Mayday.us

186 points by avibryant 11 years ago | 31 comments

aresant 11 years ago |

If a user used Stripe "the chance that a visitor would abandon their donation at the Checkout step halved from 22% to 10%"

You can see even in Stripe's earliest UX the desire to dramatically limit the "pain" that goes into entering CC details online.

When they added the "remember me" button I said to myself this is going to wind up being the "billion dollar checkbox" once merchants really understand the power of not forcing people to re-enter their CC details.

It's still somewhat mind-boggling to me how badly browser "auto-fill" solutions fail at this incredibly valuable problem.

Amazon and Apple, IMO, basically hold onto their dominating positions in physical & digital content respectively because their hold so many CC's and it's just so much damn easier to not have to re-authorize, re-input, etc etc.

swartkrans 11 years ago | |

When I see that "remember me" checkbox I thought about how they were storing that information. There's usually no obvious indicator someone is using stripe, you just see a form asking for credit card input. I tend to never check such a box and in fact prefer it if there's a payment option with a company that already has my credit card info, like paypal or amazon, so that I have less surface area for having that information stolen and less places to update once I have to renew or replace a card.

maerF0x0 11 years ago | | |

I too do not like my CC info on file. This is mostly so I can always be super sure that I'm paying for something. There cannot be any accidental clicks that lead to charges, instead I can know, for certain, that If I havent put in my CC then I'm not paying.

funkyy 11 years ago | | |

Your CC is probably insured anyways and if you have good bank they will deal with any fraud in matter of days releasing you from any responsibility.

If not - change a bank.

isamuel 11 years ago | |

I've found Safari's credit card auto-fill to be remarkably good. To a first approximation, I never type my credit card information anymore—and when I do, I'm willing to blame the website designer for doing some goofy thing to prevent recognition.

Silhouette 11 years ago | |

If a user used Stripe "the chance that a visitor would abandon their donation at the Checkout step halved from 22% to 10%"

While that's an interesting data point, plausible explanations could be anything from very positive, such as

(a) Stripe's Checkout process being dramatically more effective for signed-in users, for example because of the reduced effort required to complete the transaction

to very negative, such as

(b) Stripe's Checkout process causing a horrible drop in conversions for users who aren't signed in, for example because of the added complexity that comes from their "remember me" mechanism or the unfamiliar branding.

It doesn't seem at all surprising that previous Stripe users would convert better with either of these relatively extreme explanations -- either those people had an easier interface to use, or they were necessarily already familiar with the Stripe brand.

avibryant 11 years ago | | |

I take your point that there are a number of possible explanations (at varying levels of plausibility) for this effect, but to address a specific example you mention: whenever we change something significant in Checkout like adding the "remember me" option, we A/B test it, and if it did in fact cause a "horrible drop in conversions" we would absolutely not release it. (It doesn't).

mrfusion 11 years ago |

Do we know how MayDay is performing in this election? I was disappointed not to hear any mentions of it on the news leading up to the election? Have they actually upset any elections.

aaronlifshin 11 years ago | |

We were in two primaries, and our candidate won in one of them, in another he moved from 9% to 24 or so of the vote.

Today is the day we learn more. Hopefully some of our candidates will win. Another important factor to keep in mind is that this an experiment. The knowledge we generate about what it takes to move elections on this issue, and the attention we have brought to the issue of money in politics are an important part of our goals.

(Disclaimer: I work for Mayday)

mrfusion 11 years ago | | |

That's interesting, thanks for the response. I've been getting the email updates and it's hard to get the big picture from those.

So the biggest goal of this process is learning how to move elections?

I shouldn't be concerned that the media isn't mentioning MayDay as a factor in the elections or control of congress?

mirashii 11 years ago |

It's a bit concerning that this page doesn't really reference the order of magnitude of data that they're working with, statistical significance, or anything to indicate that the difference between the two percentages they're comparing is something that's actually worth comparing, and not something that can or is likely to be explained away due to small sample size.

avibryant 11 years ago | |

That's a fair concern. The sample sizes here are relatively high: you can probably back some estimates out yourself from the numbers given in the post (millions of dollars raised, mean donation of $88, 14% of donations in the last week were repeat, etc). I'll also say that the comparisons in the post are significant to a 99% confidence level.

birken 11 years ago | |

Also there are many other variables that could affect this analysis that aren't explored or mentioned. Just two I can think of off the top of my head:

- Users logged into stripe probably buy more stuff online. Maybe they donate more money because they have more money.

- The fact that a ton of repeat donations came in the last week might have been due to email campaigns or some other external thing. It isn't necessarily a fundamental principle of fundraising drives (though it certainly could be). Same thing could explain mobile usage driving up (SMS campaign or something).

Overall I think it is cool that data is being shared like this, and it is interesting. But at the same time, the post shouldn't be speaking about data in such absolutes... no confidence intervals, few caveats mentioned or explored, conclusions are made with bolded certainty.

minimaxir 11 years ago | |

From the downloadable dataset of donations, the current total amount of donations is 62,769 donations with 50,802 unique donators, which is a healthy amount.

However, that doesn't indicate how many users fell into the "had a Stripe account already" bucket. (I'd wager not many.)

(Off topic aside about data integrity: the downloadable data, from October onward, has donation dates from 2018.)

rio517 11 years ago | | |

This is Mario from Mayday PAC. Yeah, our last release had those 2018 issues. The data actually comes from several different vendors and we plan on normalizing it all better post election. The 2018 data should have been registered as 2014. (Obviously not 2018)

exratione 11 years ago |

It's amazing how much goes to line the pockets of politicians and their cronies, and with the flimsiest of expected outcomes on the part of those who give, in an age in which creating actually worthwhile things, new technologies and scientific progress, is cheaper than ever.

Watching this sort of thing, knowing that the researchers behind many very worthwhile lines of medical research that might bring great benefit to hundreds of millions struggle to raise a tenth of this amount over the course of years, is ever eye-opening.

We're not a very rational species.

aaronlifshin 11 years ago | |

Yep. This is precisely what Mayday.US is fighting.

lifeisstillgood 11 years ago |

>> But on the last day of the campaign, mobile use doubled: 32% of donors donated from their phones or tablets instead of waiting to get to their laptops

This is to me a killer insight. I just sent my first invoice from my mobile phone. I have always always assumed I could not use my mobile for a complex website but it was relatively painless - and 1000 times more convenient (at work, not on clients network etc)

I only did it because I "had to", and it worked because the company (freeagent) has put enough effort in. Now I can do more accounts on my mobile - and all those who donated above will be likely to donate earlier me time than the last day because it worked this time round.

brey 11 years ago |

  Looking at repeat donations prompted us to ask: do people donate more or less 
  their second time? On average, the answer is roughly 50% more. While first 
  donations had a mean of $88 and a median of *$30*, repeat donations had a mean 
  of $114 and a median of *$50*.

  Average doesn’t mean typical, however. If you look at each repeat donor one by one, 
  it turns out they’re split almost exactly into thirds: 33% donate less the second time 
  (most commonly half), 35% donate more (most commonly double), and 32% donate 
  exactly the same. The averages get pushed up because doubling (and the 
  occasional tripling or even quadrupling) makes a bigger difference overall 
  than halving does.

that's odd. wouldn't you expect the median to stay about the same if 1/3 donated less, 1/3 donated the same, and 1/3 donated more?

brey 11 years ago | |

ah, no, I was wrong - the median only stays the same if only people in the lower half beforehand gave less, and only people in the upper half gave more.

if people cross the old median, this is perfectly possible. although initially counter-intuitive ...

corin_ 11 years ago | | |

Not just if they cross the median, the median might cross them - for example what if the only people to come back to donate a second time were above the median in their first donation, then even if they all donated the same amount the second time, the median of second-donations would still go up.

charliepark 11 years ago |

If I understand Checkout correctly, a user on Site A enters her card details, and then when she's on Site B, her details are shown back (with some obfuscations). Does this ever alarm users? I'm sure the goal is that it would be a seamless experience, but I'd be curious if anyone here has used Checkout and heard positive / negative feedback from users.

floatrock 11 years ago | |

I've seen this happen with cafe/food truck ipad point-of-sale systems (square, paypal, etc.). They swipe my credit card and up pops up a "would you like a receipt emailed to xxx@whatever.com" box.

My first reaction is always "I never told you a goddamn thing about my email. How'd you get it from swiping my credit card?"

Pretty sure stripe/square/paypal don't share the card's email with the merchants (yet), but even so, it's a bit disconcerting to see the food truck guy "has" my email without me ever giving it out.

Consumer databases are a huge business. It's election day today... think it's an accident that the campaign mailers you got match your census block's demographic profiles? http://www.esri.com/data/esri_data/ziptapestry Normally only the credit card companies were privvy to this data collection. It would be poor business decisions if selling these profiles was not part of stripe and square's business projections.

aaronlifshin 11 years ago | |

From our users, the most feedback we have heard about this functionality is: "I want to change my card details, but it keeps bringing up my old card"

The solution is to put the cursor in the card number box and hit delete, but this is not obvious in the UI.

I am not aware of Mayday users raising the concern that their details have been saved.

aaronlifshin 11 years ago | | |

Overall, we have mostly positive feedback about Stripe, and have been happy with the usability for our users as well as on the back end. It's been especially great for mobile.

Our audience is heavily from the tech community, and people like seeing the latest technology used on a site. I remember at least one email coming in to that effect.

justcommenting 11 years ago |

i appreciate the value of excellent UX and kudos to stripe for sharing this but personally, i've never been so fickle about a donation or purchase that the UX was the difference between me completing the transaction vs. not.

there have been times i've had to 'abandon' a checkout step and return later, but i can't recall any times that a financial transaction was important enough to make but not important enough to return to, e.g. if i didn't have a particular card with me.

stripe sees things differently--and probably for good reason--but i wonder if they might be inferring user intent from user behavior too directly.

Looking at repeat donations prompted us to ask: do people donate more or less their second time? On average, the answer is roughly 50% more. While first donations had a mean of $88 and a median of *$30*, repeat donations had a mean of $114 and a median of *$50*. Average doesn’t mean typical, however. If you look at each repeat donor one by one, it turns out they’re split almost exactly into thirds: 33% donate less the second time (most commonly half), 35% donate more (most commonly double), and 32% donate exactly the same. The averages get pushed up because doubling (and the occasional tripling or even quadrupling) makes a bigger difference overall than halving does.