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  • Increase Trial to Paid conversions by 10%

    Increase Trial to Paid conversions by 10%

    Our own product/design team were on a call with a UX expert this week. We were asked “whats your key usage metric?”.

    There was a cavernous pause until someone said “perhaps David can answer that”.

    It was a humbling moment.  Despite being a company that talks about: product management, user journeys, goals, “aha moments” and OKRs – we could not enunciate an answer that should really be a team mantra. 

    via GIPHY

    As I opened my mouth to respond, I realized our OMTM (one metric that matters) is too glib and too obvious.

    Laughably obvious.

    What is our OMTM?

    MRR: Monthly recurring revenue and MRR month-on-month growth are the metrics that investors want to see. But that is totally wrong at an execution level.

    Many small-to-mid size teams (including us) get pulled in many different directions. It’s the CEO and the Product Manager’s job to keep re-iterating tangible goals that a team can execute on. 

    Patrick Collins explained how Zip don’t use roadmaps but 90-day OKRs. 

    To focus product teams, inherit from a larger  business metric like MRR:

    Breaks down to at least, some macro areas:

    • Acquisition of Triallers (marketing team)
    • Trialler to Customer Conversion (Product Team, Customer Success)
    • Customer Retention (Product Team)
    • Plans and billing methods that work for customers (VP Product, VP Sales)

    Then a product team would negotiate with the business that: “Trialler to Customer Conversion” can be expressed as a 90-day OKRs. For example:

    “Increase Trial to Paid conversions by 10%”

    But this may be still too abstract for the product team – they could formulate more granular metrics:

    “20% increase of triallers complete and preview their first guide within 1 day”.

    We now have a clear answer for “what is your key user activation metric?”

    The team runs experiments focussed on hitting this goal and is a mantra for daily sanity checks on tasks. 

    How Contextual helps

    Contextual guides allow you to:

    • Target specific users. For example you may have several personas that connect into your App. You can guide each differently.
    • Track their interaction with the guide (did they use it or dismiss it)
    • Tie the guide to a Goal (your Product Metric). 
    • Do this without writing code. By having a no-code approach to helping user engagement with your product – you can keep your engineers focussed on features and fixes.

    via GIPHY

    Proxy Metrics

    Gibson Biddle, former CPO at Netflix has a 2019 series that is worth reading multiple times. Specifically relating to Proxy Metrics his piece on “How to define a metric to prove or disprove your hypotheses and measure progress”. 

    He covers how you can map from a higher level business metric to a product level proxy metric. 

    In the case above, even “Trialler to Customer Conversion” is large and too abstract for a product team, so breaking this down to “20% increase of triallers complete and preview their first guide within 1 day” is making a hypothesis that it “will move the needle” on the more abstract metrics.

    I won’t reiterate Gibson’s full epic post but he suggests:

    • Is measurable.
    • Is moveable.
    • Is not an average.
    • Correlates to your high-level engagement metric.
    • Specifies new v. existing customers.
    • Is not gameable.

    He also cautions that its not a quick fix: “we made decisions quickly, but isolating the right proxy metric sometimes took six months.”. Keep that in mind, you will be iterating on your metrics and the hypotheses that formed them.

  • Manage “empty states” with tips

    Manage “empty states” with tips

    Empty states are the unfortunate onboarding journey that your users often experience. This is the place where a user doesn’t experience value until the user has the “aha” moment. e.g for Trello or Monday, this is clicking “finish” on one of their action items.

    How do we solve this? 

    I attended a great session with UX consultant Mark Lamb  who has 20 years of experience designing products at Google, Uber, and Adobe.

    Mark recommends reading B.J Fogg’s book to get a deep understanding of user psychological responses to your App in the FTUX. How to manage Empty states was a powerful part of the talk.


    tiny-habits-book

    Mark’s advice is “be helpful or hide”, he was a little harsh on our Microsoft Word friend “Clippy” because (as we wrote) he was “bolted on at the end”. Similarly an empty shopping cart like this from Etsy is a poor experience.

    Mark suggests hiding these experiences until the user is further into the journey but such design decisions are costly to implement.

    Many teams don’t have the budget or resources of Uber, Google or Adobe – when Mark was asked about cost constraints he recommended tools like Contextual.

    Etsy didn’t take advantage of this state, a better onboarding FTUX would direct the user back the “Aha moment” is achieved with something like this next example:

    • it is playful
    • has a call-to-action
    • adds a little FOMO by showing “trending” as what other users are enjoying.

    You could be using tools like Contextual to potentially test different button styles and messages.

    cart_ios_etsy_uigarage

    The key message is “if it’s empty, then suggest things”. Clearly with Contextual you can test and iterate different suggestions (or creative) and measure uplift using goals.

    Another key principle Mark advocated was “Show don’t tell“. Product Managers and Designers can use guide tools but careful to make Clippy’s mistake.

    In “todoist” the “How can I use filters?” button is an opportunity.

    The button may be a Contextual tip that might popup some contextual help or an explanatory video.

    The key message is: What is the next step to get the user towards the “Aha” moment?

    Here is the “Empty States” section of Mark’s talk, thanks to Fishburners for the session and recording!

    If you’d like to explore further we have touched-on Empty States elsewhere here and here. If you want to see how Contextual can help you, book a screenshare. ????

  • Slack’s contextual tips for Huddles

    Slack has either boosted productivity or destroyed it in the workplace ???? – it’s hard to tell! 

    It does however get everyone talking about a topic and we covered previously about how Feature Announcements are done at Slack.

    So it’s no surprise that Slack used contextual tips to announce “Huddles” (Discord-style voice conversations).

    Contextual Tip for Huddle on Mobile channel

    As you can see, contextual tips don’t need to be flashy or complex – they are super-impactful at right-person-right-time.

    Contextual Tip for Huddle on Desktop App
    Contextual Tip for Huddle on Desktop App
  • Onboarding: the tip of the engagement iceberg

    Onboarding: the tip of the engagement iceberg

    We all love to talk about “sprints”.

    Mature Product teams know that user engagement is a marathon. Startups and under-resourced Product teams think in sprints. They often only consider the “immediate” that neglects the true lifecycle of their (soon to be successful) App.

    “We just need a home page guide”

    “We only want a Carousel for our Apps splash page”.

    These are common opinions and definitely part of the Apps journey to success. But the sprint perspective believes the “first 5 minutes” is a panacea for user retention. The “first 5 minutes” is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Beneath the surface is the real volume of the iceberg. Here lies the massive breadth of engagement activities that includes:

    1. Onboarding
    2. Feature Announcements
    3. Feature Discovery
    4. Guides
    5. Tips
    6. Training videos
    7. Self-Service help and docs
    8. Tooltips
    9. Nudges
    10. Goal Completion
    11. Re-engagement Emails and Push
    12. Feedback Questions and Surveys
    13. NPS or CSAT

    Plugging the leaky bucket

    Growth comes with Progressive Onboarding. The way to get DEEPER ENGAGEMENT & RETENTION is to progressively guide users to “aha moments”. The MAGIC of deeper engagement is getting users to understand and interact with:

    • Your primary use-case in the onboarding process
    • Secondary functions and uses down- played to achieve your primary goal
    • Nudging at the right time to go further
    • Providing contextual help when a user needs it.

     

    Beneath the Surface

    This post covers the first 4 of 13 listed engagement activities. We give screenshot examples of how Product Teams have deepened engagement.

    Example 1 – Onboarding

    For Examples of “Onboarding” refer to some other posts.

    Example 2 – Feature Announcements

    Here Google introduces a new feature in two different ways. One is a grand announcement and tour. The second if a contextual prompt to nudge the user at the moment of maximum impact.

    google presso - welcome to office editing

    Example 3 – Feature Discovery

    Vimeo has been around for years and needed to catchup with the cool-kids like Loom who were making video/screen recording simply. With the advent of Covid-19 and work-from-home the need to have RECORDED zoom sessions arose. This was sitting under the hood until I “discovered” it.

    The second screenshot surfaces a feature that you might easily miss.

    The 3rd from Twitter is amazing because I never knew your could Bookmark tweets. I use it all the time now!

    zoom to vimeo - prompt

    see who is viewing the page 2

    Example 4 -Guides

    Using a crypto wallet is a new experience, not for the faint-hearted. Metamask do a good job in walking the new user through important fields and actions.












    Next time…more iceberg!

    In the next posts, we’ll continue with the next group of engagement methods:

    1. Tips
    2. Training videos
    3. Self-Service help and docs
    4. Tooltips
    5. Nudges
    6. Goal Completion
    7. Re-engagement Emails and Push
    8. Feedback Questions and Surveys
    9. NPS or CSAT
  • Announcing the New Contextual Web Creator

    In the upcoming weeks we are releasing an update to our Chrome Extension for web apps.

    This is a great addition and actually shoots past the current mobile guide creation interface which will adopt some of the elements here. Specifically:

    • New design for a user friendly experience & navigation
    • New targeting tool for tip placement & repositioning
    • New guide settings interface with improved selection criteria process for a more streamlined experience
    • Tight point-and-click selection of targets and launchers with css/class/DOM overrides.
    • Search & filter guides easier with the new guide home screen
    • Edit guide name easily

    There are so many great features here, we’ve split it into two videos. If you’ve got any questions, hit us up on support@contextu.al or our on-site chat!

    https://vimeo.com/566908938/641fa71371https://vimeo.com/568797474/a90ded76ab