Category: Audience/Segmentation

How Much Feedback is Enough Feedback?
An essential component for a well-oiled machine that is a product-led company is feedback. It’s a tool that can help better your product, build meaningful connections with your users, and help you run a successful business.

But do you need a large quantity of feedback to translate it into valuable product improvements? Is any feedback a good enough lead to make changes? Does context matter?

This article will give some answers regarding realistic response rates, justifying changes based on feedback, and much more. So, let’s dive in!

Realistic Response Rates in Context

The concept of a response rate indicates the percentage of the users who offer feedback for your product, a feature of it, or the business in general. However, as we already know, feedback is contextual.

According to Survey Any Place, the average feedback response rate is 33%. The infographic shows the impact different mediums have on giving feedback. In contrast with the average rate throughout all feedback channels, a good NPS response rate is anything above 20%.

This goes to show that you should take into consideration the chosen feedback method when looking at response rates. It might be good practice to combine different ways of asking for feedback for optimal results.

Another thing you shouldn’t forget is that apps inevitably reach different types of people. This means that you can target your audience with different methods of feedback collecting as well. Diversify your feedback mediums for:
- Web and Mobile users
- Different user segments or user roles
- Different stages of a user journey
Try different methods for these and see what brings the best results – based on your OKR and JTBD of course! 🙂

If you have a large sample of feedback (see these articles on statistical significance) consider A/B testing to determine what medium (mobile or web) of feedback are your users most comfortable with. This means that you give half of the target audience of users one form of feedback, while the other half are offered a different channel to express their opinion on your product. See which method is more successful in attracting your clients’ opinions and go from there.

There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to feedback. Figure out slowly what works for you and your users best!

Justifying Change Based on Feedback

As part of a product-led company, you probably already know that every piece of feedback is valuable. User feedback fills the gap between your expectations and the user experience. So, reviews are a testament to your efforts and also a great opportunity to improve your product where it is necessary.

With that being said, when does feedback justify change?

Surely, one negative comment or response is not something you, as part of a product-led company, should be discouraged by. However, in the next user journey mapping session, you can take a look at the user’s point of view and the reason behind their negative review. While a single piece of negative feedback is not a strong enough reason to implement significant changes, analyzing it might be a good idea for future developments of your product.

Statistically, change can be justified with just a 20% feedback rate. As response rates are, on average, around 33%, it’s safe to assume that most users who are willing to offer feedback for your app, fall into that 20%.

With their help, you can identify product improvement areas and plan your next user journey mapping according to the feedback you are getting. If you are able to incorporate feedback and change, your business is in the ideal market-fit bracket.

Not Receiving Enough Feedback

Positive feedback is desired, negative feedback can be a good lesson. But what if there is little to no feedback? If you’re a small startup with under 1000 users, you might find it difficult to get the reviews you need to justify changes or even keep your company running.

In this case, you should especially focus on implementing in-app feedback methods to ensure that you’re reaching your active and engaged users. Their feedback is the most valuable one when you’re working on a smaller scale. Of course, don’t forget about timing, as it is a significant component of feedback. Give your users enough time to experience your app before asking for their opinion.

Implementing changes with little feedback to back you up can be a risky business, but it can also drive users to give an assessment. It would be wise to start small when it comes to changes. Test the waters, see what triggers responses from your users.

We mentioned A/B testing earlier in the article. Statistical significance plays an important role in this experiment, and it’s based on a cause-effect relationship. A good example of A/B testing is changing the color of a button within your app. (It can be the button in your in-app feedback survey!).
Which version drives better response rates from your users? Statistical significance can back you up and give you confidence that the changes you want to implement are positive ones, so that in lieu of enough feedback, you can still make smart moves to improve your app.
Monitoring the impacts of the changes you make is critical to ensure that you’re not doing damage to your app in the process.

The Next Steps

Feedback has an integral part in a successful software business. At Contextual, we can help your journey towards product adoption easier by focusing not only on capturing feedback, but also on onboarding, feature discovery, and much more. Book a demo with us today to learn more!Image Credit
February 21, 2022
Onboarding only the users you want
Two extremely exciting companies in B2B SaaS Video are Loom and Bonjoro – they both let users reach out to prospects and customers with short-form videos that may help with sales, onboarding or customer support.

In this podcast video interview I talk with Matt Barnett from Bonjoro – their onboarding deliberately self-selects for SaaS companies and excludes consumers and other long-tail applications.

To illustrate what Bonjoro do, take a look at this simple email I received after signing up.

Tools like Intercom, Hubspot, Marketo, Autopilot, Sendgrid all blast pseudo personalized email templates at you when you sign up. Bonjoro solves SaaS personalization at scale.

Frickin’ genius.

Everything about this rings true as an authentic personalized email and nothing is more authentic than ME talking to YOU.

“This video contains important information recorded personally for you by Grant Dewar”.

“Hey David, saw you signed up and wanted to say hi from sunny Sydney! Check out your video & let me know how you want to use Bonjoro – I’ve helped a bunch of our SaaS users get going.”

Using these subtle clues, email recipients feel this is a legit, personal communication.

It works.

Open rates are off-the-charts and the relevance for SaaS is the differentiation of personalization – but also at scale.

Here is some discussion snippets on the onboarding flow.

Matt says “they suffer from having such a broad range of users at signup”. So they have to be brutal about the target users they want to focus on – otherwise they would dilute their focus and not be valuable to any one sector.

Also – you will notice that Bonjoro solves this via “Jobs to be done” for the user – get them to name the problem they want to solve:
- onboarding someone
- try to get more demos
- increase retention
- stop churn
To view or listen to the whole interview – Matt shares his whole journey and other valuable topics such as:
- importance of adding team members during onboarding. Not for the usual viral reasons but so people get familiar with video and the human response it invokes.
- people are not confident with video – they are still educating the market.
- remote/distributed teams
- cookbooks of examples for specific “Jobs to be done”
- design-led as a key part of even B2B SaaS products.
- why they integrate with tools like Intercom, Mailchimp, Convertkit etc.
- Which integrations convert better
- Team size, MAUs, break-even-or-not?
Its a great ride and you can see on video or subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes.

https://vimeo.com/395116750

Conversation Transcript

David Jones 0:00
I guess it looks like you are trying to target enterprise. So business customers and possibly even enterprise customers because they are a higher LTV (lifetime value) type customer for you. And you can support $1,000 LTV customer just as well as you can a zero dollar customer and so you’ve got a major focus in that space. So you know, you never got to go for sort of a massive land grab approach.

Matthew from Bonjoro 0:34
So we don’t we don’t do enterprise. I think there’s a cultural shift to happen there. I think trusting your thousand employees to get on video and, and hop on board with clients – there are a lot of enterprises who arn’t willing to make that jump – just yet. It’s going to happen.

Matthew from Bonjoro 0:48
We tend to focus on SaaS and then SMEs. And SMEs in the sense of up to 200 person teams. That’s where we work, we’re mostly used by Customer Success teams. So posts sign up in that lead conversion activation funnel. And then and then post payment like customer care. So really, teams like who will have a customer success team, and those now probably in e-Commerce and they probably in non-SaaS SMEs as well. That tells you where we. At the end of the day, it’s how you message your client. If its going to convert more and it takes 30 seconds. And you have, juniors on your onboarding team. And that client is worth $50. Maybe that 30 seconds is worth the LTV.

Matthew from Bonjoro 1:36
It is (the value of the effort) to work it out for the company, but we do have customers using it with pretty substantial funnels, but they they’ll either filter and then they’ll and then they’ll spread the load across a group of team members.

Matthew from Bonjoro 1:58
Yeah, like I’m actually a Product Designer as well, its more than graphic design so actually its UX for the real world, its kind of the the ultimate goal so yes look good engineering work and then come able to use. I mean, I’m not the guy who now who does the the end design work like we have we have also UX person. I work pretty heavily with them then engineering. But yeah, design first. I’m hugely biased, but I think it’s the way to go.

David Jones 2:30
It makes a lot of sense to me after being in this space for a while, you know, my two previous startups are in security and the design requirements are completely different.

Matthew from Bonjoro 2:41
I think anyone enjoys, like enjoy the experience. Yeah, like again, like yeah, journey versus the end. Yes. You enjoy the journey. Yeah, given numbers, a high percentage of people will stick with it and see it through. And then like little things, if it hit bugs, they hit issues and they hit UX flaws, which are gonna have, they are more likely to keep going. So the way I see it is it just, it just makes. Yep. Like it removes barriers. And our onboarding is, is pretty heavy in terms of my setup, I’d say. So, hopefully people enjoy it more.

David Jones 3:15
Yeah. So let’s, let’s have a look at that. So what I’ve got what I’ve got on the screen here is the first step after putting in username and password. So I should have taken a screenshot of that, but it was super easy. You didn’t ask me any questions. You know, the thing I did a fireside with deputy last week, and they talked a lot about product lead growth and talked a lot about, you know, the drop off rates with adding additional fields, so you were pretty clean about that. Have you had debates about that? Whether you I think you asked the question, either here. You know, you just sort of pushed it pushed it off to the registration page. Did you ever have questions up front that were causing drop-offs?

Matthew from Bonjoro 3:59
Not up Front. Interestingly we actually found like so one we implemented was GDPR Terms of Service, which actually made zero impact so everyone’s completely cool with that. But our form start here, this is classed as early onboarding, most of this is for the user. Like this screen is interesting. So we asked people to basically create a campaign for why they’re doing these messages and we’re trying to there’s a few things going on here. What is we’re trying to get people to start to think in our way so you know,

David Jones 4:33
My first impression was: “these guys are serious about business”. It wasn’t kind of like the casual the casual signup you know, oh, I’m gonna do a video. I’m gonna do a video for somebody It was like, your first campaign it’s like, “oh, wow, this is this is really tied into a process” and but I didn’t actually understand at this stage why I was so sort of important.

Matthew from Bonjoro 4:56
Yes, as they start thinking, Okay, campaigns, this is not just a one off thing. Nothing is this is great data for us. So, we’ve always struggled with having such a broad range of users that sign up – and the only way we can bucket them is by “Jobs to be done” so campaigns an awesome way. People just tell us what job they want to do: are they onboarding someone, or they do retention, or are they trying to get more demos – like they “name the thing”. And we look at that report every week and we’re like: “this is our primary use cases here”.

David Jones 5:30
That’s interesting. I did a tear down of Monday, the productivity tool too, and they actually give you those use cases right up front. So you got this menu to pick from and like it lets you actually get to that “aha” experience around my specific needs – this feels similar in that sense.

Matthew from Bonjoro 5:56
This is our latest onboarding. This is kind of a failsafe for us. So it’ll be more explained on the next screen. But this is this is kind of like so we make sure that everyone always has somebody else to send messages to

David Jones 6:09
Ah, yes.

Matthew from Bonjoro 6:10
The point to understand is that, we looked into what our product qualified lead is. So what are the leading indicators that someone’s going to become a customer. And there’s two things, basically, one is the software integration, which I mentioned that in a minute. The second one is what actually gets sent to the customer is they get a response to a video where someone (the potential customer) goes “this is amazing”. Like, “thank you so much”, and that person to put the credit card in and then they’re on the train. Now to get to that you work backwards. People need to send somewhere between five to about 12 videos. So one of the things we do is we have integrations to help drive this but we also try to add in team members because we found that pretty much anyone who comes back and says “this is great”, “this was unexpected”, is a huge plus in terms of getting that user to ultimately convert over.

David Jones 7:03
Right? Yeah, there’s a real there’s a real kind of like safety, use nothing to fall back on. But it was a real safety net for me to be able to try it out with a colleague.

Matthew from Bonjoro 7:15
Yeah. Because videos, you know, not not everyone’s done videos before. So people are nervous when they first start.

David Jones 7:24
That makes sense. Yeah. You’re kind of educating the market at the same time as getting getting them to use your product. What do think about ugly old blokes like me? Do you find that it actually a skews demographically, the younger people or….

Matthew from Bonjoro 7:38
Nope – say our biggest user base is 32 to 48. (laughter) That’s where we sit, we drop off over 60 and we drop off below 25. So I think, probably there’s a couple of things that was one of the reasons this is it’s not the age as-such. It’s the fact that at that age you are in a more senior position, probably, you’re in CS (Customer Success) or you’re in support, you know what you’re doing, or in sales. Secondly, you’re a lot more confident by that point. So I think confidence comes with age, and people don’t care as much about getting on video if it gets the job done.

David Jones 8:25
Do you think the bottom end of the range? So below 25 has just to do that they they’re not in the job yet.

Matthew from Bonjoro 8:33
I think that is part of it, I think a lot of video messaging been done by youth is between close friends. There maybe this again, maybe this is just because of the age thing. Yeah. It’s hard to know, whether that’s all the same age. I do think confidence comes into it, I think. At the end-of-the-day when you’ve been doing sales or you’ve been doing meetings have you met loads of customers before? This is a less intimidating job than in your first job when you like: “oh, I’ve got to talk to people I’ve never met who are customers”, you know?

David Jones 9:11
And I don’t think we’re going to see Tick Tock for enterprise. (small chuckle)

David Jones 9:18
Alright, so this was interesting to like boom, straight into integrations, which was really, really interesting. So you’ve got a bunch of integrations, you’ve got a bunch of integrations via Zapier, but certainly things like MailChimp and stuff like that. At this particular stage, I’m still a little bit confused that if I was a CS person, why I need to connect my MailChimp. So I was a bit confused about that. I could certainly, probably make sense out of the intercom connection in that situation. I put in a request for Autopilot. It was interesting, too. I sort of thought I should I put in one for Pipedrive, you know, so I didn’t know what was the best platform am I trying to integrate here, you know: is it the support system?, is it the marketing system?, is it the CRM? I wasn’t quite sure where we were going on that.

Matthew from Bonjoro 10:15
yeah we do we do bias towards our better users, so like with my campaigns: Intercom uses “campaigns”, ActiveCampaign (the platform) uses the words “campaigns” within CS. So it’s just “Yes, teams that use that”. And then when you come in here, we again <…>

Matthew from Bonjoro 10:33
So, Mailchimp is interesting. We get a lot of Mailchimp signups. They’re not the best customer because they tend to be more marketing side and kind of small business. However, however, like numbers are pretty significant. So take a bit of an internal decision now – who do we double down on because we keep building integrations every day like, we have Pipedrive is #2 requested; Kajabi is another really high one. But I haven’t used. You start to get these (integration requests) coming through.

Matthew from Bonjoro 11:08
So I guess the question for us as a company is do we keep going broad and broad and broad? Or do we really start to double-down on the ones we know are extremely active and best users and provide a lot more value to those users and make them a lot stickier.

David Jones 11:24
Yeah, you’ve got a menu of options or directions that you could go, you could go really hard down, say the Zendesk intercom route or you could stick in some other some other area.

Matthew from Bonjoro 11:34
It’s tough. It’s tough to know which way to go. Because there’s big benefits either side, you kind of have to make call. And it comes down to benefit. Yeah, the strategy of where you’re going as a company.

David Jones 11:42
Yeah. That’s a great position to be in. I’ll check in with you in six months. And we’ll we’ll find out what how you iterated to a particular direction. It would be great to see that journey…..All right. So here I was a bit confused about just here on the left hand side, why it was saying “choose your software” but people were being shown to me so I was a bit confused about that.

Matthew from Bonjoro 12:12
Good one – it’s good pick up (laughs). I have no idea why

David Jones 12:17
I didn’t even I must admit I should have tried clicking on them to see I missed a bit about uploading my profile so I missed one screenshot and I couldn’t get back. This is a bit of a shame. So I was uploading icons I didn’t know whether it was icon profile.

Matthew from Bonjoro 12:30
It actually shows the video and shows the message that it sends and how it how it looks when you send someone a video message. Which is more around we found that again, having some input on the kind of final look and feel like colors and stuff. These are ideas that are a small thing. People love having ownership over the product. Like Gmail, “I need customized background”. Sounds stupid, but the people love this stuff.

David Jones 13:01
Yeah, make sense to me. I really love this over here as well to that I could actually see how far I did a survey for somebody this morning and they provided me no “Step one, two, three”. I had no clue there could have been 4800 steps. I had no clue. So this is this is a lovely onboarding device to manage patience. Have you found that you’ve got a drop-off at a particular stage. Got any data on that?

Matthew from Bonjoro 13:30
Turns out, we are at a more high level, so we can’t we tend to see who gets the first message. I don’t think we’ve quite split out individual jobs on onboarding. It just “did we complete” or not. So we actually have a we have more people who don’t complete now than before we did this. We also increased our conversion rate by 35%. Since doing this, so we’ve kind of got <…> our Onboarding used to be a lot less than this people get in there with actually like, getting things quicker. But again, this idea of focusing down to users that we know….

Matthew from Bonjoro 14:11
Their intent is already high 50 to 60% of our traffic is through word of mouth for people who’ve received messages. So I think there’s quite a lot of buyer or signup intent and knowledge already. So we don’t tend to get people coming in cold <…> we tend to get a lot of referral stuff, so I think to that extent if people have quite good intent they will come through this and then way more likely to convert to a customer because they are set up correctly. But at the expenses that we do bounce out people because I think we do have a few….

Matthew from Bonjoro 14:48
I would like to do less steps. We may try and drop one or two of these or trying to combine some. It’s kind of hard. Yeah. Like it’s tough.

David Jones 14:57
Yeah, it’s really interesting to make a brutal decision to exclude people or to show or basically show something that actually invites the ones that you really want – I think it’s a great design. If you’ve got enough if you’ve got enough volume coming through there. Is there a sense of what channels are really being those are the power channels for you?
March 1, 2020
Part 2: Segments are nice but each user journey is unique
In the Part 1, we covered the importance of establishing goals around your engagement experiments and flows.

We could call this Part 2: “Segments are nice, Segments are dumb”.

Segmentation will eventually be “individualization” – we cover the steps needed to get there. Thinking in “Goals” are an important step.

Since Contextual’s inception, we provide default segments useful for tracking and grouping users. Names like Newbies, Light Users, Power Users, Churning, Zombies have filters for capturing generic “buckets” of users.

In addition, you can choose a combination of filters based on your own Custom Segments. This example below is creating a segment of “Recently active Project Managers”.Contextual

Once having defined and saved the “Active Project Managers” segment, your Product Team can then:
- target tips, tours, flows, popups at this group (in conjunction with other triggers)
- track the size and membership of that segment.
This is a very good granular way at looking at your user base and targeting flows and content that is customized for their job role.

But…

User’s don’t care about your segments.

Ask a user what segment they are in. You’ll get a blank look.

Segments ignore the needs hopes and wishes of each individual user. A segment aggregates and abstracts them into a “label”.

But each user is on their own unique journey and within a segment you should be seeking to personalise and respond to individual needs at scale. How do you scale for each unique snowflake?

Credit: Monty Python, Life of Bryan.

Scaling Individualization

If you have 25K Monthly Active Users, then having 6 segments is easy for you to manage but mediocre for users.

One solution would be to create more segments – the ultimate solution would be to create as many segments as there are Users (25,000 segments!). That would be:
1. ridiculous!
2. a huge amount of work for the product team
3. always out of date.
4. Still not what a user wants from your product.
Artificial Intelligence will eventually make this possible: what Netflix does for movie recommendations or Facebook does in your feed. More on this later.

Goals – a user’s needs
- Better than structuring your users into segments – goals align the Product Team’s interests with the user’s interests.
Its not very different but an important way of thinking about your user’s needs.

Example:

Already you can see a business GOAL or event looks like a customer progression in their own journey, there are some mandatory steps in the business process that each user must be aware of and complete:
1. DETAILS_FILED = YES, NO
2. TERMS_AGREED = YES, NO
3. QUOTE_CREATED = YES, NO
4. SALE = YES, NO
Then joining these journey goals with Contextual’s seamless tracking of the user’s behaviour, e.g:
1. Install date and time
2. Usage dates and times
3. Screen Visits, Session count, length etc
4. Touch events
Delivers a rich pool of rule-based or training data that can tell you more about the user that enriches data-driven segment toward goals and “individualisation”.

Today, by manually working backwards from the population who have achieved goals you can determine the “Next Best” segments you should be targeting. Contextual allows you to “what-if” audience size my testing goal-completers with other data. You could export or dump this data to a datalake (redshift, bigquery/bigtable, snowflake, Azure DW) or data-mining system for better tools for PCA and to seperate causality from correlation. Then you can compare goal-completer’s rows vs not.

You should end up with some observations like:
- “80% of users who completed the introduction tour” resulted in DETAILS_FILED=YES”
- “90% of users who completed the introduction tour” within 24 hours of registration resulted in DETAILS_FILED=YES”
The goal at scale

The interesting thing about goals is that unlike the 25,000 potential segments, there is a small number of goals that matter in the sequence of a user journey – so scaling with the above method is naturally a more manageable.

But…let’s face it, you don’t want to click through all your users to uncover nuances submerged in the data that lead to greater personalisation and individual needs.

DETAILS_FILED = YES is an important business goal in this app – the business relationship is established. The Product Team can learn a lot from what attributes distinguish these users from the DETAILS_FILED = NO users. There are also other filters that are pre-cursors, for example, users who have churned will automatically DOCUMENT_UPLOADED = NO.

From the Contextual data we can learn that these 2 goal based segments can be broken into (we chose) approximately 10 interesting segments.

For example, we know that users who viewed the “Completing the Document” tip tour have a higher success rate of DOCUMENT_UPLOADED = YES.

So one logical conclusion would be to keep re-showing this tour to users until they complete it. Another action could be to trigger a feedback question to these users.

Some other attributes are surprising – for example Android uploads from newer devices is a predictor of success. How the hell could the Product Team manually discovered that? The action is the Product Manager can schedule an investigation by developers to find a root cause.

Individualization with Machine Learning

Each of the 25,000 user’s journeys is describable by the data (behavioural, segmentation, goal, external enrichment).

Instead of the manual iterations above, you will see AI in platforms like Contextual by training on the “goal data” (supervised) to learn the models, then automate interaction with new users as they move through the journey.

The challenge is that both platforms and Product Teams outside silicon valley are not quite up to the task at the moment. So, purchasing decisions for on-boarding/engagement products are made without this as even a consideration, so we need to user the rule method and engines like Contextual to get results today.

Keep an eye out for companies like https://www.clearbrain.com/ who are early but pitching causal based analytics to convert customers.
September 2, 2019
User Goals, Segments, User Activation – Part 1
This multipart series covers best practice for activating user’s on their journey. “Activation” has a specific meaning, the way it was defined in McClure’s Pirate Metrics – if you are not familiar with this, take a scan of this post.

In this post, we cover UX goals you want YOUR user’s to achieve. The next post will compare with segments. Contextual allows you to add segments from the beginning which is great, but segments also have problems that we’ll dive into.

Setting meaningful user goals

All app owners want to get their users to the “AHA” moment as quickly as possible – this increases engagement and “AHA” is an ACTIVATION event.

The problem is that many App owners don’t know what that means in their App:
1. There is not enough granularity of data to know.
2. New Apps have little or scarce data.
3. The bigger problem is that the goals are too big (not granular enough) – “convert triallers to subscribers” is not a goal, its a wish!
Work Backwards from goals to design

Steven Covey (of 7 habits fame) says “Begin with the end in mind”.

Often Product Teams visualize how they want to guide the user in the App. Implicitly the goal is embedded in the design discussions but quickly gets buried with the design’s colours, shapes, wording, validation logic. Its just human nature.

Instead we suggest to always keep goals at the center of design.

The Atlassian Team Playbook has a whole “play” (Team Goals, Signals and Measures) as an antidote to getting lost in the detail.

At Contextual we use Atlassian’s Confluence for writing the requirements docs and in the sample templates they have “Goal” and “Metric”.

They are encouraging a Product Manager to not just define User Stories but also “what does success look like”.

Above is an example from a Contextual Requirements doc. In this Confluence template the Metric column is encouraging a QUANTITATIVE measure for a GOAL.
This is awesome because the whole team can focus on what is the important business result. A better “Metric” for
```
"Customers can integrate with reduced support ticket load"
```
could be
```
"Reduce Integration related support tickets by 20%".
```
Note that it has nothing to do with how the product looks and all about the cost to the business and happiness of customers.

Make goals granular

In FULL SCALE***, Richardson says:

“Determine goals, milestones and priorities. These three tasks make people more productive. Productivity makes better use of your time. Time is directly related to growth. Growth is why we’re here. Therefore, growth is goals, milestones and priorities.”

Your goals might be too big and too abstract. For example:
```
"Reduce Integration related support tickets by 20%".
```
or
```
Increase conversion to paid by 30%
```
are desirable business goals but don’t map to a user in their journey.

So you need to map and align the user goals. Break the business goals into multiple user behaviours in your App. This might simply be a “BUY” or “PAY” button in the App but the following Pandora example breaks “activation” into 3 user behaviours that you would define as goals.

Example User Goals

The first step is to understand what your successful user journeys are. A famous example from Facebook was “if a user gets 7 friends in 10 days they will be a lifetime user”.

Three other examples are:

1. Pandora: I recall a speaker from Pandora explaining that an “activated” user was someone who had:
- Played songs
- Invited a friend
- Saved a playlist
You can think of these as more granular goals.

2. Checklists and gamification. LinkedIn mission needs great profile data. They did an incredible job of getting people to update.

3. Spotify – the lead data scientist at Spotify told me: their top-tier users, the most engaged people, actually treated the application like an operating system. The data science team would analyse their behaviour and then map journeys for other users that made it easier to become top-tier.

In Summary: you need to create goals that you are able to measure that are meaningful to each user’s journey.

About now, you might be looking liking like this.

This is where your personal knowledge of your App is essential.
With your team:
1. break down your big (business) goals into smaller events you’ve seen. For example user behaviours like:
  1. a user bookmarks an item that shows they have commitment.
  2. If they hit the payment page but didn’t complete thats significant.
2. In the next post, we will discuss data-mining as a possible method of surfacing goals. If your team or tools have that, this is ideal.
3. your analytics platform. You may not have a team of engineers, data scientists and PH.D’s that LinkedIn and Spotify have but it’s likely you are already using analytics tools. It may not have a magical answer but you can do some “what-ifs” around user behaviour.
User Click activity can be a quantitative goal

On some Contextual plans you get click/touch tracking**. So looking back 30 days for a question like “did a user touch/click BUY button?” could become a very useful goal.
There is a very good chance that a “click buy button” is exactly the behaviour you want to measure and 30 days history can be measured before and after you run a goal-based experiment.
Outcome
You want define a “happy user journey” with granularity like Pandora. Here is some examples:
1. “We know 60% of users who don’t churn and Visit X page and Search for Y getting a successful result and Save an item become subscribers.
2. Users with Saved items are 60% more likely to make a purchase.
NOW you have a list of more granular goals.

In Contextual you can select goals based on:

1. Business Goals (the Custom Tag option above). In the Pandora example this could be the “Invite a Friend” process or the “Save Playlist” event. In other App is could be a purchase, getting an anonymous user to register an account etc.

2. Behavioural (Button Clicks, Page Views, or other InApp metrics in “Contextual Tags” like Session Counts, Upgrading to the latest App etc)

In this example from Wikipedia, to set a goal to measure people who registered – you simply mouse over the “JOIN WIKIPEDIA” button and clicks/touches on that will be selected as your goal.

Iterate your process

Because this post focusses on goals and segments, I won’t revisit creating user onboarding activities. Sometimes this is code design and sometimes its using a tool like Contextual to create walkthroughs.
To see some examples of what Contextual can do to help onboard users or help guide them to discover and use new features, check these posts.
- Create flows/walkthroughs/tips etc to test your hypothesis
- Measure the results. For example did the “BUY” button clicks relatively increase? Go back to the Contextual “Metric History” analytics chart (an example above). Can you quantitatively measure uplift on user interaction with your “BUY” button?
- Refine or discard your hypothesis.
- Repeat
In addition to analytics of Metric History, Contextual’s experiment analytics allow A/B splits against goal to prove/disprove hypothesis. Two detailed posts cover this topic.

Next Post: Segmentation

Now that we have Goals defined in a granular and quantitative way, the next post will cover the pros and cons of segmentation and individual user journeys. Where is personalisation practical? If you want to be notified signup on the side-bar 🙂

Notes

** Contextual doesn’t try to replace dedicated analytics products but touch/click behavioural analytics are designed for Product, Customer Success and Growth teams to see the impact of tips and tours.

*** FULL-SCALE: How to Grow Any Startup Without a Plan or a Clue
August 13, 2019
How Google Home educates on a new user interface

Our house is one of those connected places and we chose Google Home as the backbone. Around the house are lightbulbs that turn-on and off with voice commands.

We also have several audio and video Chromecasts that do things like play the current episode of “the innocents” on voice command. All this is done via 4 Google Home minis placed in rooms.

I rarely go into the Google Home app, but I was setting up a new light-bulb and the App had updates. The Product Managers at Google obviously wanted to tell me more about the changed – we call this “Feature Onboarding” – here is what it looked like.

The cool thing about this is that they’ve targeted me on first use of the upgrade and told me about the interface.

The top image is attractive and contains common items for lightbulbs, switches, lamps that you hookup in the App.

The wording is a bit dense for my liking (users are usually in a rush to get to the features) but it hits the major UI and feature points.

The call-to-action is simple, either “DISMISS” or “WATCH NOW” – it was a little confusing to me what “WATCH NOW” meant, often Apps use “LEARN MORE…” but I guess it sets expectation that it would be an easy video to consume.

So I clicked and here is what I got.

Video is a great way to educate users as its a “show me, don’t tell me” solution. You can see here that Google have set the video to 42 seconds, so they want to hit the big points and not waste your time. I think of this as getting the message across and then getting out of the way.

Google have big teams that can do these popups and target them at the right users at the right time.

This is also simple to do with platforms like Contextual and your App can do things from simple tips, to embedding videos – then measure the uplift with analytics.

October 12, 2018