SaaS/Subscription: Viewed Homepage -> Viewed Signup -> Signed Up

E-commerce: Product Search -> Viewed Individual Product -> Added to Cart -> Completed Purchase

Lead generation: Viewed Offer -> Entered Contact Information

Daily Deal: Viewed Homepage -> Subscribed

They can all be summarized as:

Unknown visitor, no value -> Known customer worth $

But none of these funnels measure what is most important to your customer: the moment in which they get value from you.

This isn’t a single moment, either.  For most sites, this is a series of events and each one builds upon the last until you have crossed an invisible threshold from “hmm, I’m not sure this is going to be worth my time” to “wow! I was actually able to ____!”

Some of these moments may happen before the visitor actually becomes a customer.

Example: When I broke my wrist last year, I grumbled that I could no longer put my hair in a ponytail with one hand.  Then I thought, “…or can I?” and did a quick google search.  There is, in fact, a small online store that sells one-handed ponytail threaders.  I was so pleased that such a thing actually existed, that I was happy even before I completed my purchase.

The promise of being able to do something that you could not previously do, itself, can be the first time you give value to your customers.

Many of these moments happen afterwards.

Example: Jana signs up for her local daily deal site, but she’s not a “spa person”.  Unfortunately, her first ten offers are for pedicures and facials. 

10 days in, Jana has not actually gotten any value yet.   In fact, she’s getting a bit of negative value because her inbox is filling up but she hasn’t saved any money yet.  It’s not until she sees an offer for that restaurant she’s been meaning to try that she gets a little surge of excitement: It’s paying off!  This is worthwhile!

Sometimes these moments are delayed because your customers need to do some work before you can provide value to them.

Example: Pei signs up for a personal finance site which will help him categorize his expenses and set a budget.  But he signed up from his phone, and doesn’t feel like keying in a bunch of passwords and account numbers.  So he doesn’t connect his bank account or credit card account.

Without that data source, the site can’t give him any value. It’s not until he connects some accounts that he can see a pie chart of his expenditures and tips on how to save more: wow!  I never realized I spent so much on eating out!

Sometimes customers get some value immediately, but not enough to put them firmly over the threshold of ‘can’t live without it’.   In my opinion, this is the trickiest thing for companies to figure out.  What is that tipping point, and how do people get to it?  How can we encourage them to get there faster?

Example: Nina helps her dad sign up for a Facebook account and adds their family members as friends.  Nina’s dad likes seeing the photos they’ve uploaded, but clearly still doesn’t get ‘what the big deal is’.  But then his best friend from high school, whom he lost touch with 20 years ago, adds him as a friend.  Now he realizes: this is amazing! I can find people that I never would’ve found before!

You could express this in a generic funnel as:

Hope -> Immediate Gratification -> Value -> “Can’t Live without it” Value

I’ve provided a timeline so that you, too, can squander the goodwill of the people who would otherwise brag about you, blog about you, and buy a bunch of your products for their friends.

September 2008:

Launch with the TechCrunch 50.  Provide a concise, compelling description of your features and some tantalizing screenshots.  Allow your excited future evangelist users to pre-order.

November 2008:

After two months, post your first blog post with some updates into the manufacturing process.   Let us know there will be a delay – but promise to provide frequent blog posts and updates on Twitter.  Do not actually provide your Twitter username.

December 2008:

One month and 15 comments later, a blog reader leaves a comment: “Hey guys – this post was made over a month ago, it doesn’t seem you responded to any comments, no Twitter updates, not a thing.” Do not respond.

Get everyone excited again with a detailed blog post including details and photos.   By now your evangelists are salivating for more.  Their comments say things like “I can’t WAIT to get this thing!”  Do not respond.

January 2009 through March 2009:

Once a month, provide one post to tantalize your audience.  While providing some transparency into the continued delays, continue to not respond to comments.  Allow someone else to steal your company’s Twitter handle.

April 2009

In this month’s blog post, show one screenshot of the software that will accompany your product.  Promise to open up a beta version of the software to pre-order customers.  This time, answer questions throughout the comments.  Revel in the fact that your evangelist customers are at a fever pitch of excitement.

May 2009

Announce your ship date – July 27!  By now, the ship date is a full six months beyond the original promise.  But that’s okay – your evangelist customers are practically begging for access to beta test your software, for free.  Do not respond.

June 2009

In response to your evangelist customers continuing to beg for access to the beta version of the software, say “I think we’re going to hold off on allowing access until the product ships, so that we have a bit more time for our QA people to stress test the site and uncover any remaining issues.”

Why would you want feedback from your most passionate users, anyways? And everyone knows that the best way to find bugs in software is to limit access to a small team of people! I mean, come on.

July 2009

By now, this evangelist has stopped checking the blog.  In fact, I’ve gone from being thrilled about you to being vaguely annoyed to having completely forgotten about you.

In casual conversation, a friend asks how I like your product.

“What?  Oh – that.  I’d totally forgotten! That’s right, I’m supposed to have it by now!”

I check the website: ship date is now “sometime in August”.  Do I believe you? No.

Am I going to link to your website? No.  Maybe you’ll ship me the product I pre-ordered last September, maybe you won’t.  At this point, I don’t much care.

This post is kind of negative.  And that’s deliberate - your users don’t have any particular reason to give you the benefit of the doubt.

From your perspective, you’re working as hard as you can to get them the best possible product.  You want their first impression to be awesomely great. You want to check that every detail is perfect first.   You think: I’d rather wait and give them something perfect.

But it doesn’t work that way.  From the users’ perspective, you’re unresponsive, not listening, withholding the scraps of information that they’re begging for.  As time goes by with limited updates, your users either raise the bar of their expectations impossibly high… or stop caring altogether.

• First thought: why is this a surprise?
• Second thought: why is no one talking about how to change these numbers?

What we should be asking is:

How can we break the 90-10 “rule”?

It can be done.  Un-scientific research of my Facebook friends shows that over 30% of them update their status at least weekly.  (My Facebook friends include a large number of early mainstream/late mainstream technology adopters, so I suspect that’s a fairly representative number.)  Lithium, who powers enterprise online communities, says that their audience participation rate is also around 30%.

What is it about Facebook and well-run online communities that converts three times as many users from passive participants into active contributors?

1. Sponsors. Most people join Facebook at the urging of friends, who provide some context as to “what is this, and what do you do here”. You listen to them because you trust them.
2. Unofficial Mentors. Thriving online communities have naturally-emerging leaders – people who’ve been around, know some history, and take pride in helping new arrivals find information and understand the “unwritten rules” of the community.  Lithium actively encourages development of these “super-members”.
3. Context. People join Facebook to stay involved with friends.  People join online communities because of a desire to learn or participate in a shared interest.
4. Don’t-Make-Me-Think Contribution. Moving the community norm towards shorter, more frequent updates encourages spontaneity – people don’t feel the pressure to compose, re-read, and make sure they sound “smart enough”
5. Critical Mass. Immediately seeing people you know, or an activity indicator like “418 posts in the past 24 hours” signals users that it’s worth their time investment to contribute.
6. Immediate Perceived Value. The shorter the time between arriving and finding content that is informative, rare, useful, or about you, the more likely people are to stick around.

Twitter obviously has the #4 (140 character limit, no editing) and #5 (3700% growth last month) covered.

But if Twitter wants to keep competing with Facebook to be the platform for expression, they’ve got to incorporate more of #1, 2, 3, and 6.

Sponsors: Allow people to invite friends using the Facebook (and LinkedIn) social graphs.  Encourage them to add at least one “tag” about each friend and include “suggested people to follow” based on that tag with the invitation.

Mentors: I have no doubt that there are thousands of Twitter-ers who would volunteer to “mentor” a new Twitter joiner, especially if there was some cursory demographic matching.  (I would happily spend an hour or so with a new-to-Twitter product manager, for example.)

Context: Oh, I know the whole point is that Twitter is “whatever you want it to be!”  Yeah, sometimes the serendipity needs to be toned down – too many choices are paralyzing.

Allow new users to choose a “flavor” of how they think they want to use Twitter and show them suggested people to follow who use it that way.  This could be powered off a completely user-populated database – little work for Twitter themselves.

Immediate Perceived Value: Finding people outside your social web but inside your “interests web” is incredibly valuable.  Twitter should buy one of those user-populated directories already and MrTweet and make it an official part of the service.

The underside of the keyboard has a hole in it, so that if you spill liquid on the keyboard — and lots of us have done it, we know it happens — it will drain out easily.

Adding a hole was not a feat of technical engineering.  It didn’t require special materials or sophisticated machinery.  It was just a case of someone thinking about what it’s like to knock over your glass of water and curse and turn your laptop upside down banging on the bottom and hoping that the water will leak back out and wondering if a hairdryer will make things worse – and saying, “We know this will happen.  How can we minimize the damage when it does?”

This isn’t the kind of feature that’s going to win you points up front.  But someone is going to be saved by it, and that person is going to be a ThinkPad evangelist for life (or at least the next couple of years, which is pretty equivalent to “life” in the high-tech world).

Most companies have realized: you don’t. Or rather, you can’t.

Solutions like Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Telligent, and SuggestionBox offer  ways to solicit customer feedback easily and harness your customer community to do a lot of the answering and helping for you.

Microsoft decided to build their own solution, and it’s a great example of how a product can include all the right features but provide an entirely unappealing user experience.

I don’t know what user research Microsoft did, but between surveying users and looking at other solutions out there, you might come up with a list of features like this:

• Ask specific questions about my computer’s configuration or software
• Look up error messages or documentation
• Answer questions
• Learn new things by tracking a specific user’s answers or answers on a certain topic

All of these features – and probably more – appear to be part of Microsoft Answers.

But there’s a big difference between what users ask for, and what users use.

Become the user and take a look at the homepage:

Where do you start?

What is there to do here?

There’s a lot of text and a lot of links on this page, but nothing to catch the eye. No prominent call to action.

Now let’s imagine why a customer would come to this site:

Sara, a new Windows Vista user, just installed a Windows Update patch and now is seeing some scary-looking error messages.  What should she do next?

Luis, who has set up data backups and cleared malware for all of his family, enjoys answering questions.  How can he contribute to this community?

It’s not about what customers ask for.  It’s about what they want to do and the experiences they want to have.

The customer doesn’t care about your business. If it’s not obvious that a product or service is going to meet their needs, they have no incentive to spend their time figuring it out.

Sara wants reassurance that her computer isn’t going to go berzerk and lose all her data.  Luis wants to feel useful.  Neither of them are likely to tell you that directly – you need to watch, ask open-ended questions, let the user narrate.

So what could Microsoft Answers do to help customers do the things they want to do and have the experiences they want?

A few thoughts:

• BIG search box.   Giving 20%, 30%, 40% of the screen real estate over to a search box sends the message that asking questions is what you’re supposed to do.
• BIG calls to action for the other main activities: register, find questions to answer.
• Be more dynamic.  The homepage feels like a Yahoo directory page, circa 1998.  An AJAX widget that showed live questions as they were asked would create a feeling of activity and responsiveness.
• Help constructing the question.  Newer users may find it hard to ask the question in way that gets answers.  A tag cloud showing technical terms and error codes that are frequently mentioned is an easier way to browse.
• Highlight recency.  Computer problems are cyclical – following a worm or a patch update or an upgrade.  Make it easy for customers to see what’s happening now.
• Claim your expertise.  For people who love to be helpful, give them a quick checkbox way to indicate the types of questions they’re good at answering – then immediately feed them a relevant question to answer.

Growing a community isn’t just a technical challenge – it’s a psychological, behavioral, experiential one.  You can seed a community with great content, but it won’t take off unless it feels inviting and responsive.

2 weeks later: How’s it growing? My second email was short, with bullet-point tips and a pointer to their customer forum and a plant database on their site.

A few days later: A targeted email, inviting me to participate in an in-person focus group here in San Francisco.  They’d like input on the packaging, so they can further refine how they communicate their value before they roll it out nationwide.

All of the emails were short, formatted neatly in text-only, and informative.  It seems obvious: of course, isn’t this what a product should do to reinforce its’ value to customers?  And yet, I can’t think of the last time I had such a neat little complete email experience.

By watching shoppers, we’ve seen that there are specific moments where designers are most likely to influence a shopper to investigate a promotion or special offer. Most of the time, these moments come after the shopper has satisfied their original mission on the site. If we identify the key seducible moment for a specific offer, we can often see over 10 times as many requests. (Jared Spool, The Seducible Moment, emphasis mine)

E-commerce sites have done a pretty good job of integrating the seducible moment into shopping since Spool wrote this original article in 2002.

But most web services and web applications haven’t. Every product manager I know has at least one feature that they’ve painstakingly researched, spec’d, and worked side-by-side with engineering and QA to get released, only to see it languish mostly unused.

I’ve watched or conducted dozens of user testing sessions where people complained about the lack of a feature that’s right there under their nose. (The look of anguish on the product owner’s face at that moment is just heartbreaking.)

Why does this matter (other than the feelings of the anguished product manager)?

Because there are direct ROI implications.  In the last two industries I’ve worked in (media, finance), the loyal user is significantly more valuable than the casual user. They are the audience that advertisers will pay a premium to reach.  They are the audience who will generate revenues by using additional services. They are the audience who will tell all their friends about you.

And – you don’t have to spend money finding them and dragging them back to your site.

They’re already there. So how (when) do you get them hooked?

1 – Time of registration.

I’ve included this just because it’s the obvious option.  Everyone uses a promotional page, a Flash demo, a follow-up email in the hopes of hooking the first-time user.

It works when: Users have mentally prepared themselves to invest time in learning a new system. (This isn’t necessarily a good thing – it means they expect the experience to be difficult.)   With one banking customer I worked with, we saw around 30% of users watching the promo video to learn about available features, compared to anecdotal feedback from an ex-Yahoo! product manager friend of mine, who saw demo-watching usage closer to 10%.

For most other web applications or services, users want to come in, complete their task, and move on.  If you force them through a “learn about us” funnel, you risk losing them entirely.  Plus, there’s just a limit to how much stuff a new visitor can absorb.

So here are other opportunities I’d love to see explored…

2 – In-application notification, after 3 sessions

Why I think this would work: The first time a consumer uses an application, they feel like they had to tackle a learning curve. The second time, they may still not be convinced they’ll ever use this again.  After the third login seems like a great time to reach out and effectively say, Hey, it looks like you’ll be sticking around. Want to learn some new tips to get more value out of us?

You want to subtly point out that the user has been using your product and has gotten value out of it, and therefore that it’s worth their time to invest even more of their time into learning/exploring/using it.

LinkedIn introduced a version of this a couple of months ago, with a progress meter indicating users’ level of profile completion.  Unscientifically? Every professional I know whose profile was 85% or 90% complete, took the initiative to get their profile up to 100% completion within a week of seeing that indicator.

A substitution I’m dubious about: Email notification, a specific number of days after registration. It’s definitely easier to schedule emails than to build in-application messaging, but there are so many downsides: being perceived as spam, putting up a barrier to entry (if they’re reading email, they’re not on your site), missing the opportunity for a personal touch…

3 – In-application notification, after 5 minutes on-site

Why I think this would work: Consumers are often coming in to complete a specific task (read an article, pay a bill, research a symptom, add a social contact) – and until they’ve completed that task, you don’t want to get in their way.

However, if a consumer is still on your site after five minutes or so, you can safely assume that their critical tasks have been completed and that psychological burden “lifted”.  At this point, they’re either going to close the browser or (maybe) respond to your prompt.  (And if it takes more than 5 minutes for them to complete their tasks, maybe you have bigger information architecture problems to solve!)

4 – After multiple logins within a short period of time

Why I think this would work: Based on my sample size of one, I know what it means when I log into a site repeatedly within a short period of time: I’m bored and trying to kill time.  After the fourth Facebook visit in one day, I am primed for time-wasting.  My friction coefficient is effectively zero, which means I’m likely to respond to a well-written win-back email, a survey invitation, or an in-application prompt.

5 – After seeing someone else’s endorsement

Why I think this would work: Outside of the tech bubble, I’ve seen technology learning spread mostly by “over the shoulder” guidance – a friend saying, hey, did you know about this? try it, I’ll help you.  Some sites use customer testimonials, but rarely (if ever) follow it up with a direct action that a user can take. (No, a “learn more” link doesn’t count.)

This would work well for the kind of service where people can’t quite imagine the results until they see them – like Google Alerts, which I have showed numerous people how to set up.   A promotion gets your attention, and if the user can take action immediately you increase the chance of follow-through.

(Seventy years ago, I’m sure there were television enthusiasts who cared how they worked.  Indeed, they would have to, because I’m pretty sure television sets in the early 1940s behaved an awful lot like computers in the late 1980s/early 1990s – unpredictable and prone to odd behaviors that corrected themselves when you gave them a solid whack on the side.)

Posterous knows that for most people, they don’t know how file uploading works and they don’t care.  They just want their stuff to be in a place where other people can access their stuff, preferably without having to learn about something they don’t care about.

What’s brilliant about this service is that it capitalizes on the way users were already behaving.

Non-techie: “I need to put these images up where other people can easily see them.”

Techie: “OK – you need to use this secure FTP app and then upload them to our web directory.  It’s slash user slash web slash home slash–”
Non-techie: …

Non-techie: “Why don’t I just email you the files and you tell me where I can see them on the web?”

Posterous works exactly like this (except automating the role of the human techie intermediary).  You send an email to them with files, they magically email you back with a URL where you can see them.

Great example #1: It’s hard to change user behavior. Look for ways that you can support people’s natural, pre-existing behaviors.  (I read in ZDNet recently email described as a “comfort app” – one that doesn’t impose a lot of rules, it just works)

You don’t even have to register first.  When you send an email, you’re automatically providing the minimum information the service needs to know from you: where they can contact you.

Great example #2: The higher the perceived friction, the fewer people will try it. In general, trying new things is hard.  People don’t like feeling like novices and risking making mistakes.  Making that “novice” stage seem as fast – or non-existent – as possible relieves that stress.

To take it one step further, making things seem ridiculously easy is such a novelty that you can attract people who weren’t even interested in your site in the first place!

Great example #3:  Start now, customize later. The simple as possible setup options often aren’t enough to get users to stick around forever.  They’ll want more control.  The time to offer it is after they’ve decided to try you out, and engaged.

Posterous upsells extra configuration options – but only after they’ve shown you what they can do.

As always, I am not associated with Posterous – I just like what they’ve done!