How to Simplify User Experience for Business Growth

When I was head of growth, our team reached 40% activation rates, and onboarded hundreds of thousands of new users. Without knowing it, we discovered a framework. Here are the 6 steps we followed. 1. Define value: Successful onboarding is typically judged by new user activation rates. But what is activation? The moment users receive value. Reaching it should lead to higher retention & conversion to paid plans. First define it. Then get new users there. 2. Deliver value, quickly Revisit your flow and make sure it gets users to the activation moment fast. Remove unnecessary steps, complexity, and distractions along the way. Not sure how to start? Try reducing time (or steps) to activate by 50%. 3. Motivate users to action: Don't settle for simple. Look for sticking points in the user experience you can solve with microcopy, empty states, tours, email flows, etc. Then remind users what to do next with on-demand checklists, progress bars, & milestone celebrations. 4. Customize the experience: Ditch the one-size fits all approach. Learn about your different use cases. Then, create different product "recipes" to help users achieve their specific goals. 5. Start in the middle: Solve for the biggest user pain points stopping users from starting. Lean on customizable templates and pre-made playbooks to help people go 0-1 faster. 6. Build momentum pre-signup: Create ways for website visitors to start interacting with the product - and building momentum, before they fill out any forms. This means that you'll deliver value sooner, and to more people. Keep it simple. Learn what's valuable to users. Then deliver value on their terms.

If you think UX is all about "making a pretty looking app", I have a story to share. Once upon a time, there was a company struggling with adoption of their Salesforce application. A critical part of the application was sending email notifications, asking users to perform certain actions when conditions were met. However, there were two problems: #1 - Users ignored the notifications because they got them all the time.* #2 - The email notifications weren't helpful.* *- These were determined because we did some lightweight user experience research The fix was easy. We implemented a "digest" type notification that was sent weekly with all the required actions combined into one place. Second, we made the emails extremely useful. The old emails did not have any useful links or instruction, color or other indicators. The new emails had links that went right to the records to be updated, and color indicating status. Finally, we coached management on making sure their users are following up and gave them reports to view activity. Voila! Usage went up, data health improved, and everyone lived happily ever after. The moral of this story for us is that while beautiful design is important, UX is a bigger journey and taking the entire end to end process into account is important to achieve business goals. This was a very fast, low risk, and low tech solution to a complex challenge that yielded results. We can help you! With the maturity of so many Salesforce orgs now, optimizing them is just as important as transformational projects. Small investment = large results in these types of efforts. #ux #salesforce #processimprovement #crm #ui #occamsrazor #simplesolutions #optimization

As a bootstrapped startup, we couldn’t afford to pay for website traffic and conversions, so we had to work extra hard to bring in quality organic traffic and turn those visitors into leads and sales. Lots of things helped, like: ✅ Improving page load time ✅ Clarifying copy ✅ Showing an explainer video on our home page ✅ Niching down our audience ✅ Creating industry-specific landing pages ✅ Blogging and other content ✅ Earning backlinks and mentions from outlets our audience trusted ✅ Adding social proof throughout the website ✅ Earning online reviews on trusted platforms But one small thing that had the most surprising impact on our conversions was adding a Calendly form to our website to let people schedule demos on their own. Beforehand, prospects had to submit a form to request a meeting. Then we had to email them. Then we had to go back-and-forth to (hopefully) find a time that worked. We lost so many opportunities that way. I forget the exact numbers, but once people could book on their own, we began earning ~40% more demos from the same traffic. That was HUGE for our marketing and sales. We’ve changed a lot over the years as we’ve grown, but we still use that demo booking form (though we do use their routing forms now to send prospects to the right rep based on company size). Sometimes small changes to the user experience make a big difference to your numbers. Just keep asking: How can I make their experience better? #marketing #conversionrateoptimization #bettermeetings P.S. What’s a small change you’ve made that’s had an outsized impact?