How to Think About the User Experience

A deep dive into experiential excellence.

Yesterday I needed a QR code. Six minutes later, I had one. For free. From a service I had never used before. I downloaded it, placed it in my advertisement and was off and running. In seconds, my value proposition was met. (The vendor was bitly by the way - kudos to them). We live in a world of immediate gratification. Want to watch Oppenheimer? It’s a click away. Need new sneakers by the morning? Amazon will deliver to your door. Need a date for tonight? There’s an app for that too. Heck, when I formed Breakthrough Ventures, Legalzoom kicked off the process in minutes.

The bar has been raised.

The Experience Problem

I’ve done a lot of work recently evaluating the first time user experience for several software companies. Many of these companies are trying to gain initial market traction and have put a lot of emphasis on a digital software experience delivering the value for the end user (as opposed to human services). They all have free trials. They all want customers to find their offerings, sign up for their offerings and ultimately buy their offerings. Most of my evaluations haven’t gone well. In some cases, it felt like the experiences were clearly crafted for the founders and perhaps the founders alone.

Art and Science

Good versus bad experience isn’t solely a matter of taste. Renowned music producer Rick Rubin famously described his value as sharing his tastes with the artists. As a UX evaluator, I do that too. However, it’s not all art. There’s science too. Maybe more science than art when I think about it. (To provide the simplest example, a former manager once told me to never use more than three fonts on a screen. It was good advice. Using more than three fonts makes the experience seem too busy, which subconsciously has an effect on the implicit trust you have in the brand. Art and science.)

In a couple of cases, I’ve actually recommended to teams that they not invest in a software experience (to start) but instead start as a services company and layer in software when it’s helpful. I do this for a couple of reasons. One, it’s really difficult - and expensive - to build software experiences for complex problems. Especially for small, resource-constrained teams. To start, it might be more effective to run the process through humans. Then, convert consistent flows into software. It’s an effective way to learn in my opinion.

But what if software is the answer? As Product leaders, it’s imperative that our first-time-through experiences deliver value expediently and are carefully crafted to feel natural and smooth. Our lives as consumers have bled into our corporate lives and our users (or prospective users) have high expectations. So how should we, as makers, think about the user experience? How can we optimize for results?

The Survey

To find out, I surveyed some of the best design leaders I know.

I wanted to know the primary drivers of an effective first-time user experience. What matters most? If I am building a new flow for the first time or rebuilding one that needs a refresh, what makes the most difference?

Here are the results:

Primary Drivers: Intuitiveness and Time-to-Value

It was a close race between intuitiveness and time-to-value. While not surprising, it’s helpful to segment the characteristics of your experience, with a firm bias toward clarity and value. If your experience isn’t intuitive or driving toward the promised value proposition, your product hardly stands a chance. Intuitiveness and time-to-value are required.

If this sounds obvious, then we should acknowledge the failure rate. According to Statista, 70% of all software implementations fail because of poor user adoption. What could be the reason?

One explanation is that teams falsely believe their experiences are effective due to biases. Another explanation is that over time, more gets added to the experience and the interface gets busier. To ensure an effective experience, we should remove noise from the UX so that the path to success is clear and frictionless. We should ensure that the user is getting value early in the process.

Here’s a tip: If your product does require some time and/or effort before the user can get to value, try and show sample results at the start of the flow. Display a dashboard for the “happy path” customer and make it clear that it’s sample data. This indicates to the user that there is an end goal and an additional investment will be worth it.

Vinish Garg, who I engaged with on my research, added this around time-to-value:

“before I start using a product, something else have built the expectations—it could be the landing page, social media post, word-of-mouth, a webinar, or anything. The first important part is to translate that promise and those expectations in the onboarding.”

Secondary Drivers:

The remaining characteristics are secondary but shouldn’t be ignored. For instance, when I downloaded my bitly QR code, the experience was seamless and I reached my value prop very early. In addition, the presentation of information and steps (coupled with my previous awareness of bitly as a brand) did help me trust the brand. However, I was a bit confused as to why I was able to do this for free. When would I have to pay more? Would my QR code stop working at some point? If I needed help, where could I find it? Those items matter, albeit less than the primary drivers: intuitiveness and time-to-value.

When I checked in with my friends in the user experience business, they had a lot of wisdom to share. Adriana Torresan, for instance, found it difficult to identify the most vital feature of a UX without knowing if the user was a paying customer or trialing the software. It’s an important distinction. Her explanation:

“Pre-Paywall: Building Trust and Demonstrating Value To establish credibility and value, it is important to communicate the product's benefits and unique selling points effectively. Interactive elements and trust signals such as testimonials or security badges can be used to build early engagement and trust.

Post-Paywall: Streamlining Onboarding and Feature Discovery An easy and smooth onboarding process should introduce new users to the product's core features, emphasizing ease of use and immediate value. The use of progressive disclosure can help reveal complex features in a way that is tailored to the user's interests. Gathering early feedback is crucial to continuous improvement and to make users feel valued.”

Product-led Growth

Time to value is important but slightly less critical for a user on a paid, one year subscription. While you want to avoid attrition and maximize adoption, you have more time to win back that customer, and can even deploy humans to help get the customer back on track. With a trialer, there is more urgency to prove value at the onset. With “product led growth” (PLG), teams are hopeful someone can find your software, try your software and buy your software with little (or no) sales intervention. It’s a risky proposition as it puts even more weight on an expertly crafted experience.

John Iannone, described his team’s venture into PLG:

“The objective is to introduce users to the feature, explain the value, and walk them through initial use case setup all without the need for support team or CSM intervention.”

How might they optimize for this? His team is planning to use an in app messaging service like Pendo to lend a guiding hand.

Research → Test → Design → Develop

One of the most helpful steps one can take to design the right UX is to simply spend more time in the research phase. A lot of teams are so committed to releasing an MVP that they want to put out a product they can learn from. The thinking here is that the team can make a couple of revisions and then bring the product to market. From what I’ve learned, it’s more helpful to do up front discovery work first. Not only will this reduce rework, it will better profile the customer and his/her objectives.

When discussing approaches to building an effective UX, Nate Jones remarks:

“Clearly understanding the user's goal (JTBD or other user-focused discovery technique) and then testing, testing, testing. Don't jump to high fidelity too soon, as it limits feedback.”

Adriana added a similar note about adding the user early in the design process:

“Gathering early feedback is crucial to continuous improvement and to make users feel valued.”

A friend who asked to remain anonymous made a good point around understanding the customer’s needs. It’s not merely about your product. It’s critical to think more broadly. She says:

“Understanding the niche or what problems they are facing and how the product would fit into their lives. This can include contextually (what spaces do they use them in?), tech-wise (what platforms are they using?), the workarounds they are currently using (because that's usually the case), and what are our preconceived notion of edge-cases.” All of this begs for thorough user research as a precursor for designing, testing, refining and ultimately deploying an experience.

Testing, then, becomes a critical step of the process that can help validate many of the critical tenets of the experience previously mentioned. By conducting the right discovery research, you can pinpoint how to define and deliver value. By running usability studies, for example, Staci Dubovik illustrated the importance of involving users in your design efforts:

“I believe the only way to design first-time experiences is to include reps from the target customer profile/persona in the process. Now, more than ever, there are great ways to simulate experiences, combined with traditional approaches like prototyping. It also depends on whether you're talking about physical or digital experiences. Either way, prioritize the user over business for every decision.”

If software delivers on its promise, it can make work easier. Software can make information easier to access, tasks easier to execute on, decisions easier to make, etc. It’s up to us to ensure that the user experience - especially on the first time through, is doing its job helping our customers do their jobs.

A big thank you to Vinish Garg, Adriana Torresan, Nate Jones, John Iannone and Staci Dubovik for their contributions towards this article.

By the way, how does your experience hold up? Interested in getting an hand-crafted assessment from a third party? We can do that for you! Check out our service here: www.getyouruxscore.com