem with this already. And then you realize that everybody's in motion. Everybody's changing and evolving, and they're going through different things in their life. And really what we're trying to do is design a single app that covers all of these needs. I get a little bit more into this as well. The challenge that we have is that this category of app, the health tracking app, really hasn't – I would say hasn't been done very well before, and we're trying to address all of these requirements from all these different people. And so what we're trying to do is really design with affection for all of these different possibilities of what these people could be when they pick up Download Clue and they start using it. So designing for everyone is something that I think quite a bit about. It's similar to what I would say people think about when they're designing a utility. I think about Clue as a utility. It's like email. It's like an Excel spreadsheet, but it's very focused on body awareness and learning about the body. The research approach that we take is continuous. We're always doing research. It's not in a phase. So the designers, myself, engineers, everybody is constantly doing research, and those insights are always going into the product. For me personally, I've done somewhere around 500 personal interviews over the course of the past. We've been in the market for about two years but working on the product for about three. And those conversations happen either in person or in text. Some of the things that have come out of that research, some of the bigger insights are people have been told that their whole lives, that their emotions are out of control and that they're linked to their cycle and they can't do anything about it. Not true, by the way. Scientifically not true. And I'm speaking always from a point of science, which I'll get to a little bit later. People don't know actually what to expect every month, so how does their body change? That changes after they've used Clue. Typically for just a few cycles they have a much better insight. And then people saying that their culture tells them what a woman is supposed to be, but that's not what they want or how they behave. And then there's this anxiety around pregnancy, either trying to avoid getting pregnant or trying to get pregnant. So you can imagine that developing segmentation and persona is either very important or irrelevant for us, and I'm on the side of it's kind of irrelevant, and the thinking that I've had around that, and I definitely feel that persona are not relevant for us, but when we create segments, we do that to reduce complexity so that we can find patterns and then design for those patterns. What we do is we disregard segments to maintain that complexity, and we find patterns then that unify that complexity instead. And so we don't use segments, we don't create segments, and you won't find in any of our documentation, we don't talk about segments internally in our teams at all. And then persona, specifically about persona, I think that they can be quite offensive because they reinforce stereotypes. So for example, you see white middle-aged man wearing a tie, executive. You see a woman in her 30s, that's the mom at home. And we just don't do that at all. We don't find them useful, and I would actually offer that maybe that's a question that in your own work you can ask is that, is this actually useful or are we reinforcing something that's negative? So the approach at a very high level, scan the spectrum, so really favoring the outliers, pulling in as much diversity as we possibly can, always holding questions open. So I never consider any of the questions that we ask to be ever closed. So we're always opening these up and maybe even to the frustration of my team. Sometimes they feel like, haven't we really answered that? Maybe not, maybe not. And then what we're really looking for are these, these unifying patterns. I would say that a lot of times this could be interpreted as that we're trying to be politically correct. That is absolutely not what we're trying to do. You should hear some of the humor we use in the office. If you think we're being politically correct, we're not. So if we're not politically correct, what we're really striving for is accuracy. We're just accurate. If we're not politically correct, we're accurate. Next topic to go into is science and design. Design principles, I think, are essential and very important to help guide the work that we do and everybody's work, but I think they're oftentimes not carefully considered. They're oftentimes very repetitive, and you can use them across almost all of your projects. It's simple. It's easy to use. It's elegant. It's all of this, right? I focused on two primary design principles for Clue, really narrowing them down, is it just had to be fast and beautiful. What we're doing is we're creating a data capture tool because we want the user to enter data so that Clue can analyze the data and then give them insights back to them about their body. The more data they enter, the better it's going to be. The faster Clue is to use, the more data there will be. The second one, beautiful, just because, well, I'll get into that a little bit later and show you what I mean by beautiful. So fast. The problem that I found with the current UI for iOS and also for Android were available on both platforms is that there is no UI, common standard UI elements for rapid data entry. So we had to develop our own. I did some research to go back and say, well, what actually makes an interface fast and easy to use? And I went to cognitive theory and human-computer interaction principles, which I'm not going into a lot of detail here. What I thought was that actually what was pretty important is just buttons, very big, easy-to-hit buttons. And I was surprised. I thought that usually when you see things, you have to go looking for stuff, and you have to kind of aim to hit it. And I was really focused on just covering a screen all with buttons. And it did two things. It made, of course, Clue very easy to navigate, easy to hit the buttons. But it did a second thing, was it really brought forward the design. So aesthetically, then the buttons became something that were very aesthetically pleasing, and iconography has become very important to us, both in terms of the mood that we create and also making Clue very usable. The only examples that I have from iOS are the calculator and the telephone keypad. Those are the only two things that I found for a source of inspiration for rapid data entry. And they do work for that, and you can see it's just all buttons. A concept that I discovered along the way is subitizing. So how many things, when you're looking at an interface, when you're looking at a series of objects, the human mind is able to very quickly and easily recognize that there are four or three or two or one without having to count. And that's subitization. Fancy word. So what that means is that if you have that many elements on the page, there isn't a whole lot of thinking that needs to happen, especially if you've already encountered that screen before. You have a pretty good idea of where things are in relationship to each other, which is why then on Clue you'll only see six or fewer items per screen always. And that actually has had a really big impact on our usability. The other thing that we've considered quite a bit is factorial relationships. So the many-to-many relationships between objects and actions, and the less of those that you can have, the better. As soon as you get up to 12 factorial relationships, so this one thing can be related to 12 other things, you're in the billions already. And of course the user can't keep all of that in their mind. So they're constantly learning. They're constantly learning. They're constantly on every screen. Secondly, to go over the beautiful design principle, these are more of the screens of Clue. So here you see the second generation of our data entry there. You see the cycle view. This is the history view. I liked one of the presentations saying that every screen should have a purpose. I agree with that. The purpose of the history view, so this is all of the different cycles, is that you can actually compare in the history the lengths of the cycles just by a glance. So you can see which one was shortest, which one was longest, which is one of the key things that people are looking for when they go back and review their cycles. And these are the reminders. The reminders are all customizable. Usually when people customize them, the text, so the text that pops up on Clue, they usually make them something humorous or something extremely discreet. So for example, your period is coming up may turn into Shark Week is approaching, something like that. And what I mean by beautiful, this is Clue. The main competitors that we have look like this. And these are the largest competitors. There are smaller players out there that also have a cleaner design, so the trend is definitely towards the cleaner design. One of the comments that we got very early into our release was this one. And if you're unfamiliar with what My Little Pony looks like, this is My Little Pony. And I would agree that the, the design of Clue is definitely an adult, designed for adults, is designed hopefully for everybody, used as a contemporary design. It's really positive, empathetic, and respectful, always. Now getting more into the science side. So people who have cycles have a lot of different questions that they're asking of themselves. Am I healthy and am I normal was the question that came up most often. And people were asking me this as I was interviewing them about their, you know, what do they need. And so what we found out is actually they need quite a bit of information because what we learned about the cycle happened probably when we were before, we were teenagers, before the cycle actually happened. And we didn't get any new information as we went through life. People also want to know what will happen today or what will happen on a future date. So to help with this in the newest version of Clue, which will be coming out soon, it hasn't all been integrated yet, there are about 100 pages of scientifically valid text that help inform people about all the different aspects of Clue. This is quite a bit of effort you can imagine for us to create. So when I think about design, it's not just about the aesthetic or the interaction. It's also about the service that we're providing back to our users. We also have some very exciting research collaborations which are coming up with Columbia, very wonderful academic institutions who have reached out to us. Because of the approach that we've taken of integrating science with good design because they usually have to create these types of tools when they want to perform their research. And they see, ah, finally somebody's done it. They've taken a scientific approach. We can use the Clue tool for this. So Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford. Now getting into affectionate design. Everybody at Clue and our team, just about everybody does some kind of research. Well, they all do research. And we all are in contact with people. Half the world's population could be a potential user of Clue. And so we're always doing some kind of investigation. And we really have a deep affection for our users. So every point of contact that we have with our users, we're always caring for our users in some way and trying to understand how can we care for them better. And I would say that is definitely reflected in the design. One of the most often asked questions is about privacy. I would also put into that category discretion. So privacy of the data, security of the data. One key thing about Clue, which not many, if any, of our competitors do, is that you can use Clue without an account. And in that case, the data stays on the phone. Nobody has it except for the person. Hopefully they back it up and we provide a few options for that. And so that's the most private anybody can be. If they do create an account, the data that we store is stored anonymously, and it's stored separately from the account data. So it's two different records completely. And then we also, from a discretion perspective, because you can imagine that if somebody, we all use our phones out in everyday life, and where data entry is happening is sometimes on daily commutes. So we've done everything possible to create a very discreet user experience. So when somebody launches Clue, it just looks like this happy place, and people don't actually know about it. They don't know what data is being entered. Last topic I want to go into is customer support. So we do a lot of customer support. And thanks to the team, we did a new release recently, and we have a huge amount of support that we're working through right now. Everybody's been working pretty hard on that. We respond to everybody who writes in to us over a support mechanism, which can sometimes be kind of daunting. The reason that we do that is because it really, really creates this deep understanding with our customers. We get into long-form conversations with them, so everybody who does support is trained in research. So they answer a question, and then they follow up by asking a question. So if they've asked for a feature, they want something, we ask them, well, how would you like that to work? So we ask them very open-ended questions, and sometimes these turn into weeks -long exchanges, sometimes exchanging sketches of ideas. And so this is how we do it. It's a primary mechanism of our research. We also have people come in to our offices, and we do beta testing. So there are many different ways that we do research, but this is a constant thread of conversation that we have with the people who are using Clue. Most often, gratefully, we have a very gracious community of users. They always are thanking us for some aspect of Clue or for just making Clue, and then they say, hey, could you please also do this? Or they say, thank you for making Clue, or thank you for making this, and how do I do this with Clue? I wanted to also put some quotes up from our users, because I feel like designers, we tend to reflect, and when we get into groups like this, we tend to reflect on the product. I always am reflecting on the user as much as possible. And they have a deep impact on us. When we get... I'm just going to let you read these. I'm not going to read them for you. But when we get messages like this, they have a really deep impact on the team. We actually have a channel of content on Slack where we distribute these quotes so everybody has a chance to read them. And we get ones like these. They're extremely, extremely moving. And we get these more than once, so this is not just like a one-off. So what we realized through the work that we're doing, we're creating a very accessible tool, something that people have a very easy time using. They have a very easy time integrating it into their life. It's a happy experience. It's a joyful experience, hopefully. In the original user testing, what I was looking for was a smile. I really wasn't looking as much about from a usability perspective. I was looking to see if I could make somebody cry. So could I make them laugh? And if you see some of the iconography, which I didn't focus on in this presentation, for example, the icon for tracking sex is a reclining man. So he's kind of like, hey, kind of looking at you. But if you have the chance to download and check it out, the iconography we spent quite a bit of time on, especially we recently expanded the tracking options, and there are now about 100, there are way over 100 icons. You can imagine that's a lot of work, iconography. If you have a lot of icon icons, you know that that's a lot of work. So what this has done for us when we provide this kind of empathetic and affectionate experience for our users, we get happy people, a lot of happy people. So literally I did some analysis and number crunching as best as I'm able to do, and, I mean, almost 100% people who are writing to us, who contact us, they are happy back at us. So the experience that we have of working on the team, we're actually finding that that's extending to back-end-door users, which we did not expect. Grumpy people is very, very small, statistically not significant. We also focus on them. We probably put even more attention into them, understand why they're upset, what could we be doing better. Those turn into some of the longer conversations that we've had. But what we found ultimately is that when you give affection, you get affection back, and I think that is something that all myself have been surprised by when we were only just four people. Working out of a living room of the co-founders, and now that our team has expanded, that everybody is deeply affected by that type of emotional interaction that we have with our users. So that's it. And if you have a desire to contact us, you can maybe ask them if you have questions about anything that we're doing. Again, we will give you the same kind of treatment that we give to the people who are using Clue. You can tweet at us there or me on the right-hand side there. Thank you.