Do with what you got: user experience and marketing tips for non-experts
You had a great idea and you’ve worked hard and built it into something real, something that you’re confident has value and utility. You launch it and you’re on top of the world… until you realize no one’s using it. Visitors to your site - and there aren’t many - trickle away without realizing what they’re missing
Last weekend, I presented a talk at Startup Camp called “Why should I use your product?” It came from my experience with TechCrunch and other industry blogs, reading a write-up of a new service, clicking over, and then seeing nothing to explain why I should try it out.
Most early-stage startups don’t have in-house expertise in user experience or marketing, and that’s the right call for them. But I realized as I was talking that my tips for them can be every bit as applicable for product managers within larger companies. Having full teams in user research, design, or marketing doesn’t necessarily mean that those resources are accessible for day-to-day projects. In an ideal world, you’d probably have an experienced marketer survey your users; you’d probably have a Photoshop whiz design your homepage - in your world, do with what you got.
These techniques come from a lot of hands-on user testing, surveying, and working with both corporate and consumer customers. Any of the methods below will get you at least a little bit further than you were on your own - try whatever one you’re most comfortable with:
Why should I use your product? After expanding an idea into detailed requirements and design, it’s often hard to compress it back down. You need a quick, understandable message that people (who aren’t you) will understand.
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Sit down with a person who isn’t familiar with your product and give them an uncensored three-minute overview. Don’t try to sound polished, don’t use your official corporate overview, just try to explain it using as simple language as possible.
When your three minutes is up, ask them to
describe it back to you in one sentence. If their summary is factually inaccurate, correct them in as few words as possible and have them describe it again.Repeat this with 2-3 people - you will usually find some overlaps in what they say. Those are the phrases or concepts that have a good chance of working.
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Get your team in a room with a whiteboard and write down features and benefits. Try to get to 100 things as quickly as possible (which means some will be inappropriate or ridiculous. That’s okay).
Then narrow those down to about 20. Using SurveyMonkey or another free tool, list each feature and ask the user to rate their interest in that feature on a scale of 1-5. Give them just enough context for the benefits to make sense - don’t bias them by telling them what your product is.
(When you have the survey, time yourself taking it - if it’s less than 5 minutes, you can get away with “take this survey for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift certificate”. That should give you a decent number of responses for a very reasonable $25 outlay.)
Meet my Trustworthiness Checkpoints. Ever get that funny feeling that the site you’re reading isn’t quite legit? So do your users. They may not be able to articulate why they don’t “feel right” about your site, but if they don’t, they won’t register now and they won’t ever come back. Understand a few trustworthiness checkpoints that consumers are looking for, consciously or subconsciously:
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Invite me in! You know your product will benefit me - tell me why and ask me to make the (time and/or money) investment to try it out! (Hint: if you are an unknown service and your “register now” section occupies less than 25% of your splash page, you’re not inviting me enough.)
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If it’s free, tell me it’s free. If there’s money involved, tell me that too. Understandably, many for-pay services don’t want to put the price on the homepage. That’s okay. The big problem is with free services that either don’t realize they should make that obvious, or fear looking tacky. Don’t. Put me at ease.
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Have a privacy policy. If I’m the average user, I won’t read it - but if you’re asking for any data of mine, I’ll be alarmed by the absence of a privacy policy link.
Be secure. Even non-tech-savvy users know that commerce sites and sites involving personal data are supposed to have https not http in the URL. And everyone loves the lock icon. Put one on your page somewhere.
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1-2-3-How’s it work? What are the steps between now and me using your product? If there’s more than one step, give me a quick preview of what the steps are and tell me if it’ll take 1-2 minutes or 10 minutes to go through them.
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Once I’ve registered, send me a welcome email. Whether it makes sense or not, this is often perceived as a sign of legitimacy. It’s also a great opportunity to reiterate “why should I use your product”.
Keep the conversation going. Generally speaking, people love to have their opinion asked. Even wildly unscientific anecdotal evidence can point the way towards great ideas (which can always be validated by more rigorous research if you have those resources).
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Invite users to sign up for a research mailing list where you will send out occasional requests for feedback, invitations to take surveys, or simple factual research questions.
Be clear that it’s for making the product better, not marketing; that you won’t share their email address; that you won’t send more than one email per month - you’d be surprised how many people will opt in (or not opt out) of that.
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Offer quick surveys, often. SurveyMonkey and other tools can generate a bit of javascript to stick in your code that will automatically launch surveys to every X users. These don’t have to be long - you can learn a lot from one baseline three-question survey:
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Come back and see us again - win-back emails. If a user hasn’t logged in for 2 weeks or 6 months or whatever interval makes sense, send them an email reminding them of what they’re missing. You can even embed feedback links so they can click directly from their email to tell you something:
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