Category: UX

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
FTUX – is not a dirty word (plus upcoming webinar!)
In this video clip Bess and David hosted a highly informative “Onboarding and Activation” event, both in-person and online. The event aimed to address the confusion among app makers regarding prioritizing onboarding steps and designs that may unintentionally lead to increased trialler abandonment and churn.

Throughout the event, David and Bess analyzed both exceptional and subpar examples to provide valuable insights. The agenda covered essential topics including:
- Pirate metrics and the significance of product-led growth
- Understanding the user journey curve
- Exploring the concept of FTUX (First-Time User Experience)
- Examining successful Activation strategies
- Leveraging empty states, feature discovery, and driving referrals
Watch a brief clip from the event’s introduction, where Bess sheds light on the elements of FTUX and how contextual walkthroughs, user onboarding, mobile tooltips, product adoption, underpinned by digital adoption platforms play a pivotal role in improving user engagement and reducing churn.

The session wasn’t about the Contextual product, focussing mainly on some classic “patterns” and “anti-patterns” – this is just a geeky way to say: “Do’s and Don’ts”.

For example, there are many “Do’s” that work for B2B that “Don’t” work for B2C. For this post, here are a few “anti-patterns”.
- Mobile is not a small desktop
- B2C: Force registration before “Aha”
- B2C Mobile: Don’t default to System Permission Prompts
  - Don’t ask until you need permissions
  - Soften with your own popup before the system
- Forced carousels/guides/tours
- 16 step guides!!!!
- External Help/External Videos (Never leave the App!)
- Login after Register (Repeat passwords)
- 2-factor on first try
- Spam with push notifications
We are doing a deep dive with our friends from Mesh.ai in a Webinar on 8th September – so if you’d like to learn more – register for the event.

Webinar: How to Automate Product-Led Growth in APAC

With MeshAI

Tue 29th September 2022, 12:00 pm SGT (2:00pm AEST)
- How Product Led Growth is transforming in 2022
- Evolving your software product’s PLG model
- Automating PLG the who and how
- Product-Led Go-To Market strategy
- The PLG Automation analytics, onboarding and communications
August 25, 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
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
July 12, 2021
6 onboarding UX emotions
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.
1. What made users flock to Mixpanel but shun Kissmetrics?
2. 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:
1. users build up “Delight” slowly over a period of time.
2. 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.
3. 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:
1. Your marketing
2. Your website
3. Your onboarding emails and guides
4. 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.

Take a look here.

The “Vibe”

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:
1. being happy and buying your product or
2. 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!
1. Customers make terrible product designers.
2. Get as much feedback as possible from customer BUT you cannot take at face value.
3. The customer’s job is to show you their pain.
4. Your job is to translate into meaningful product solutions.
5. 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!

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June 28, 2021