Today's user demands more than just a one-size-fits-all SaaS product experience. Personalized user journeys that tap into the individual's needs, pain points and desired outcomes are emerging as the key to sustained engagement and retention.
This kind of personalization starts from the very beginning of the user’s relationship with your product: the onboarding process.
By asking the right questions, you can cultivate a deep understanding of each user and guide them down a path tailored to their unique requirements.
Today, we’re going to explore a 5 step process that will allow you to easily personalize your product’s onboarding journey.
Let’s dive into the steps in Miro’s onboarding sequence that lead to their personalized user experiences.
Miro has clearly done their research and understands their different types of users and how best to segment them.
First, they simply ask the user "What kind of work do you do?”
It may seem like a very simple question, “What kind of work do you do? Marketing, operations, finance…” but, because they understand what each segment requires to experience value in their product, this one answer allows them to personalize the user’s next steps, ensuring they find what they’re looking for.
The work that goes on behind the scenes includes in-depth persona mapping and user segmentation.
Persona mapping and user segmentation:
In this step you want to get clear on your user’s motivation. You need to understand who they are and why they would care about your product.
Fill in these five topics for each type of user that your product is built for:
Responsibilities → {Main responsibilities and JTBD} How they do that → {Their current workflow} Pain points → {Challenges/obstacles they face} Goals/KPIs → {Objectives they are responsible for achieving & metrics they own} Firmographic data → {Title, company sizes, location…}
You will find that different types of personas care about different things but they will share common pain points and motivations. This will make it easy to identify which part of your product is most relevant to them.
As you can see in Miro’s example, based on the fact that I chose operations, they know which templates to show me that will most likely resonate with my persona.
Bonus point 💡 Notice how they still give users the option to “start from scratch” - it’s important to always allow users to explore on their own, since different people will prefer different ways of going about these things.
Once you’ve completed this exercise, it’s time to identify your product’s core use cases.
Identifying core use cases:
Here you want to list every unique use case that your product has so that you will be able to find the commonalities between them and categorize them into overarching themes.
This is going to deepen your understanding into how your product solves different problems for different personas.
You’ll start to see how certain use cases can be relevant to one or many personas and get a sense of how to best connect them.
Connecting the dots…
This is where desired outcomes and use cases meet.
We have now formed a clearer picture of which use cases could best fit each persona.
It’s important not to overcomplicate the questions (and available answers) that you’re asking the users. Therefore, in this step, you want to connect multiple personas with common use cases so that you can end up with a question as simple as “What kind of work do you do.”
Now that you have connected the dots between your users’ desired outcomes and your product’s core use cases, it’s time to help them choose the right path.
Asking the right questions:
Asking the right questions is part art, part science. It is something that by this stage of the process, you should have already clearly mapped out.
But, the way you phrase the questions and answers to choose from, is the icing on top.
You want to ask the user something that is easy to understand, relates to their needs, and gives them a sense of “finally, a product that gets what I’m looking for!”
This is subtle and you might think it’s not the biggest deal, but a small change in the language you use can play a huge role in tapping into the underlying psychology of the user.
Consider questions like: What will be using {product} for? Which problem would you like to solve first? Have you used a {product category} before?
Now, when the user sees an answer that resonates with them, they’ll feel that your product can help with exactly what they’re looking for.
Creating unique user journeys:
If you ask the right questions, users will be able to tell you what they’re looking for in your product. Based on the use cases that you connected with different desired outcomes, you will now be able to guide users to the value they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.
Most users end up confused when they sign up for a new product - this is a powerful way to improve the odds of them activating in your product.
Conclusion
Don't assume why they signed up, ask them what they're trying to achieve. Based on their response, guide them on the relevant user journey. One small touch point like this can transform their entire user journey.
Every company is going to need to experiment with this depending on their different user segments. But the rule is - Don’t assume, just ask.
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