Is your product struggling with user adoption? Is the marketing team complaining about increase of acquisition cost?
Products like Google+ & TwitterPeek failed because they never focused on defining the Aha Moment in the first time user experience!
An ‘Aha Moment’ is the moment when new users first realize the value of your product & why they need it!
The flow that helps a user reach the ‘Aha Moment’ is the activation funnel!
When the average session time for a new user is less than 5 minutes, achieving ‘Aha! Moment’ in the shortest possible time, is one of the most important as well as ignored aspects of product in most organizations!
The original thought of Aha moment was codified in Facebook back in 2008!
When fb looked at users who had good retention, they realized that these users had made atleast 7 friend connections within 10 days of joining the app.
If I have friends who I know, I will spend more time with fb because I can have meaningful conversations!
Upon stumbling on this insight, the most important metric in fb became making users have 7 friends within 10 days of joining! The task was to figure out how this can be accelerated as soon as the user registers!
This is why you see ‘friends’ to connect or ‘interests’ to follow in the onboarding flow of all social apps now!
Lack of focus on activation is where products like Google+ & TwitterPeek failed!
Google+ started on the premise that Google has millions of users who are already using Gmail for connecting. So the hypothesis was that once all these users are moved to a social platform, they will naturally start using it.
However, they didn’t solve the activation part well. Unlike Facebook, where most people join because someone referred you to the platform, Google created Google+ accounts for all gmail users without being invited. This resulted in the creation of a lot of ghost profiles.
So, a new user of Google+ would see a lot of their friends in the network but could not have any conversation because the other person was not using the platform. This led to poor experience, lack of trust & eventual churn by the user after trying to use the product.
Once trust in a product is lost, it is difficult to build it back!
Even after multiple attempts to improve the user experience & activation flows, Google+ was eventually shut down in 2019.
Other products have also discovered their user’s Aha Moment!
– For Slack activation is achieved when 2000 messages are sent between the members of a team
– For Twitter users, it is by following 30 users
– For Dropbox users, it is saving one file in a folder
– For Duolingo, it is completion of one learning session
So by now, you know what needs to be done if your product is struggling with user adoption?
Defining the ‘Aha Moment!’ and reducing the time to achieve it for your users plays a key part in it!
Source: Linkedin