Category: Progressive Onboarding

Unlock the Secrets of Black Friday Success with Contextual User Onboarding!

In case you thought it was too early to be talking about Black Friday sales, think again.

This period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday is make or break for retailers, accounting for up to 40% of annual sales. With the holiday season just six weeks away, data.ai reports a staggering 22% increase in visits to mobile shopping apps as consumers eagerly research, compare prices, and hunt for discounts.

But here’s the catch: while downloads are important, user engagement on mobile shopping apps has grown nearly twice as fast. The time users spend in these apps directly correlates to higher retail sales. As the world faces an acute shortage of software developers, retailers struggle to quickly adopt a mobile-first strategy to capitalize on this massive trend. Additionally, inflation continues to impact consumer wallets, making the upcoming holiday season even more challenging.

To win over mobile users and maximize sales, retailers and service providers must do more than simply release a mobile app. They need a solid strategy for mobile app user onboarding and ongoing user engagement. Mobile shopping apps, in particular, are prone to high user churn, making it crucial to guide users to the “Aha moment” swiftly. This moment occurs when users experience the initial value of the app, such as finding a desired product and making a purchase—also known as “Activation.” Activation aligns with the methodology of Product Teams, ensuring the app fulfills a potential customer’s needs to be done (JTBD). Since users invest only a few minutes or even seconds before moving on, a well-designed mobile app walkthrough is essential for them to activate and return to the app repeatedly.

When it comes to mobile app user onboarding, best practice involves designing contextual mobile app walkthroughs. Contextual mobile tooltips deliver the right information to the right user at the right time, enhancing the onboarding flow and ensuring a seamless user experience.

Experienced retailers understand the art of maximizing customer spending by optimizing impulse buying decisions. Mobile app shopping is unique because time is of the essence, and users will quickly move on if their needs aren’t met within seconds. This is where contextual mobile in-app tooltips come into play, helping users achieve their goals and nudging them toward the next desired action, such as checkout and continued shopping.

As mentioned earlier, software development resources are expensive and in high demand. They are also slow. To catch the wave of mobile e-commerce consumers, app developers, designers, and product managers must move faster than traditional software development sprint cycles allow. The market is evolving too rapidly for current methodologies to keep up. That’s where Contextual, a no-code SDK plug-in, becomes invaluable. It empowers product teams to create mobile app user onboarding guides, in-app tooltips, onboarding carousels, mobile app videos, and user feedback surveys through an Engagement layer, without the need for extensive coding. This preserves precious development resources, allowing them to focus on the app’s feature layer.

Don’t miss out on the incredible opportunities presented by Black Friday and beyond. Embrace Contextual User Onboarding to supercharge your mobile app success and leave your competition in the dust!

October 18, 2022
Web And Mobile – The Challenges Of Meeting The Customers’ Needs Across Platforms
Do you remember a time when you pulled up the web version of an app that you usually handle on your phone?

Chances are, it was a different experience from what you were used to in the mobile version. Features might be in other places, and it might even look like a completely different app. It feels off.

You don’t want that for your own product.

There are many areas where product-led companies face challenges on a daily basis. Reducing the gap between the experience of the web and the mobile version of an app is a common one. But the task is not so easy.

In this article, you will read about three roadblocks and the impact they have on product companies. If you are currently developing an app on different platforms or planning to do so in the future, this is for you.

Prepare yourself for testing times (pun intended) and keep on reading!

Challenge #1: User Interactions Aren’t Linear

Thanks to modern technology, users may interrupt their work and later pick it up where they left it. These interactions can not only be sporadic, but also scattered across platforms, giving room for frustrations on the user end. If an app is not optimized across its channels, the user experience will suffer from it.

When it comes to web and mobile development, a multichannel approach might harm your product’s success. Delivering a feature in the same manner on multiple channels is a company-centered strategy.

There is a better solution than this – the omnichannel approach. It focuses on the customer and delivering a seamless and unified experience no matter the platform they use.

As a product-led company, chances are, most of your customers are both web users and mobile users. You can reduce the gap between the two user experiences by adopting an omnichannel strategy.

Putting the customer in the center of your app will bear its fruits sooner than you think! With a smooth cross-channel user experience, product adoption and happy customers are guaranteed.

Challenge #2: Different Platforms, Different Time Perceptions

Time and timing are tricky aspects to perfect in software development. Especially when it comes to cross-platform planning. During web and mobile development, focusing on time perception is essential. Here’s why.

Mobile users are notorious for being more impatient. It only takes seconds to switch between the apps on a phone. Due to this fact, users have a different set of expectations on the time spent on one task. So, don’t waste their time!

For instance, during onboarding, don’t try to show them how many things your product can do. Focus on keeping them engaged and helping them reach their goals with your app. Mobile users have a limited attention span, so make the most of it.

In contrast with this, web users are much more patient. The reason behind it is very straightforward. When a user sits down in front of a computer or laptop, they are more clear-headed and focused on the task ahead of them. For them, time moves more slowly. But, as mobile apps are more often used on the go, their users’ time perception is different.

Time holds relevance in web and mobile development. As a product manager or developer, you should always pay attention to this detail. Focus on how your app is perceived depending on which platform it’s used on. Patience is a virtue – but it’s not your job to prove that to your customers.

Challenge #3: Introducing New Features

Feature discovery brings unique challenges to web and mobile development. Implementing new aspects into a well-oiled machine can be tricky. You don’t want to disturb the user, but you want to show them the latest features.

It might seem like a hamster-wheel kind of issue. As screen real estate is precious, a great tip to implement feature discovery is popups. They help build user awareness, they work both on web and mobile apps, and don’t clog up the user interface. Besides this, popups open opportunities for continuous user onboarding.

Cross-platform feature discovery represents a challenge in web and mobile development. As the users’ workflows differ from platform to platform, you need to cater to everyone’s needs when introducing a new feature to your product.

At the end of the day, it’s important to underline that by adding new features, your users can maximize their productivity within the app.

Cross-Platform Apps Are Challenging

Web and mobile development is a tough business. You have to cater to your customers, to their needs and wants, and to their preferred platform.
Let’s sum up some tips for a smoother product adoption process.
- The omnichannel approach can be helpful in integrating your users into the development process. This way, your product will feel cohesive across platforms.
- Don’t try to make your mobile users as patient as your web users. They might get frustrated.
- Use popups for feature discovery. They are quick, they help with building user awareness, and most importantly, they help with screen real estate.
How to face any challenge that might arise?

If you want to overcome similar challenges in your software development journey, book a demo and get started with Contextual! We’ll help with your product’s onboarding process, feature discovery, and many more!
December 21, 2021
Onboarding guru Hulick on JTBD
If you are a Product Manager, Designer, you have probably heard of onboarding guru Samuel Hulick. Even Customer Success people are aware of his tear-downs of early experiences in mobile and web apps. We’ve even emulated his approach with a few posts on this blog. 🙂

In his latest “Value Paths” podcast, he laments a misconstrued use of JTBD.

“it is mind-boggling to me how much of Jobs To Be Done is sales and marketing-oriented rather than product-oriented”.

Contextual agrees with Hulick that the role of JTBD is most profitable when designing user experiences in your product. To read some of our other posts take a look, here, here and here.

Source: HBR

Hulick and his co-host (Yohann) attempt to refine JTBD with into Value Paths:“Path Design is how you get users from where they currently are all the way to the results that they care about.”

It’s an interesting approach that attempts to corale many of the UX tasks that Product Teams undertake. Often when disciplines are new, they are a collection of activities and example-based approaches that people attempt to copy and reproduce in a cargo-cult like manner. Some activities become perennial best practice and others are just hacks that work for a short time or in a specific eco-system.

A classic example of a hack in customer acquisition is spam – it works for a while but burns a lot of prospects and email filter systems constantly improved to stop the spam.

In onboarding a more subtle “hack” is to try to capture ALL the user’s details (do you really need their phone number?) at registration time before they can evaluate the product.

Hulick: “Because if the user goes from the marketing website, to the onboarding third party plugin, to a sales survey, and then finally gets into the dashboard of your product, they might feel like they’ve gone through like seven different products along that way, where for the user it should feel like one continuous thing.”

We’re Building Processes, Not Products

This is a key insight: As product designers we are fixated on the features and functions of a particular module in the product. Per the example above “user registration”. All your attention and discussions about design “crowds out” that the user has a journey to achieve a result. Their trial of your product is a several A-to-B processes to assess if they “hire” your product, they will get their needs met.

The podcast is worthy of your attention – here are some other powerful takeaways:

“The key to path design is clarity on the end outcome (what the path results in). Every time the user engages with the product, it is within the context of the end outcome; so every interaction should be framed against it.”

“There are infinite paths between “where users are” and “where they want to be.” Thinking of the critical pathway (the actions or stages the path must contain by necessity) is a compression algorithm — it compresses that near-infinite, unordered information into a single hierarchy.”

You can find the Value Paths podcast:
- Post here.
- Apple Podcasts.
- Google Podcasts.
October 11, 2021
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.

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:
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
July 14, 2021