Stages:

Represent the “bucket” or “segment” that the people belong to. People generally fall into one bucket at a time with a few exceptions (we’ll cover that later).

Stage Goals:

These are like mission statements for what we deliver to people in this stage of the user experience. It’s what we want people to do.

Conversion Event:

These are examples of actions people might take to move through the user journey.

Note: Like many “flows” or “cycles” the path of travel is not necessarily sequential and very different based on how you market, build products and serve people using your product.

Dissecting the SaaS Dead Zone

What lies between registration and conversion?

Between Registration and Conversion is an interaction vortex we’ll refer to as the “Dead Zone”, where most people vanish or ‘go dark’ in your product.

This is where many product people mix with marketing to re-target, nurture, email, annoy, harass and do anything else they can to re-capture people.

Ask any product manager, “where do people fall off after first time user experience?” and you’ll get a glazed eye, shoulder shrug or a response like “let me have a look at the data…”.. and you’ll never hear from them again.

We combat the dead zone with four product interaction stages, the first is well known, subsequent stages less. They are:

First Time User Experience:

It’s the first thing you deal with when you login, maybe it’s connecting a service, adding a friend, learning a feature. It’s generally linear, short and targeted around a specific set of actions that the product team has determined to be most critical for people using the product for the first time.

Product Engagement:

If they made it through the FTUE now what? Our goal is to get them to give us money, but we can’t do that until they actually use the product and engage with it. So there becomes a second set of motivation to get users to interact with additional features and to really “dig in” to the product.

Product Activation:

Is a business & product driven set of metrics that companies use to move people through their funnel toward being a paid users. Usually defined as a set of triggered feature or product interactions.

Product Adoption:

Is defined by a set of metrics that show people are actively engaging the product for example: feature utilization, sessions, sharing and new users added. It’s the pre-cursor to conversion.

Instead of having a big giant bucket of “nurture” we admonish you to go deeper, create better segmentation and use the stages outlined above to build sub-segments. In fact it’ll be one of your chapter challenges.

Stacking Effects

How small incremental “WTF” moments impact long term people-to-product relationships.

Here’s a quick real life story of an Unnamed SaaS Reporting Tool:

I see a really great Facebook ad “no sql? no problem!!! Create great reports in no time..”

I had an existing tool but I wanted to explore options, mostly motivated by functionality.

I clicked the ad and it whisked me away to a landing page.

Immediately I noticed the landing page is dissimilar in messaging, value prop and feature highlights, it points out how I can connect services and doesn’t follow along the theme of “easy reporting without SQL”. It in fact looks like a totally disparate landing page.

I sign up anyway, because my desire to change is stronger than the dissonance I’ve encountered thus far. But I feel a bit annoyed…

I register painlessly using SSO.

I’m dropped into a product with wildly complex dashboard, full of example data and no clear route to adding integrations or connecting services to see my own reports.

I dig around for 30 minutes trying to find a place to connect google analytics, finally I found it. Frustrated and annoyed now…

I connect GA but find that data isn’t syncing, I do a bunch of googling and learn that the data is polled every 15 minutes and can’t be synced any faster. At this point I’ve wasted 2 hours of my time…

As I’m about throw my laptop across the room I get the icing on the cake. An Intercom message “hey we hope you’re loving unammed reporting tool! Tell us what you think!”. I clicked the thumbs down button.

I logged out, unsubscribed from emails

and never returned…

Stories like this illustrate the cascading effect of experiences people have with your brand and product through the funnel. Let’s use the above example as inspiration for the first chapter challenge.

Chapter Challenges:

Analyze the stacking effect of a recent user experience:

Detail a new product experience you’ve had recently, try using a bulleted list like the one above.

Identify and match the stages of the user journey

Detail where you either “fell off” or felt “engaged” with the product.

Finally, as a fun little excercise define three emotions attached to those interactions

Dead Zone: Use the four product stages to re-vamp metrics:

Create 4 buckets for users to live in: First Time User Experience, Product Engagement, Product Activation and Product Adoption.

Define those behaviors that move users into subsequent buckets. This will be very specific to your product / business. Ask users!

Talk to users and assess blockers for movement from stage-to-stage.

Review your findings with your peers (and with us if you can!)

Get rewarded for your Challenges!

Post your challenge results in the comments below, we’ll pick one lucky recipient per chapter and give them something from the Adaptation Treasure Box.