Making your product experience unique — Amandine Durr @BackMarket
The 2022 Product Conference started with the opening keynote “How to make your product experience unique” by the talented Amandine Durr (CPO @Backmarket).
Amandine has over 10 years of experience in product management, both B2B and B2C, in the following fields: e-commerce, communities, digital content & entertainment, ad tech and payment solutions.
Making your product experience unique.
When we talk about product experience, we think about the features, the design, the ergonomics, the fast page loading, etc. But let’s put the technique aside, here comes the time to talk about emotions in software products.
Emotion is the perception that the product gives you when you use it.
Instead of only talking about features with messages that can sometimes be complex and may be similar to other competing solutions, we need to focus on the emotion generated by our product to our users.
How to create emotions in your product?
To generate emotion, you must define first what is called your North Star Value. The North Star Value will lead your customers to choose your product over your competitor’s. If your competitor has a different North Star that doesn’t fit the user’s needs, they will choose you instead. The North Star will help you communicate the story of who your brand is and not just what your product does.
The North Star Value Checklist 📝
- Define your North Star Value. You need to think about why your product matters to your customers. It has to:
✔︎ Last over time
✔︎ Be applied to your entire product
✔︎ Trigger emotions - Put your North Star Value into action.
✔︎ Make it part of your discovery process and think about your elevator pitch.
✔︎ Share it at the company level: It’s not only about the product team. It will involve and impact other teams: make sure your brand team and product organization work closely together.
✔︎ Be consistent in and out: people need to understand it and fill it in their everyday life.
💡 Good to know
54 seconds is the average time spent on a web page across all industries.
50% of your visitors will only see one page.
How do I make sure my visitors will come back to my website and memorize my product? Let’s look at some examples 👇
→ How do Airbnb drive emotion when talking about accommodation reservations? 🏡
First, Airbnb selected their North Star Value to build their narrative ‘Flexibility and Dream’. Then, they built their feature and defined the emotions around it to create memorization.
To be consistent with their NSV and put emotion at the heart of their narrative, Airbnb conveyed that perception starting with the first element of their website: the search bar.
In this search bar, you’re not offered dates and places, but “Anywhere” and “Any week”. And when you click on it, the destinations and dates that are displayed start with “I’m flexible” for the destination but also for the duration.
It’s not only about their search bar. For Airbnb, the narrative around the product is as important as the feature itself and they’re conveying their narrative of dream and flexibility everywhere in their product, throughout the user journey, including in the smallest details.
Airbnb connected its Product narrative with its Marketing narrative — for instance with the launch of “Categories”, promoted by Airbnb’s founder himself in a video shared online, that also conveyed the brand’s vision to bring more flexibility and dream to any traveler around the world.
Because they sold more than travel, they managed to adapt to the market changes et generate growth in spite of the Covid context that had a huge impact on the travel industry.
💡 Emotion drives big business impact.
Airbnb has 90% direct traffic. They recently released their financial results, in Q1 of 2022, Airbnb announced jaw-dropping 70% year-over-year revenue growth.
→ How does Spotify leverage emotion in its product? 🎶
A few years back, the Spotify North Star Value was more about ´Access’. Meaning that you had access to unlimited music and hundreds of music catalogs. Now, the North Star Value of Spotify are ‘Discovery’ and ‘Personalization’. This evolution has generated important impacts on their product.
Since then, Spotify is leveraging its data to provide its users with specific playlists and make them discover artists.
For example: “This is Mozart” is an album entirely created by Spotify based on its users’ data that offers you the best selection of music to discover Mozart.
How they went from Discovery to even further personalization, where they create playlists just for you — Again, up to the smallest detail: you can for instance add images to illustrate your playlist so that they’re fully custom to you and relate to the emotions you get out of the playlist.
→ How does Back Market drive emotion to break e-commerce codes? 🔃
The objective of Back Market is to reduce environmental impact and benefit from buying second-hand products. The North Star Value of Back Market is ‘Sabotage’ — meaning a little emotion of transgression by doing something different. They wanted to share their environmental belief in a non-traditional and slightly edgy way.
How ? With a narrative that goes off the beaten track.
To stand out from other giants like Amazon, Cdiscount… Back Market worked a lot on its narrative. The Sabotage experience and transgression is also used in their marketing/brand campaigns. They added the “And that is sabotage because…” in their positioning statement to ensure it is included in the positioning of each new feature.
Some examples:
- To present a refurbished iPad they’ve chosen to say « Distract your kid for yourself, for up to 40% off ».
- During the covid time, Back Market added a new line in the payment frame « toilet paper » saying it’s on back order.
- In the App, before validating and finalizing your order, Back Market displays a popup « But, do you really need it? ».
But what about B2B companies… 🤔
Let’s talk about Yousign — How did Yousign innovate to become one of the most attractive scale-up in an ultra-competitive market, previously considered dusty?
Yousign has grown in a hyper-saturated competitive environment with hundreds of players in Europe. So how to bring a new solution to a centuries-old problem: the signature of documents.
To innovate, you have to change the reality, but also the perception of the reality.
The Product Narrative.
We wanted to answer a simple question:
- Why our product matters to our customers?
- What is their pain point (we want to solve) when they’re not using our solution?
→ The answer is the waste of time. The waste of time when creating the document. The waste of time when sending the document for signature… and then, the time to wait for the signature! 😱
At Yousign, 60% of documents are signed in 15min 💪
So, instead of talking about our (great) features, we decided to highlight that feeling of wasted time in our messages and print campaign “You wait or Yousign?” illustrated in our colorful and modern brand design.
The Brand Design.
To make attractive what can be perceived as a complex solution, we’ve decided to opt for a website with a strong editorial and attractive visual line — colorful and dynamic, yet simple and secure — to be easily recognizable and bring out joyful emotions.
The Product Design.
In order to maintain consistency between our different channels, we put a lot of effort into keeping our solution accessible and easy to use with more clear and modern design minimalist interfaces…
… and forget the old and monotonous click to sign. Let’s swipe! It’s more than an online signature process, it is an enjoyable experience, relieved from painful and time-consuming tasks.
Conclusion
Emotions are the customer experience's main driver, as they are fundamental to who we are and the choices we make.
Do not waste your product not thinking about the narrative before.
So no matter if you are a B2C or B2B company, you need to focus on the emotion generated by your product to your users. You need to ensure that it will be included into your narrative to express it throughout the journey in innovative ways, whether marketing channels and Product, that will have your users experience it every time they’re in touch with your brand or your product.
