Written to help you design a better UX for your product, thereby improving user engagement and loyalty. Follow-up to:

“Why every product needs sophisticated onboarding”

Progress, as the iconic Eiffel Tower was being constructed in Paris. It took 2 years, 2 months and 5 days to complete.

Why your users should be working hard

There is a lot of conventional wisdom around reducing friction (e.g. number of steps to sign-up) in order to increase conversion across any funnel. [1] So why and when should users be working hard to use your product?

Users are necessary but not sufficient for success

Of course you need to begin with users: you can convert sign-ups by ensuring users find substantial value in their first experience. Onboarding is therefore critical and my previous post discussed designing a flow that increases activation.

Activation should actually be the first metric a startup should nail, followed closely by engagement or retention.

A good way to begin is reducing friction and making the sign-up flow as seamless as possible [2]. At shoto we doubled our sign-up rate just by reducing the number of screens users had to pass through before accessing our app.

Yet this isn’t enough — users are fickle; to succeed, you need fans!

This guy

Fans are convinced of the value of your product and are emotionally attached to it. In return, they will provide value (revenue, content / data, connections) on a recurring basis and with have fewer demands.

Becoming a fan involves commitment

So how do you create fans? There’s more to it than activating users and it’s not just more marketing. [3]

Loyalty is built around three dimensions: repeating behaviours (habits), rational evaluation and emotional attachment. [4]

All types of loyalty need the first dimension, repeating behaviours. The Hooked Model (Nir Eyal on how to create habit-forming products) contains four components: 1. Trigger 2. Action 3. Reward and 4. Investment, which need to occur multiple times for a habit to form. This is supported by research that consumers place a surprisingly high value on themselves successfully building something (the ‘IKEA Effect’) [5].

So, users need to act and invest (work hard!) to become fans. But they don’t do this for every product; only if and when the reward is obvious and aligned to their motivations. Therefore you need to gradually engage users with the promise of reward (trigger), followed by action, followed by reward. It’s a mix of marketing and onboarding, and requires a fine balance; too much information without action or too many requests for action without information will lead to drop-off. [6]