Overcoming Setup Hurdles
July 2024
👋 Hi Growth Designers,
Have you ever tried to teach a friend how to play a game? If you’re like me, you tend to over-explain and under-appreciate their new perspective. Consequently, this leads to a boring ‘activation’ to the game, where your friend nods their head yet isn’t listening.
In this edition of our newsletter, we will learn how to effectively setup your product’s newly-acquired users for success. We’ll talk specifically about both the Aha! Moment and Setup Moment, both of which are critical for a new user to understand your product’s value.
Let’s get activating!
Lead Growth Designer at Mercury, & Co-Facilitator of Growth Designers Community
Identifying the Aha! Moment
Every product has an Aha Moment, where a user experiences true value. This is the point in your product experience, where everything clicks. It's like you've gained a special ability that you didn't have before. It feels like a super power!
If you’re confused as to what your product’s Aha Moment might be, just take a look at your marketing landing pages. What problem(s) are listed as what this product can solve? These moments are typically tracked as the North Star metric. Subsequently, engagement is typically measured by how often this Aha Moment is experienced (e.g. daily/weekly/monthly active users of the feature).
Hopefully this helps you connect-the-dots as to why Aha Moments matter and how they relate to other core concepts of growth.
But First, The Setup Moment
Before you can ever reach the Aha moment, however, most if not all products will require you to hit a certain Setup Moment.
The setup moment is a key data point where the user has 'paid a currency' to get a future reward. This 'currency' could be their time, data, or attention span. They are putting trust into your product to capitalize on the reward (aka value props) that your product has promised in your marketing efforts. Remember: the setup moment is NOT the time when a user experiences value -- that's the magical Aha moment.
Some examples include:
- Connecting an integration (Zapier)
- Submitting a bank account application (Mercury)
- Adding 7 friends (Facebook)
Reduce Time to Value (TTV)
You know a bad setup when you see it — tooltips everywhere, overlays with arrows pointing at all the features…yikes. Like the example of teaching your friend to play a game, these solutions are over-explaining, rather than intuitively teaching as the game is played.
To best improve our setup, let's discuss 3 ways to reduce effort: demo data, templates, and smart defaults.
Demo Data
To shortcut time to value (or TTV), many products use a demo site and/or dummy data to showcase the value props of what your experience will look like after you onboard.
A great example of demo data, is Mercury's Demo site. Signing up for a bank account is a somewhat lengthy and intrusive process. However, with Mercury’s demo site, anyone can explore a mock bank account and experience the magic of the simplicity and intuitive UX of the product.
Templates
Recipes and templates drastically lower the barrier to get started, and TTV. They allow users to jumpstart eliminate the setup process and get straight into value creation.
In years past, templates have served not only as an activation tactic, but also as an acquisition strategy. Each template landing page brings targeted SEO traffic. For example, when searching for customer journey map, service blueprint or 5 whys, guess which sites you'll see in your top search results? You guessed it…Miroverse templates and Figma community files.
However, if I were a bettin’ man, I’d gamble that these templates may have seen their peak. Why? With Figma’s newly-released Figjam AI, I can foresee the rigidity of pre-built templates being surpassed by more flexible, highly-customizable AI-built templates.
Smart Defaults
As growth designers, we’re no strangers to the power of defaults. What we pre-select as options for users are powerful incentives, and should be used to shortcut TTV.
A great example of smart defaults is Typeform's AI Survey builder. This feature eliminates so much setup friction and gets users to value laser-quick. By simply describing the form they want, a user is presented a best-in-class form with little to no editing.
Concluding Thoughts
Don’t be the designer who over-explains to new users. Instead, use these tips to be the savvy growth designer who empathetically sets users up to reach the Aha Moment quickly!
If you liked this content and are interested in learning more, watch the replay from our free Growth Design Crash Course, or join our upcoming Growth Design School Fall Cohort.
Together with other top-tier instructors, I’ll be teaching a deep-dive on Activation. In the class, we'll unpack more strategies, tools, and real-world examples to define and improve your product’s Aha and Setup Moments.
Until then, happy growth designing!
- Scott
About the Author
Scott Christensen is a Lead Growth Designer at Mercury, and a co-facilitator of the GrowthDesigners.co community. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
