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:
Onboarding
Feature Announcements
Feature Discovery
Guides
Tips
Training videos
Self-Service help and docs
Tooltips
Nudges
Goal Completion
Re-engagement Emails and Push
Feedback Questions and Surveys
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.
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.
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!
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:
In an earlier post we covered how Eventbrite tracked anger vs delight. Today I cover 6 onboarding UX emotions your users may experience when trialling your App.
Your user’s journey is a mix of “will this work for me?”, “how does this work”, “that didn’t work”, “aha-yes!”. For a new user it’s a roller-coaster of emotions and its made up of 20 small steps that anger or delight.
What made users flock to Mixpanel but shun Kissmetrics?
How did Amplitude arrive much later but still nail a huge market segment?
I don’t have the answers – there will be many, many reasons** and even more opinions. The question is what are the 20 steps your App needs to deepen engagement where users go from:
ACQUIRED ➡️ ACTIVATED ➡️ RETAINED ➡️ REFERRER
Tracking and shaping emotional UX
This chart is intended to show that:
users build up “Delight” slowly over a period of time.
One event along the journey send then into a state of “Anger” . The anger has a much bigger impact than all the small delight moments.
Summary: “delightful things don’t matter if you don’t solve the critical moment”
For Eventbrite, it was failures at payment time that produced anger. The user had searched for, selected an event, read about it, got excited, registered and then BOOM something in payment was wrong or broken.
Types of Emotion
Anxiety and Uncertainty
For the Eventbrite customer, things were even worse – the user didn’t know if they were registered or not!
When I was at College, the programming classes were on a shared Unix system that would always crash at the worst possible time, everyone pushing to get their assignment done at the last minute was “<CTRL-S>ing their code every few seconds to make sure they didn’t lose work – stressful!
Would those Anxious students ever recommend or refer people to use that brand of Unix hardware? I think not.
Once a customer has a catastrophic experience its going to be hard win their trust again.
Overpromise Disappointment
In the 20 small steps to engagement the user is investing time in the hope that they have the product to solve their Job-to-be-done (JTBD). The curve might look something like this:
Along the time-invested curve, the user is calibrating their experience back to stories told on:
Your marketing
Your website
Your onboarding emails and guides
What their peers or press have said about the product
It’s easy to over-state a product’s unique value proposition in the marketing.
We experience this ourselves:
the product is a self-service dashboard
the impression is this is a super quick process
some don’t realize there is an SDK (at least for mobile) and that they need their developer buy-in
that targeting and personalization is magic rather than data-driven
that the integration will match their app perfectly first-time. (Mobile Apps are often written differently and our integration sometimes needs the developers to talk to each other)
None of this is the customer’s fault, we need to better set expectations of simple things and technical things.
Confusion (Cognitive Overload)
Related to uncertainty is powerlessness.
Often users are confronted with a confusing array of crammed in features. It’s just too much and leads to confusion.
One of my most popular posts on medium covered the risk of cognitive overload in your App. These psychological factors affect your user activation rates and how you can manage that.
Incompetent lawyer Dennis Denuto abandons case law and logic when arguing his clients case in legendary aussie comedy “The Castle“.
Dennis’ argument is that the “Vibe” is not right!
Customers also use their “spidey-sense” when trialling your product. The spidey-sense is getting the “Vibe” of whether the product is going to work for them. Small moments in your App transmit a positive or negative Vibe to the user. This Vibe will affect activation rates.
Gratification
The activated user chart (above) has an initial steep climb – along that climb your user needs to experience practical results along the way.
Gratification is a major goal. But it needs to be revealed to the user in a timeslice that is achievable. In an attention-deficit TikTok world “Instant Gratification” is your only option ????.
Prioritizing your Onboarding should be coloured by JTBD and tempered through the lens of SMART goals. Give the user something achievable! Its a major dopamine rush for any user to get gratification on their key “jobs”.
Surprise and Delight
Consumerisation of SaaS and B2B Apps is one of the most interesting trends. Slack, Mailchimp have added playfullness and joy into work-based applications. Its a powerful “cute” additive to the user’s experience. It signals your are not only on the top of your functionality but you have time, space and ❤ to add some fun into the application.
BUT….as mentioned above, Delight is only impactful if you’ve resolved all the Anger points first.
Summary
I’ve provided 6 major emotions that a user experiences on their way to:
being happy and buying your product or
churning to a competitor.
But don’t be fooled, these emotions run under the surface – don’t believe what any user says, but measure what they do!
Customers make terrible product designers.
Get as much feedback as possible from customer BUT you cannot take at face value.
The customer’s job is to show you their pain.
Your job is to translate into meaningful product solutions.
You need a champion of the customer that OWN this conversion of pain to design.
Last note: one important emotion I didn’t cover here (its pre-acquisition) is the conviction that comes from referrals and social proof about your solution. When a prospect’s friend recommend product, it’s a huge contributor to trialler positivity.
Are you looking to get more users to love your mobile and web apps? Click on the buttons below to get your 14 day free trial or contact us for a demo!
Its been a huge month in tech with #wallstreetbets on reddit** and crypto going mainstream – but the breakout success in Apps has to be Clubhouse. Clubhouse launched in April of 2020, perfect for a COVID world, now they have over 5M users on IOS only! They’ve mastered the art of FOMO to drive that growth.
Source: the twitter thread below
Why FOMO matters
For the uninitiated: “fear of missing out” (FOMO) is a huge driver of consumer crowd activity. It was a big, big driver in the #wallstreethbets fight and is fully leveraged in Clubhouse’s explosive growth. @petergyang summarises on this excellent twitter thread.
Specifically Yang outlines:
FOMO on top creators (they had superstars like @pmarca and @naval early, culminating with @elonmusk, upcoming is Elon with Kanye )
FOMO on the best content
FOMO on invites
FOMO on growing audience
FOMO on delightful experiences
The thread expands detail for each of these points – it’s worth a read.
BUT…I wanted to focus on 2 important messages for the activation part of the funnel (where Contextual helps), that matters a ton for Product Managers and Growth teams:
“The app also aggressively promotes follows through: 1. Onboarding 2. Notifications 3. Clubs“
“…is the delight of discovering an amazing topic or seeing a top creator join the conversation. Variable rewards cause people to tune in more.”***
Whilst there is a huge FOMO in acquisition (users get invites which makes them part of the “insiders” club”), its is the ability to re-engage via the Onboarding and Notifications to keep bringing them back.
The big deal about consumer Apps is the “meh” response once they’ve installed and the users closes the App and doesn’t come back (they go back to Instagram or Tiktok for their entertainment). This is why consumer apps have Day 0 abandonment above 78%.
FOMO based re-engagement
Have your product team brainstorm what are the FOMO elements that your users want. Think about it….the user likely went to the effort of installing your App or creating an account. Not all FOMO needs to be about worshipping Elon or Naval or Kanye (does anyone ?????).
Things that might make sense:
if you are ecommerce, then can you alert the user about price drops.
if you are real-estate or research, can you capture the users preferences and give them an inside edge that will have them opening the app again.
if you have a social graph, let their connections do the re-engagement broadcast (this is how Clubhouse uses “Clubs”).
…the list goes on.
The first point is that it’s likely to acquire a user (even before activation) you’ve nailed the insight that drove them to you. In your Onboarding can you throw up a Contextual feedback question to clarify what is driving them?
The second point is that these method are well-known and consistent, once you’ve nailed your EXACT version (iterate fast with tools like Contextual to “test-and-learn” don’t get bogged down roadmapping and coding the tests) then make it repeatable across the product Onboarding and Re-engagement processes. Identify the common questions and use-cases and standardize them!
Clearly stated by my friend @chrissaad he expands this thinking/expectation to all SaaS products. Products for B2B can often be super-complex and feature rich (Contextual is an example) – but the job of the Product Team is to make the experience as standard as possible and align it with the messaging as the user comes down the acquisition funnel.
If you apply your particular insights based around FOMO and standardize you may just nail your engine of growth.
** Reddit raised $250M off the back of the WSB phenomenon. Social network’s ability to influence group behaviour and now long established markets is analogous to the 2011 Arab Spring.
*** BTW “variable rewards” is a well-known tool in gamification.
Our readers develop and run Apps in competitive markets. Even once “safe” corporates like banks now compete with mobile-first “Neobanks” crafting Apps that are disrupting the oligarchy.
So how do you compete with a large funded competitor? They could be a big corporate or a Blitzscaling startup. In this webinar, Scott Middleton and I examine how one blitzscaler: Monday.com ($234.1M funded) onboards and activates users. They literally throw everything including the kitchen-sink to make you believe their product will solve your team productivity needs.
What are the insights?
If you don’t have 14 minutes to trawl through the takeaways, I’ll give some pointers to what we spoke about.
1. Tough Sector
Monday is in a cluttered “Team Productivity” segment, it’s also B2B SaaS – one of the most profitable sectors for Apps that dominate. Incumbents/competitors include Trello (2011), Asana (2008), Basecamp (1999), Jira (2002).
With this massive addressable market, Monday.com know:
there will be plenty of triallers
if they can nail the onboarding for each trialler they have a highly profitable opportunity.
this underlies the intensity of onboarding and activation.
they drive for Fast activation
they know there is Fast/high churn potential.
2. Reduce Cognitive Overload
Contextual Tips stop cognitive overload and start the path to “Aha”, they deliberately reduce the number of options at the “top-of-funnel” so the user can only do what supports onboarding.
No “empty states” (User gets visual feedback of usefulness) even when first time in the App. Many Apps leave you guessing about what things will look like once you’ve adopted the product.
use subtle tooltips to explain the common use-cases. “Show-me, Don’t tell me”.
3. Viral Acquisition
Monday recognizes they are going to get the best lock-in when customers invite a colleague.
So their invite stuff is aggressive – I think too aggressive but clearly they’ve kept it because its worth the risk.
They use modals, so I am forced to think about it and its not optional.
IMPORTANTLY: they have a tiny, tiny “I’ll do it later” option that lets you escape the invite process and get on with your evaluation. This “Single player mode” is an example of then the company goals and trialler goals are different.
4. Gamification and Contextual “Show-me” (Videos)
Gamification is more subtle in B2B, tools like checklists, progress bars are silent reminders for a user to complete tasks they enhance onboarding.
Progress bars are great to orient users (in their journey)
Keep demo videos inside the platform and contextual)
Let the user self-pace
Click to see animation
5. Second Session – Inbox and more checklists
The main insight here is that Monday goes all out with contextualizing the user in their journey and what are the next steps. The “Inbox” item is pleading with me to invite teammates and create more boards.
Its possible this message varies PER-USER depending on where they are in their unique journey (I didn’t test this).
They’ve probably used their analytics over time to learn that multiple users and multiple board use-cases drive up the likelihood of activation and retention.
This is expensive stuff to code and deliver but must have been worth doing to keep triallers on-track.
6. Emails, Push Notifications
Most Apps know that drip emails during the trialling process give you 3 big benefits:
Get the user back into the App
A second chance to explain possible use-cases that resonate with the user
Open/Click Analytics tell you if the user is genuinely interested or just a tyre kicker.
Monday is no exception – the email to join a webinar is genius because it allows the user to get deeper understanding that sometimes self-onboarding just can’t achieve.
But can we afford to do all this??!!
Monday’s $234.1M investment certainly helps to be able to build out an impressive, dense and impactful onboarding process.
Other Apps that don’t have the funding may think this is too ambitious and unrealistic for their team and resources.
The good news is that what the big-gorillas hard-code is now available in platforms that smaller Product Teams can make use of.
Those apps can still:
pick and choose the design techniques above.
use platforms like Contextual to build onboarding elements and measure the uplift.
experiment faster to see what works – don’t die wondering!
Onboarding is usually considered to be the first 5 minutes of the user’s experience in the App. But successful Apps always have FEATURE #2. This needs onboarding too!
Scott Middleton challenged this perspective in our recent Onboarding Best Practices webinar. Scott has his own “Aha” moment about why onboarding is really “Continuous Onboarding”.
https://vimeo.com/371063593We can simply break down user onboarding into:
“DO NOW” (the journey to the “Aha” moment which is the user’s primary JTBD discussed here).
“DO LATER” for secondary important features that will deepen engagement and increase retention.
Here is a couple of examples from Google mobile Apps:
In the first, a new button is announced with a simple tip: “A new way to customize Discover”. Its a secondary feature but powerful to announce as it allows the user to simply tune their news to their preferred topics.
The second coachmark, is a more agressive modal element that blocks your attention until you deal with it. Google clearly wants to get stickier with your searches.
The animation below shows a couple of familiar launchers you can use to announce new features or target specific users/segments to:
a) help them out
b) trigger action towards a goal
They are:
Little Red Gift. This is Slack’s way of letting you know about new things.
Glowing Hotspot. This the pulsing effect is handy for attracting attention that you want action on.
Tooltips are the silent unobtrusive helpers.
The latter 2 were once upon a time hard-coded into the application. Now its easy to deploy these:
i) without writing code
ii) target specific users or segments
iii) measure the analytic engagement or improvement on a goal that you want the user’s to complete.
Click to see the animation
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