Creating the first-time user experience: a seamless journey to drive user adoption
Marketing Site. Optimizing Sign-Up Flow. User Onboarding. User Journey Map. Project Management
“In a Sales Led Growth company, we were attempting to promote a new SaaS product using a Product Led Growth approach. This practice has deepened my understanding of the Product Value Proposition and Customer Journey, fostering a more macroscopic perspective towards the product.”
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
YEAR | DURATION
2022 | 6 months
TEAM
Product owner: Muyun Xia
Marketing manager: Dong Li
Engineer lead: Yongchao Li
Senior Product Designer
YEAR | DURATION
2022 | 6 months
TEAM
Product owner: Muyun Xia
Marketing manager: Dong Li
Engineer lead: Yongchao Li
The Challenge
In the post-MVP launch phase of our metrics management platform, Kyligence Zen, the primary goal is to attract potential clients to test our product. This crucial step is essential for iterative improvements toward achieving product-market fit. I was assigned this crucial task due to my relevant experience from a previous startup in New York.“How can we effectively attract more potential clients to experiment with our product, guiding us through the iterative process to achieve product-market fit?”
The Approach
Even though, at that time, Kyligence was a Sales-Led Growth enterprise company, our SaaS team operated like a small startup with very limited sales resources. In this context, I tried to employ a Product-Led Growth approach and focused on the Acquisition, and Activation stages of the AARRR funnel. To familiarize users with our product's value and encourage them to start using it independently, I strategically focused on shaping our best-in-class 0-1 first-time user experience within six months.The Process
The first thing I did was build our initial user data tracking pipeline to leverage data for guiding subsequent projects. Drawing on my previous experience with Mixpanel, we successfully implemented it within two weeks with just me and one frontend engineer.Following projects were prioritized to address aspects at the front of the funnel. I started by building the marketing website, then moved on to the onboarding experience. After that, I dedicated more time to continually optimize the sign-up conversion.
Marketing Site User Flow Mapping
Marketing Site Delivery
The Outcome
Marketing Website
We launched an independent website featuring a landing page that clearly outlined the value of our service, a pricing page, and a metric templates page. The metric templates feature allowed users to choose templates relevant to their industry needs and import them into their accounts with one click.The metrics templates feature on the website significantly improved our site's SEO ranking. We observed a growth in visitors from organic search. Three months after launching this website, we had 5k new visitors, and the number is still increasing.
The conversion rate of the site, defined by clicking the "Free Trial" button, was 4%, slightly higher than the average marketing site conversion rate.
Landing Page
Metrics Templates Page
Onboarding
The onboarding process is an ongoing project. After launching the first version, I used the "create a metric" action as an indicator of a product-qualified lead, signifying user activation. The onboarding process underwent three major iterations, leading to an improvement in the user activation rate from 8% to 25%.Recognizing that the product features were evolving and onboarding served as a powerful tool for experimentation and learning, I utilized Appcues, an onboarding tool, for implementation and testing. This approach allowed us to gain rapid insights into user behaviors with minimal engineering resources.
Appcues Tooltip Onboarding
Sample Data
A Detailed Guidance
Sign-up conversion
When the product initially launched, both the Chinese Region and the United States Region used email for registration. After identifying that sign-up conversion in the Chinese Region was suffering due to a misalignment with the user habit of using phone numbers instead of email, I introduced mobile number registration specifically for the Chinese Region. One month after launching the mobile number registration feature, we observed a 10% increase in registration conversion in China and a 20% boost in sales call effectiveness.
The Impact
Originally, the company set a goal of reaching 3k users within 6 months. In reality, we successfully attracted 5k users within that timeframe. Additionally, we were able to convert 2 paid clients who were willing to strategically work closely with our team and provide feedback.The promising signs of growth instilled confidence in the leadership regarding the new SaaS product we built. Consequently, they decided to invest more in this product, and it has now become our company's flagship product.