Memo - Rethinking reporting and helping professionals with goals

Introduction - reporting through a conversational interface

This memo documents what we have done in terms of reporting in the @meplexproject, and where we may want to go with reporting. Reporting, here, is being used to refer to the events of communication which are passed to our @user:professionals. At this point, our initial implementation informs them about their user's activities on their landing pages. This implementation is quite simple, and may be seen as an old fashion kind of reporting. Nevertheless, our goal is to understand how reporting can help with their marketing goals.

Marketing goals

Our goal is to understand how reporting helps people to advance their goals. The medium where our @user:professionals interaction happens is - so far - through Whatsapp, in alignment with the Vision of MePlex as a marketing assistant chatbot which helps them with Web/online publishing needs. Examples of marketing goals:

• Increase conversions - help them to understand which communicative experiences improves the conversions of prospect users. A case, a complication is worth considering: our @user:professionals do not want numbers. They want potential patients, patients that they can help, patients that helps them to advance their carreers and personal growth too.

A case of reporting: has the user clicked the contact button?

What we have done, so far, may well be seen as a old fashion kind of reporting/analytics. As an example, our @user:professionals has a landing page being used as part of a marketing campaign. As users navigate through the page, they may progress with an interest in contacting the @user:professionals. A potential event of interest is knowing if an user has tapped the contact button:

When their users tap that button, a notification event is sent to the professional:

A case of reporting: has the user listened to the welcoming audio?

When their users are visiting the page for the first time, they go through an experience referred in web terms as "above the fold". Notice that there is a play button there. When the user taps that play button, the user listens to an audio: they can hear the voice of Vanessa, they can listen to her welcome message:

At the same time, an observation event is captured and is sent to Vanessa's Whatsapp, which receives the message from the assistant's avatar experience, if you will. Here is a potential case where observation and reporting can be considered:

We do not know if the user interface properly supports the user with that flow. In other words, we do not know if that button was perceived as a button. Or if it was tapped/clicked, or furthermore we do not know if listening to the voice of the professional helps.

Although the observation and analysis can be complex - due to the subjectivity involved - observing us observing is helping us to pay attention, us as humans, us as professionals, and change our behaviors and actions. To point a case, consider that when we inform these professionals that "an user has listened to her welcome voice audio button", their minds engage with considering that narrative, what has happened, revisiting that story (or flow) which in turns prompts them into the process of reviewing what they have recorded. In other words, this is what you see is what you get or this is about us observing the trees in the forest.

Storytelling

The above situation, if observing and reporting sets professionals to be involved, might be a starting point allowing us to considering the experience of reporting that matters, that helps professionals with improving their content. For now, I will leave us with a question, open, I wonder about the use of observation and reporting events that can be tied with purpose, with their goals, and our goals.

Unintended benefits from this reflection - a bug found

When writing this report, I found a bug in the user interface of Vanessa's case. I did it as I was going through the flow and clicked/tapped the contact button. Nothing happened. That was a regression, a bug. See Weplex - reflecting about reporting and improving the user experience