First Impressions and New User Experience
4 Golden Rules of User Retention
Based on my experience working on product over the last 4 years, I’ve learnt that new user experience is sacrosanct. Below are the four golden rules that make a first-time user experience sticky.
First Impressions — your mother probably told you how important they are. In consumer web and mobile, we’re discovering our mothers were wiser than they realized.
When a user first lands on your product, he is judging and evaluating your product. Between 60% — 95% of all user lapse occurs during the first session.
Now, you know how amazing your product is, its value proposition and why it will revolutionize the user’s life. Most products don’t communicate this in a user’s first time experience. Everybody’s in too much of a hurry to get that email id and Facebook connect done.
1. Form-Free Forty Seconds
No sign-up, no-sign in, no email ids and no Facebook connect. The first thing you want to show your potential users is the value proposition. Show them that one thing that will make them love your product. Let them feel it and let them try it.
Games do this best. They let you play a sliver of the game (usually just the core loop) before prompting a sign-up. This way, players get addicted to the swipe or click or shoot that defines their core gameplay experience. Mobile apps like Tinder and Uber do this well — they show you exactly what you’re signing up for and then prompt the sign-up. For websites, this is bound to be harder as they will have to constantly track who is a first-time user and deliver them a unique personalized experience.
2. Inspire Action — Inspire the sign-up!
When I was a child, I would cook a lot. I’d bake a cake or a 3-course dinner for my parents, wait for them to feel really loved and have an excellent meal, and then ask them for money or permission to stay out late. On some level, I was using behavioral economics to get my sign-up.
Upworthy does this the absolute best. You click on a link from somewhere, you see this page. You read about something that’s inspiring or exciting or ridiculous. “You liked this? Give us your email!”. You’ve shown me why I should love you ,then you ask for my commitment. My answer is YES! I’m in. Because I know now why I should give you my email id.
Whatever your first-time visitor to user “conversion” point is — be it a share, a sign-up, a Facebook connect or a credit card entry, your best bet is the instant after they have done something that makes them love you!
3. Seed the User to Guide the Conversion
So you’ve got the email-id and you’ve got the credit card. What next? Should you let them roam free?
No. Guide their conversion. Make the “sale” a natural part of their experience. Make it something they get used to doing.
Games do this best. How does Clash of Clans make money? By getting players to spend the in-game primary currency. So they seed the player with a little bit, and in the tutorial they “force” the player to spend the in-game currency. So it becomes something natural to them. “Hey, I don’t want to wait for my troops to train, let me just click that “Speed-Up” button and spend a few gems.” It has become so natural for the player to “pay” or “convert”, that they itch to do it once the “tutorial” is over.
Other products should do the same thing. Show your users how easy it is to pay or convert by seeding them with some credits and making them spend the credits. If you want them to invite their friends — show them how to do it in your first time experience.
4. Plant the Seeds for the Next Visit
This is LITERALLY what we do at Zynga. In Farmville, a player plants seeds and waters her plants and she’s got to wait. When she comes back, all her plants are grown and ready to harvest. If the player doesn’t harvest, her crops will wither and it would have all been a waste. This has been the single most valuable asset in driving players to come back to the game after next visit.
Players who have signed-up can be motivated to return to do a plethora of things.
Linkedin does this well with endorsements. In fact, its likely they introduced endorsements because it creates an extremely effective hook. You want to know who has endorsed you for what and you get emails every day saying somebody as endorsed you. Because endorsement is such a simple and easy action for anybody to do, it can trigger a frequent notification and lure the user back to the site.
Think about what can be an easy and effective hook in your product that will plant the seeds for the next visit.
New user experience is critical to retain your installs and visitors. Overvalue it and you will see results!
You can follow me on Twitter at @akshitag.
