- Source: https://amplitude.com/user-engagement/three-games-of-engagement
- Onboarding: A series of steps within your product designed to show new users how they can use the product to obtain value.
- The Three Engagement Games
- Attention Game - maximize attention spent in-product or on-site
- Transaction Game - get customers to buy products
- Productivity Game - allows businesses to complete a task or improve workflow for user; typically B2B
- Amplitude has found that even if businesses say that they are in all three games, it's best to focus on one. Making a clear choice on which one to focus on is a big part of what strategy is.
- Why it's important to define a north star
- It gives your organization clarity and alignment on what the product team is optimizing for and what can be traded off
- Communicates the product organization's impact and progress to the rest of the company
- Holds product teams accountable to an outcome
- KPI: ‘Key Performance Indicator,’ a measurable value that demonstrates how well an organization is achieving its current objective.
A north star metric is the key measure of success for the product team in a company. It defines the relationship between the customer problems that the product team is trying to solve and the revenue that the business aims to generate by doing so.
- What is the customer value exchange for your game
- The value exchange between business and customer is as follows. A business makes a product that offers some value to customers - entertainment, efficiency, status, etc. - and the customer in return offers some form of compensation to the business.
- To increase engagement, it is important that you understand the various actions within your product that provide value (realized value, in particular) to your customer
- Metrics for the Attention Game
- time spent within the product
- number of sessions over a period of time
- how many times users performed a critical event over a period of time
- Metrics for the Transaction Game
- Browsing doesn't add value - you need to get users to add things to a card, enter their credit card number, and complete their transaction
- Metrics for the Productivity Game
- These kinds of products help customers increase efficiency
- As a product person, you need to help customers overcome the adoption barrier by creating a desire for your product, making your interface easy to learn, and worth their investment in time and money.
- What is the Engagement Loop
- The engagement loops helps you and your team understand and describe the timeline of interactions from your customer's perspective
In order to grow, every “engaging” product needs an interaction loop that maximizes the value created in your user’s first session and brings them back regularly
- Maximize value in the first session! Once you get someone to sign-up, how do you get them to your product's Aha Moment? These are some good questions:
- What am I doing to drive a curious customer to their a-ha moment?
- What is my recurring unit of value exchange?
- What is the customer investing in that I can leverage to make each subsequent exchange of value more valuable?
- How am I timing my ask for reviews and referrals from customers?
- Look at Spotify's onboarding - it's a great example of a simple flow and gets them to enjoying Spotify and seeing value as soon as possible:
- Notice how Slack updated their onboarding copy to make their value prop simpler:
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Here are the above tips simplified:
- Lesson #1: Remove any possible barrier to accessing your main value proposition
- This means streamlining your UI to make the a-ha moment idiot proof.
- Remove Distractions
- Prevent Wandering / Exploration
- Get it down to the minimum number of steps for users to realize that moment of magic
- Example: Spotify Onboarding
- Lesson #2: Give the customer instant feedback on their actions to affrm the value exchange
- Use subtle UX cues to affirm the value exchange so the customer can cleary follow what happened and take a moment to internalize it
- Example: Slack "welcome" copy
- Lesson #3: Create benefits for customers to increase their investment in yor product
- For Asana, this means "Gamification" where if they complete a task, the little "celebration creature" zooms across the screen
- Key: Small, random indicators of success / achievement can boost how someone feels about using your product
- Lesson #4: Prompt for referrals and reviews after the customer has already started investing
- Lesson #1: Remove any possible barrier to accessing your main value proposition
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How to measure engagement, depending on your "engagement game"
- Source: https://amplitude.com/user-engagement/engaging-new-users
- It's important, when measuring the growth of new users, to understand what a "new user" is. Amplitude recommends not measuring vanity metrics like sign-ups or app downloads but rather "activations".
- Activation: The point at which a user finds value in the product and also provides value back to the business. See the image below (hint: it's not just clicking the 'activate account' link in their email)
- This is where activation is in the entire growth funnel:
- This chapter is about the stages of activation: Onboarding, Aha Moment, First Value Exchange
- Onboarding, the first phase of new user activation, is a the process by which new users get acquainted with your product and first discover value.
- Amplitude recommends looking at your sign-up page and the first steps afterward:
- how many steps must the user take to see real value?
- How can you make those steps easier / faster / more enjoyable?
- There are three main onboarding categories:
- doing-focused: the user actually does meaningful actions within the product to see value
- benefit-focused: the user is walked through a specific product function that would be beneficial to the user
- account-focused: the user sets up their profile in a guided process (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn)
- Doing Focused:
- the example below is Tumblr's onboarding process.
- It is designed to quickly instruct new users on how to create a new post
- Doing-focused onboarding should be simple and be the smallest amount of action to convey value and have them do something meaningful in your product
- Benefit Focused
- Benefit-focused is less about having the user do something but more about showing them your product's core value
- I could see this being the case for more complicated or involved products where a quick, 1-minute or less action may not be valuable enough to show value.
- Evernote's onboarding example below shows how Evernote explains its core value prop to users
- For more compicated B2B products, i.e. Typeform, new users are walked through creating their first new form
- Account Focused
- Account-focused onboarding is more popular in social media applications
Activation is about building trust with your users. Onboarding is about logistics. A 10x improvement to your North Star metric doesn’t come from endless, minute optimizations of your onboarding flow or sending yet another email. It comes from providing a core value of your product early on in the new user experience.
- Onboarding Best Practices
- The aha moment helps companies connect their higher-level goals to actions that users take within their products.
- the Ladder of Engagement is the “ongoing learning journey a new user embarks on to become an expert.”
- Before your Ladder of Engagement, understand which "engagement game" you're playing. Start at the topmost rung (power users) and work down
- What do you want your power users doing and why?
- How should users arrive at this point?
- Understanding what action(s) makes up the bottom rung of the engagement ladder is the most difficult as it is what gets users to that "activation" point; the first value exchange