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).
As you can see, contextual tips don’t need to be flashy or complex – they are super-impactful at right-person-right-time.
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.
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
This chart is intended to show that:
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.
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.
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:
It’s easy to over-state a product’s unique value proposition in the marketing.
We experience this ourselves:
None of this is the customer’s fault, we need to better set expectations of simple things and technical things.
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.
Take a look here.
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.
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”.
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.
I’ve provided 6 major emotions that a user experiences on their way to:
But don’t be fooled, these emotions run under the surface – don’t believe what any user says, but measure what they do!
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!
Why do left-handed squash players who drive yellow Camrys on a Saturday morning matter??
If you work in Product you know the term Product Market Fit or PMF or PMFIT. This milestone is a momentous point in a product’s journey and a defining cusp in potential great success and failure – but it’s hard to point to the science of knowing how to get it.
Last Friday, I was lucky enough to host a panel with some incredibly talented product folk and founders – between them over 90 products have been launched. We dug into what is pre-PMF and what is post-PMF, some wins in finding it, some fails and most importantly what methods help you get there.
Here is the link to the full session and I’ve summarised a few key points below.
The main takeaway is that PMF is about “doing the work”. Prioritizing and running experiments that align with revenue goals or okrs and measuring the results.
Trish started by:
Mick deconstructed the PMF acronym highlighting:
Cheryl’s experience of over 60 startups was valuable. The change is from “pushing shit uphill” to “chasing the demand…I can’t keep up with this thing” (possible directions for the product).
Sometimes you find (the Spotify example) that your key users are treating your App like an operating system – they are hacking it in ways that you never imagined.
Steen related thought tools he has used over the years. Specifically oscillating back-forth between the “understanding which segments are right for your offerring” and “how can you better service those segments”. Then iterate through that cycle where you get to high level of engagement accompanied with money “flying through the door”.
The Sean Ellis’ methodology was the first to lay the groundwork for quantifying PMF. The favourite for Steen is the currently more fashionable method from Superhuman. Both of these are focused on customer/user perception of their need for your product on their chosen task.
Steen called this “toothbrush time”, that consistency of use in each day.
Stick with the whole video for learnings and some useful questions.
I’d love to followup some time with a deeper dive on marketing and audience testing methods both pre and post PMF. Stay tuned.
How is it that some apps nail user engagement? What looks so easy is the result of a lot of product measurement and fine tuning.
The reason why mobile tips, tooltips and guides work is because designers often hide features away to avoid clutter. What you can show on a sidebar (or top menu) in a Desktop App is often not best to show on mobile due to limited screen real-estate or differing layout.
Successful Apps always work by optimizing feature uptake. Successful Apps eventually add more features that need explanation – this post we have a look at what tips and guides some big players have been doing in 2021. (all of these screencaps are from just the last week or two).
You could forgive the twitter team for sitting back, sipping on a Sightglass latte. Or perhaps you imagine them freaking out about Clubhouse and rushing to launch Twitter Spaces. But some part of the team are quietly optimizing user’s understanding of how the app works.
As you can see here, they are testing 2 tips at once. I didn’t think about the bookmark idea before, so kudos to them.
A nice new feature would not be known by users unless accompanied by a Feature Announcement – the call-to-action “Go to settings” is a perfect example of giving the user the option to uptake that feature. You can do this easily with Contextual and you can measure the uptake.
eBay benefit if they can encourage us to save our searches. You know you will get inApp reminders, price-drops, emails all based on your stated-interest.
A latte sipping product manager might think that the “❤️ Save this search” is prominent enough but kudos to this product manager for leaving nothing to chance.
Calendly may not be as big as the other Goliath’s but you can see Feature Announcements are a great way to deepen the usage of the product. Regardless of whether its mobile apps or mobile web, tips can help users comprehend all the capabilities of your App. As I mentioned in the starting paragraphs: in mobile much is hidden and that is exactly why tips, tours, guides are even more powerful – targeted to right-user-right-time.
With Contextual you can create carousels without coding. But readers will know that I’m not a huge fan. I AM a huge fan of JTBD (Jobs-to-be-done) and to me carousels seemed to stand between the user and their job.
So thats not a good thing.
Elsewhere in a banking app, I was positive on using carousels for feature discovery. In this post, we look at how the world of cryptocurrencies is trying to become easier to consumers. Specifically why carousels help explain a new concept from a crypto project called Argent.
In the world of crypto, post-Mount-Gox, the familiar catch cry is “not your keys, not your coins”.
That won’t make sense to most people and hence why crypto is largely for either for geeks or the very committed. Like all movements, you have wearly adopters and eventually the movement “crosses the chasm”. The diagram below was made famous by Geoffrey Moore in his book of the same name.
Briefly:
1) when we store our cash in a bank account, the bank is the custodian – they hold the keys.
2) in the crypto world:
If you are confused, no problem, this is because we are still on the RED left hand-side of the curve below.
Argent want to help change that.
Argent have a radical and new way of avoiding the custodial role by adding “Guardians” – but for a new user to understand: it does need education, and it does need people to collaborate. I’ll let them explain.
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This is a complex new area for consumers and this use of Carousels by Argent is not interferring with the JTBD, but actually bootstrapping the consumers understanding. I think they’ve done a good job. They were probably tempted to use a video explainer, but this keeps the user inApp, contextual and ready to proceed.
BTW, they did have an introductory Carousel which I was less excited about. I’ve included it here for completeness.
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