An Excellent First Interaction

In 2013 over 2,370 days (approximately 6.5 years) of video were uploaded to YouTube showing recordings of customers taking products out of their packaging or what’s known as ‘unboxing’ videos. For example, a quick YouTube search shows over 127,000 videos of people unboxing iPhones. The most popular of these videos I found had over 1.4 million views.

For perspective, at the same time Apple spent over $350 Million on advertising and the seven largest smartphone makers in aggregate (including Apple & Samsung) in spent $1.3 Billion (with a “B”) on advertising.

First impressions matter. This was a theme that came up over an over again as we analyzed the pairs of companies for our science of growth investigation. This makes intuitive sense as it’s especially important for companies transitioning beyond the innovators and early adopter personas and ‘crossing the chasm’ to the majority of the market for their product or service.

A Few Interesting Lessons from Companies Analyzed

As mentioned in my introductory post, we have analyzed a number of companies to identify these best practices. My plan is to walk through each in a more detailed post like this one.

I wanted to highlight a few specific things lessons / observations from those case studies.

Introduce Artificial Constraints

Sometimes the easiest way to create a great first experience is to introduce what I’d describe (for lack of a better term) artificial constraints. Here are some easy examples:

• A portal to the Internet, but the only thing you could do on the homepage was search
• A network that starts by restricting access to individuals with specific college email addresses
• A content publishing platform that gets rid of titles, tags and limits messages to 140 characters
• A network of drivers that turn anyone into a taxi but only if the service is ‘in your city’

Engineering Choices

Sometimes the product architecture choices end up influencing the first interaction in either positive or negative ways. In our study of pairs of companies, one interesting example of this was Wordpress’s choice to use PHP vs Moveable Type’s use of Perl.

Bryan Reese a former product manager for Moveable Type wrote an interesting analysis on his personal blog “How did Wordpress Win?” where one of the three factors he points to is the PHP vs Perl architecture decision.

Technically, the reasons behind WordPress’ famed 5-minute install can be attributed largely to PHP’s deployment model, which was architected specifically to address the challenges associated with running and hosting web applications based on CGI, or in effect Perl — the Internet’s first practical web programming language.

Furthermore, every web host likes to configure CGI differently on their web server, which led to a lot of confusion and frustration for a lot of users, and prevented anyone from authoring a simple and canonical installation guide for all Movable Type users across all web hosts…”

Without having been involved in the strategy discussions at Six Apart, I suspect this was a choice made before it was obvious all the implications of choosing Perl vs PHP. However, clearly with the benefit of hindsight, those choices were limiting their growth and so either re-using the ideas but forking to a PHP version or figuring out a ‘standard’ configuration option to accelerate customer’s installations would have been incredibly helpful.

This also isn’t limited to software architecture choices. For example, as we looked at the case of McDonalds vs White Castle we came across this great quote from Ray Kroc’s autobiography about the first time he saw his first McDonald’s:

I was fascinated and effectiveness of the system they [the McDonald’s brothers] described that night. Each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with minimal effort.[i]

Techniques to ensure an EXCELLENT first interaction

So how do you invest your time to ensure a great first interaction? Here are a few things that I’ve observed to be really helpful.

1. Do user studies on a regular basis with new users simulating their first interaction with the product. User studies are a powerful technique across the board, but especially testing that initial experience. This can be done in person at places like a local coffee shop (“can I buy you that coffee and have you try my product for 5 minutes?”) or through a service like UserTesting.com.
2. Map out the entire customer journey. A quick note on this, as I think most of use intuitively understand today, this has gotten much more complicated. I’d recommend thinking of this less as a funnel and more the McKinsey style consumer discovery journey.
3. Measure the impact of changes you make using cohort analysis (see example from Twitter here).

What am I missing?

Any other techniques that you’ve found particularly helpful to creating an EXCELLENT first interaction? I’d love your feedback. Please feel free to reach out and write a response here on Medium or ping me on Twitter.

[i]. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc, page 9