The whole ‘UX vs UI’ thing has been bamboozling product teams since time immemorial. But it needn’t be all that complicated. When it comes to UX vs UI, you just need to know your look and feel from your user journeys. And – importantly – who’s responsible for which part of the pie. 

So let’s put this to bed once and for all: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about UI vs UX (but weren’t afraid to ask, since you presumably Googled it and landed here)…

What is UX?

UX stands for user experience. For digital products like apps, websites and online services, it’s an overarching term that generally speaks to the way people navigate, explore and, well… Use the thing.

That covers navigation and information hierarchy, as well as overall accessibility and ease of use. Great UX is all about answering a core question: can our users do the thing we want to enable in a way that makes sense? You get there via market research, user testing and fine-tuning until you have a user experience that’s super seamless and intuitive.

And yeah, we know; that letter ‘X’ is doing some heavy lifting here. UX just scans better than UE. It is what it is.

What is UI? 

UI stands for user interface. And for all intents and purposes, ‘interface’ here is synonymous with what most people think of when they think of the word ‘design’. 

Well, kinda, anyway.

See, if you give a designer access to Figma and absolute free reign they’ll let their imaginations run wild. That’ll give you something incredible to look at, but potentially confusing to use. Great user interface design, then, is all about massaging those cool ideas into something that feels unified, coherent, and obvious to the user.  

In other words, UI builds on the skeletal work done by UX teams, focusing more on the cosmetic and aesthetic parts of your product’s DNA. 

UI designers are obsessed with color schemes, the way buttons look, the readability of interactive elements, the feel of transitions and animations, and whether everything is crystal clear to the end user. 

UX vs UI – what’s the difference?

This is where it gets a bit complicated – since the latter is actually a subset of the former. While the two are different disciplines, everything you do as part of user interface design should be done in the interest of your product’s overall user experience. 

After all, if you’re fussing over drop-down menus on a product that’s fundamentally broken on a UX level, you may as well be rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. 

With UX vs UI, the differences between the two disciplines are probably best described with some handy analogies. If you’re a chef dreaming up a new meal, UX design would be the thought process behind the ingredients – do they work together? Are the flavors complimentary? UI design, on the other hand, is the presentation, the plating and the garnish.

If you’re making a giant, city-destroying robot, UX would cover the fundamentals of movement, the specifications, and the stomping motions. UI would ensure that the robot’s face and voice feel consistent with your destructive intentions.

UX vs UI design vs PX

Product experience (PX) is a slightly different beast, as it has a wider, more all-encompassing focus. So, while user experience looks to fine-tune the actual usage and flow for each customer journey, product experience takes a much more holistic view of everything to do with it. 

That includes the product’s look and feel, sure – but also its marketing, customer service, third-party touchpoints, back-end engineering, userbase, and even how it fits into the world in a contextual sense. 

UX tasks and responsibilities

User experience teams look after a range of jobs that coalesce to bring a seamless, simple flow to the product:

1. Hierarchy and architecture

When a user lands on the front page of your app or website, what are they looking at? What information or tools do they need first? What are they there to achieve? Answering those questions helps UX teams decide what’s most important and, ideally, shove those things front and center so that users don’t have to go digging around.

2. Navigation flows

That hierarchy work will also influence your product’s general navigation – which includes what’s in the main nav menu, but also the page-to-page flow for every kind of user journey. These all need to make intuitive sense and provide users with exactly what they’d expect to see at each step.

3. Wireframing

Once you have your user journeys and information architecture nailed down, UX teams build basic wireframes of every page. These are stripped-back blueprints for the product, app or website that give UI design teams a structure to work with.

4. Testing and fine-tuning 

UX is never a one-and-done process. Instead, it needs constant testing and finetuning. Focus groups, heatmaps, eye-tracking tools and solicited user feedback forms all help inform areas of the user experience that fall short of expectations – or that highlight experience gaps you’ll want to close.

UI tasks and responsibilities

UI teams tend to pick up where UX leaves off, adding polish to wireframes and finalizing product design – albeit still with an eye on user-centricity. UI specialists look after…

1. Branding, fonts and color palettes 

AKA: the only part people tend to consciously notice, even though they’re benefiting from all the hard work that went into every other part of your UI and UX design behind the scenes. That’s just the way it goes, sadly. 

2. Layout and page density

UI designers need to carefully balance information density, white space, scannability, and a bunch of different psychological hooks that keep people using, scrolling, or pushing buttons. There’s an art and a science to this that requires iteration and user testing. The goal of great UI product design is clarity and useability that implores people to stick around.

3. Interactivity design

It sounds obvious, but people need to know – in an instant – that a button is a button and not just a graphic or aesthetic piece of page furniture. There’s work to be done here in creating a design language that’s easily readable and stays consistent across the whole user journey. Nobody likes surprises, and nobody likes clicking on things that do nothing.

Where do UX and UI overlap?

While it’s ideal to have dedicated people for both UI and UX in your product team, the reality doesn’t always work out like that. So, whether you have dedicated Designers for each discipline, or Designers straddling both areas, you should always understand that they are different skills with different priorities – as we’ve outlined already.

But there is one key facet that UX and UI Designers share: They both need to be intensely user-first in their thinking. 

That may be obvious for UX – making the user journey and flow feel intuitive is the basis of the job. But it’s also true for UI design because success in this space means only making design choices that add to the user’s experience. The alternative is to design fluff for the sake of fluff.

UX and UI examples

Example time! Let’s take a look at a couple of hypothetical products, and dissect what UX and UI teams would handle for each one:

eCommerce website

UX team: What problem are we trying to solve, and how best can this eCommerce website do that job? Your UX team would first get stuck into some research on customer needs and pain points, alongside their existing online shopping behaviors. From this, they’d design the overall user flows for browsing, searching and buying. That would then lead to the creation of wireframes and prototypes that can be used to test, validate and iterate.

UI team: Your user interface team would step in to take those prototypes and turn them into visually appealing pages, complete with your company’s branding. The goal here would be to build a cohesive UI that enhances every step of the journey – and encourages purchases. Once finalized, UI design teams work with front-end developers to ensure these designs translate into the final product without anything getting lost in translation.

Mobile banking app

UX team: The key job in this case would be to figure out the various journeys users want to take in their banking app, list them in order or priority, and design an overarching navigational flow that doesn’t get in their way. That would ideally come alongside some competitor research, where you might uncover something your rivals do poorly. Maybe sending money to friends is a pain and should be enabled with a big, no-nonsense prompt on the front page? UX designers need to balance these needs while also adhering to accessibility and regulatory guidelines.

UI team: Once the wireframes are in, your UI team’s job is to take that experience and make it unequivocally yours – so that no one can mistake it for any other bank’s. That’ll be alongside adding flourishes that give satisfactory feedback that your users have done what they think they’ve done. Maybe confetti rains down on the screen when they receive money? Maybe a button jiggles when they enter information wrong? These are the touches that make an app’s UI feel compelling.

How do you measure good UX vs UI?

For both user experience and user interface, you’ll use focus groups, heatmaps, eye-tracking and other types of user feedback to stress test everything and generate a host of relevant metrics and qualitative statements about your product: 

So, while those metrics might be in the form of core KPIs (like Time to Value, which measures how long it takes users to get what they came for out of your product), they could also be a written statement that the app doesn’t work on their device – or even that the color scheme gives them a headache. 

In either case, these metrics and statements will generate questions that can help you improve things. And the nature of those questions will differ whether you’re looking to improve UX or UI:

Questions that drive successful UX

• Is every user journey catered for?
• Do people know how to achieve what they set out to do?
• How long does it take them?
• What’s slowing them down?
• Are users getting lost?

Questions that drive successful UI

• Does this represent the brand?
• Are page designs distracting users too much?
• How can we simplify?
• Are people clicking on non-interactive elements?
• Are users scrolling below the fold?

Why do product managers need to know about UX and UI?

In short? UX and UI are the bones, organs and skin of your product. Even if users aren’t explicitly aware of all the scientific tweaking that goes into great UX and UI design, they’ll definitely feel the results if yours is lacking – and they’ll love your product if you’ve nailed the core tenets of both.

In other words? Product managers need to work closely with UI and UX teams to ensure that the initial vision for the product has made it through the conception and design processes – and all the way to the end product – without getting twisted into something that doesn’t serve its user base. 

The post UX vs UI: Understanding the difference appeared first on ProdPad.

But there are other good reasons for attending UX conferences if you’re a forward-thinking product person:

Why you should attend a UX conference or two

Innovation and inspiration galore

UX conferences are hubs of creativity and innovation, buzzing with fresh ideas and cutting-edge concepts. They’re always pretty immersive and that really helps you to break away from your day-to-day and get some space to think – dare I say it – ‘outside the box’. 

With workshops, presentations, and interactive sessions led by some of the brightest minds in the industry, you’re bound to leave with a brain full to the brim with innovative strategies and approaches for you to implement in your product.

Your network is your net worth

Rubbing shoulders with industry leaders, seasoned professionals, and like-minded UX geeks can open doors you didn’t even know existed. UX conferences are a great place to make some sweet connections that could help you build your professional network, and even find potential collaborators for your next big project… or even a side hustle or two.

Stay up-to-date with the latest trends

UX never stops moving, and new technologies and trends emerge at a rapid pace. Attending UX conferences will keep you updated on the latest tools, techniques, and methodologies that are shaping the user experience landscape.

From AI-driven interfaces to immersive virtual reality experiences, you’ll get a comprehensive overview of what’s hot and what’s not in the world of UX.

Skilling up

With a plethora of workshops, masterclasses, and hands-on training sessions, UX conferences are a great place to sharpen up those skillz (intentional z, don’t @ me).

Whether you’re looking to polish your design skills, improve your understanding of user behavior, or learn about the latest prototyping tools, you can often join a specialized session or workshop on whatever interests you most.

Get Inspired

There’s nothing quite like the energy of a room filled with passionate and like-minded UXers who get their kicks out of creating exceptional user experiences. These are good people. 

Their stories of success, the lessons from their failures, and the collective passion for creating meaningful products can be a great pick-me-up to help you remember why you love this work. Attending these conferences might just reignite your passion and give you the motivation you need to tackle your next big project.

Now that you know what you’ll be missing if you don’t turn up, here’s our curated list of the most exciting upcoming conferences in 2023 and 2024 that you definitely shouldn’t miss.

Note: Prices are presented in the local currency (or US Dollars when provided) and are correct at the time of publishing.

The top upcoming UX conferences of 2023 and 2024

November 2023

UX Brighton 2023

When: 3 November 2023
Where: Brighton, UK
Tickets: Student: £65.00 + VAT, Last Chance: £250.00 + VAT
Website

Why you should go: We’ll be there! Come say hi at our stand, and delve into the details of how we can help you solve your product management challenges.

Other than us being there (as if you need a better reason!) UX Brighton is always filled with innovative talks and viewpoints that will challenge your preconceptions about UX and design.

Our very own Janna Bastow delivered a keynote here last year and was a massive fan of the vibe. Brighton is a very cool place and the design community is strong.

This year the focus is on encouraging creative thinking and innovation and features impressive industry names like Dr Elizabeth Churchill,  Senior Director of UX at Google.

Leading Design London

When: 8-9 November 2023
Where: London, UK
Tickets: Last Chance: £1595 + VAT
Website

Why you should go: Hosted by Clearleft, this UX conference is specifically tailored for people in design leadership positions and is particularly helpful for people stepping up to a new leadership role. This year’s impressive lineup includes Eric Snowden, VP of Design at Adobe. 

ReOps Conference

When:16 November 2023
Where: Virtual only
Tickets: Student: $39, Regular: $79
Website

Why you should go: More focused on research, this conference is ideal if you’re looking for ways to learn about the more data-driven side of UX. This year’s key topics include recruiting in different contexts and countries, knowledge management in regulated industries, whether you’re upscaling or downscaling, stakeholder management, and different ways of working both in your team and cross-functionally.

Design in Product

When: 29 November – 1 December
Where: Virtual only
Tickets: Conference: $449, Workshop: $895, Conference/Workshop Bundle: $1245
Website

Why you should go: This conference is specifically for design professionals working in the Product world, and provides a wealth of resources and vital knowledge about how UX folks can approach, understand, and explain their work in Product terms to help them really make a difference.

January 2024

UX360 Research Virtual

When: 30-31 January 2024
Where: Virtual only
Tickets: Early: $99 to $199, Regular: $299 
Website

Why you should go:  Another research-focused conference, UX360 is all about keeping up to date with the latest in UX and design research from luminaries in the UX research field. The organizers want to provide a space for UX researchers like you to improve your skill set, meet and greet with your peers, and get inspired to improve your own research practices.

Design Matters Mexico

When: 31 January – 1 February 2024
Where: Mexico City, Mexico & Virtual
Tickets: Online: $149, In-person: $299
Website

Why you should go: This socially conscious conference is a must for anyone working in a Latin American context, especially as one of the main themes this year is ‘From Latin America With Love’. The speakers will demonstrate the influence heritage and ancestral knowledge can have on design and tech, and why that matters. They will also be looking at how we can move towards “a future where design is the driving force behind sustainability and social responsibility”. 

February 2024

Axe-con

When: 20-22 February 2024
Where: Virtual only
Tickets: Free
Website

Why you should go: If you’re looking for ways to improve the accessibility of your design work, then look no further. This year’s topics include accessibility in development, accessibility in design, and organizational success with accessibility. There’s no better place to learn about accessibility best practices from the leaders in the field.

March 2024

Leading Design New York

When: 20-21 March 2024
Where: New York, USA
Tickets: $1,495 to $1,995
Website

Why you should go: The US-based iteration of Leading Design’s UX conferences. If you don’t want to head over the pond for their London conference, then you’ll have just as useful a time here, learning about the best ways to nail your design leadership role.

UX Copenhagen

When: 20-21 March 2024
Where: Copenhagen, Denmark 
Tickets: In-person: DKK 6,500, Virtual: DKK 3,000
Website

Why you should go: This year’s theme is ‘Degrowth and Consumerism’ It’s all about breaking our track record of harmful production and development processes. And why consumerism has to amend its ways to ensure the survival of the world as we know it. As the closing keynote speaker said last year, “There is no planet B.”

April 2024

UXinsight Festival

When: 15-17 April 2024
Where: Breda, Netherlands & Virtual
Tickets (2023 prices): Online: €150, In-person: €400 to €1,200
Website

Why you should go: This year’s theme and line-up are yet to be announced – however, if you’ve got a passion for UX research, and how it can be used to not just make better products, but also help people, then this conference will be sure to inspire you.

May 2024

UX360 Research Europe

When: 16-17 May 2024
Where: Berlin, Germany
Tickets: Early bird: €695, Regular ticket: €895
Website

Why you should go: Having swiftly risen to be one the most popular virtual UX conferences since its 2022 launch, 2024 will see the inaugural in-person event for UX360. If you’d rather be boots-on-the-ground instead of attending the virtual conference in January, this is your chance to get the same insights from global thought leaders in the field, with the added bonus of networking and sharing tips with similarly-minded UX pros.

June 2024

Config

When: TBA (21-22 June 2023)
Where: San Francisco, USA & Virtual
Tickets (2023 price): $499
Website

Why you should go: This one comes personally recommended by ProdPad’s own Product Designer Ira Bolshakova, who loves the great range of speakers covering a plethora of important topics, as well as the product announcements made at the conference.

August 2024

UX Nordic

When: 28-29 August 2024
Where: Aarhus, Denmark
Tickets (2023 prices: Online: €275, Regular: €495, Workshop: €850
Website

Why you should go: UX Nordic focuses on providing UX professionals with hands-on experience and knowledge in their talks and workshops. While this year’s agenda is still in the works, they want to provide you with actionable ideas from leading experts, such as last year’s keynote speaker Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin, Principle Design Engineer at GitHub, and Kelly Dern, Senior Product Designer at Google.

September 2024

Disco Conf

When: TBA (Last dates – 19 Sept 2023)
Where: Virtual only
Tickets: Free
Website

Why you should go: Disco Conf is a free UX and product design conference that aims to help you learn how a creative, discovery-focused mindset can help you in your product design work. Last year’s speakers include our friend Product Design Coach Tim Herbig, and Sharanya Ravichandran, VP of Design at JPMorgan Chase.

October 2024

UXDX EMEA

When: 16-18 October 2024
Where: Dublin, Ireland & Virtual
Tickets: Online: €199, In-person: €499 to €2,999
Website

Why you should go: The largest and most popular of UXDX’s global range of conferences, the stated focus is on the shift from projects to product teams, and how all the different stakeholders in a product team can come together to work towards common goals.

Let us know your favorite UX Conference!

Hopefully, something on our shortlist of the best UX conferences speaks to the challenges you are facing in your work, or areas that you want to grow in. Let us know what experiences you’ve had, and share your favorites with us in the comments below so we can make sure this list includes all the most important UX conferences to attend in 2023 and 2024.

And don’t forget to come say hi to members of the ProdPad team at UX Brighton this year!

The post The Best UX Conferences in 2023 & 2024 appeared first on ProdPad.

• Are we actually solving the problem we want to solve?
• Are our users using our features?
• Could the user experience be better?
• Was the last launch successful?
• When do our users churn?

You don’t need to carry on nodding along with the questions. I know they’re endless, and trying to make sense of your user data is no small task. That’s where product analysis comes in and can be really beautifully visualized in a product analytics tool. 

I will start with a bit of an overview of why product analytics tools, then walk you through ProdPad’s top 7 product analytics tools. By the end of the article, you should have found the right one for you.

What data do you look at in a product analytics tool? 

Simply put – product analytics is the analysis of user engagement within a digital product or service. Product teams can track, view, and understand large quantities of behavioral data, and make improvements to the product by understanding user experience and engagement.

The data points you’ll be looking at are:

• Feature usage
• User experience
• User data
• Session data
• Pain points and sticking points
• And many more

Why are these data sets important? Feature usage means that you know what people are using and what they aren’t. User experience data means you know exactly what is working and what isn’t, to the point where you see users churn or become super users. User data means you can validate your user personas – are your super users who you thought would be? Does marketing know how to talk to the right people? The uses are endless, to be honest. Session data is really important. You will be able to understand how many times people need to use your free trial to convert to a paid account or how many sessions before someone churns and then you can make changes to the onboarding process to try to combat it. Finally, seeing pain points and sticking points means that you can fix these issues and hopefully improve retention.

These are just some of the data points that you can collect with product analytics tools. By scratching the surface of the sort of questions you can ask your data we can all agree it’s pretty important to be able to understand it.

Why do you need product analytics tools?

Product analysis gives you, the product team, full visibility on what your users are actually doing, which is pretty darn important when it comes to understanding user behavior. Users don’t always represent their interactions accurately when they’re asked to describe them after the fact. Getting the correct user data is imperative to help inform your ability to build the right things.

Every product was born out of a problem needing to be solved. Each product that exists has a finite target audience. A product company is made up of teams all trying to get the target audience to see the product, want the product, buy the product, and use it, hopefully, upgrade their usage of it and never leave. That’s the dream, right? 

Churn and retention are probably the most important metrics a company can track alongside monthly and annual recurring revenues because a company cannot grow if users leave your purchasing funnel as quickly as others enter it. 

To put it simply – you have money coming in from users and you lose money when customers churn but if they are paying on an annual basis then you won’t see the effects of losing them for a year. So if you want to see massive growth in sales you need to reduce churn as much as is humanly possible.

There are two ways to solve that:

1. Marketing – get as many users into the top of the funnel as possible
2. Reduce churn – fix as many of the pain points as possible

As you know, you need a mixture of them both to be successful. You need new users to use the product and test whether your fixed pain points have reduced churn. You’ll also need your users to help you find more pain points to fix. That’s why product analysis is so important because you need a tool that can help you zero in on those issues that need fixing, help you increase your user retention, and make a better product in the process.

What are product analytic tools?

Product analytic tools exist to collect and analyze the user behavior within your product. Once you’ve started to collect all of your user data, you can glean insights that will help you improve your products and better fit the needs of your users. If used correctly, you can track and reduce churn, spot trends, and set KPIs against your data.

What are the 7 best product analytics tools?

When looking at product analytics tools, look for tools that are easy to use, that give you full visibility over your user base, and if your product is being used the way you want it to be used. We’ve looked at all the tools on the market and have created a summary of each, a breakdown of costs, and if we think it’s worth your time. Here are the seven in no particular order:

1. Mixpanel
2. Amplitude
3. Pendo
4. FullStory
5. Heap
6. Gainsight PX
7. Google Analytics

Let’s dive in and see what each tool is all about.

1. Mixpanel

First up we have Mixpanel, which we use here at ProdPad. What we like about it is that it’s really customizable. You’ll often find our product team talking about WACs (weekly active contributors) and finding new ways to improve our customer retention. 

But let’s get down to the brass tacks, the things that are awesome about Mixpanel are the funnels and reports that you can make to understand conversion rates, where your users churn, and who your super users are.

Their integrations are really extensive and should very easily connect with your data lake, customer data platform, or through one of their SDKs meaning it will be really easy to connect it all up to your stack.

Mixpanel also offers a freemium account with 100k monthly tracked users or their paid accounts start at $25 a month. 

2. Amplitude 

No list of product analytics tools would be complete without Amplitude. Not only are they one of the highest ranking tools on G2, but they’re also used by 25 of the Fortune 100. Definitely, one to check out.

What makes Amplitude special? Well, Amplitude pegs itself as a digital optimization system, where you’re able to track all user behavior and app usage in real-time. They integrate with pretty much everything – check out their integration page. They even have a search bar, it’s not messing around.

Amplitude offers a free account that includes up to 10 million monthly events tracked, the growth plan and enterprise plans are priced upon request.

3. Pendo

When it comes to doing a product analytics tool audit, Pendo should be high on your list, because Pendo does more than analytics. Pendo is an end-to-end product engagement platform, not only can you glean insights from your user data you can also use it to set up in-app prompts to tell your users to use the features that they aren’t using.

This is the sort of tool that works for everyone but particularly a small team so you aren’t leap-frogging between tools and having the ability to create workflows to improve feature adoption in the same place you’re running reports is super valuable.

Pricing-wise, Pendo also offers a free version of the tool, and then pricing for all plans is available upon request.

4. FullStory

FullStory is, in my opinion, really cool. We use it and I really enjoy seeing how people are engaging with our website. 

They are digital experience intelligence specialists, so not only is it a powerful analytics tool, it captures so much data. I like being able to see someone using our app or website in real time or a little faster. You can literally see when someone gives up filling in a form or rage clicks. Using FullStory, you can create better user flows or fix things that irritate your users.

It has great integrations and works well with most tools you’ll find in your tool stack. Pricing-wise it’s not got a free version but it does have a free trial.

5. Heap

Heap is another very well-regarded tool that mixes together analytics and watching users interact with your app or website. They have heaps (like what I did there?) of happy customers and their case studies really speak for themselves. For example, Heap has helped Huel increase their conversions by 30% and decreased churn for PocketSuite by 30%. 

They integrate with over 100 different tools and also have quite a nice competitor comparison part of their marketing site which is worth a look. The biggest selling point against the others is that like Pendo they integrate with your product with zero code and for smaller teams that’s music to their ears. 

When it comes to pricing they have a free account but you can also have a free trial of their growth plan, all other plans are priced upon request.

6. Gainsight PX

Gainsight is one of the tools that really focuses on product-led growth, by pulling together analytics, feedback, and user engagement into their platform. It is a bit of a one-stop shop for your analytics and user experience tool. Not only can you track everything your users are doing but you also can set up all the walkthroughs, and in-app guides to make your user experience better.

Gainsight is also one of the tools that incorporate user feedback into their tool, giving you the ability to send out surveys for NPS scores. This feature is definitely a nice-to-have element of the tool but I wouldn’t consider your customer feedback needs covered and if you want something really robust try Gainsight alongside ProdPad’s customer feedback solution.

In terms of pricing, Gainsight offers a free trial of the product management solution but if you want to try the full offering you need to talk to a sales representative for a demo and pricing conversation.

7. Google Analytics

Come on, I couldn’t make a list of product analytics tools without talking about the OG Google Analytics, love it or loathe it Google Analytics is a super powerful tool – and it’s free.

If you’ve got a web product Google Analytics can do an awful lot of the things that the tools on this list can do. You can understand where your customers are bouncing, and their demographics, and you can watch their movements around your site or tool. It also is part of the entire Google suite of tools so it connects seamlessly with Looker Studio etc. 

The other reason I included Google Analytics is that not every product team has the budget to add a product analytics tool to their stack, but having Google Analytics means that price isn’t a blocker for understanding user behavior within your app.

So now you’ve got your product analytics software covered why stop there? If you want to know even more about your customers and their needs then you need to start asking them for feedback and you can do that with ProdPad. Gathering feedback alongside your product analytics tool just makes sense if you want a full picture of what your customers are thinking as well as what they are doing. Check it out here and start a free trial.

So there you have it, folks, that’s ProdPad’s top 7 product analytics tools! There is definitely something for everyone, but as always if you think I’ve missed something I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

The post 7 Best Product Analytics Tools for Your Product Management Stack appeared first on ProdPad.

• What are user personas?
• What is the purpose of a user persona?
• How to research user personas
• How to create user personas
• How many user personas do you need for a product?
• User persona examples
• User persona templates
• How to present user personas to the wider team
• How to apply user personas in product management

What is a user persona?

User personas are fictionalized profiles of your users, based on research, analytics, and customer feedback about how they use your product. The key with user personas is to focus on behaviors, rather than actual demographics about the people behind the behaviors.

What is the purpose of a user persona?

The purpose of a user persona is to help you understand your customer base better, so that you can brainstorm, advocate, and build on their behalf. They inform every point of product management and development, from backlog grooming to retrospectives.

The difference between marketing personas and user personas

Marketing and product personas might overlap, but they certainly differ in how they are researched and how the business applies them.

Marketing personas can entail profiles of target customers. Such personas can describe where a potential buyer came from, how they interact with marketing assets or the website, and how they move down the conversion funnel. They can also inform how the sales team might approach them to close a deal.

User personas are more about how a person behaves within the app – yes, as a user. These insights inform the product team’s understanding and product development in general.

There can be useful connections between the two. You might notice a pattern between certain marketing personas turning into specific user personas. Such a flow offers valuable insight into the customer lifecycle, but it’s not steady across the board. A single human who had one marketing persona might have unexpected behavior within your product. 

How to research user personas

Researching user behavior like this is another form of customer discovery. You should have lots of conversations with your current customers and your potential market. When having any of these conversations, it’s important to ask questions that target the user’s pain point and reveal how they work.

To define your user personas, ask questions such as:

• What problem are you looking to solve? 
• What tasks do you need to get done? 
• What are you trying to achieve on a daily/weekly/monthly basis? 
• Why did you choose our product?
• What do you do with our product?
• How often do you use it?
• What would you do if they did not have your product?*

*This question provides a specific kind of clarity around user behavior. Perhaps the customer would turn to a competitor, or maybe they’d just use a whiteboard, or some other manual workflow. Their answers will tell you a lot about what it is that they’re actually trying to do in your app and how they behave.

Each focus group can offer unique insight to your research. Here is a list of potential groups you can interview and what to ask:

• Your longest users. Why have they stuck around? What are they happy with?
• Your most advanced users. What pro-tips and cow paths have they found?
• Your newest users. What’s their experience like?
• The almost-users who tried then didn’t buy. Why not? Where’d they go instead?
• The folks who looked at the site, but didn’t start a trial. Ditto.

How to create user personas

Once the research is done, there are three steps to creating user personas.

1.  Lay out your initial assumptions

Most product managers start with a set of assumptions about which user segments they have, based on the research. Of course, you need to put these to the test. Lay out these assumptions as “proto-personas” – either on a series of whiteboards or post-it notes. Feel free to reformulate these in any way that feels right. This is really just a first draft.

2. Share these assumptions with other people

Before you get too far, share your assumptions with other people who were also involved in the persona research, have conducted previous customer discovery, or are otherwise close to the users. We call this a “sense check” – essentially, you and your colleagues are confirming, “Do these feel right? Do these make sense?” If the answer is yes, then it’s time for step #3.

3. Define the user personas

This final step is about defining the user personas more clearly. Based on the information you have of each section, what can you summarize about them? These personas should be defined, but they don’t need to be detailed. Don’t worry about going super deep, and there’s no need to include (often fictional) demographic information.

For example, some companies create personas that include gender, age, location, or other biographical information. These types of details, while perhaps humanizing the imagined user, don’t actually tell you much about how they use your app. In fact you get caught up in irrelevant details.

So, when it comes to defining user personas, don’t overdo it to the point that they’re not useful anymore. That said, there are a few important dimensions to define.

A user persona can be comprised of many different user dimensions:

• The type of business
• The role of the user
• Their frequency of login
• Their jobs to be done

How many user personas do you need for a product?

Some product managers might wonder how many are necessary to get all the insight and other benefits of creating personas. Certainly you need more than one, but what’s the minimum? And is there a maximum?

No, there is no set range to follow. The number you need for a product depends entirely on what your product is, how varied your customer base is, and also just what your team finds useful.
Segment the market variables and user dimensions in different combinations. Keep whatever tells you something important about how that profile relates to your product. You might also have some personas that relate only to a specific feature with your product. That’s okay, too.

Here at ProdPad, we have 15 user personas. They are all based on customer discovery and research. Check them out in the next section.

User persona examples

Looking at another company’s user persona examples will help put the research and creation process, outlined above, into concrete form.

So here we offer up ProdPad’s very own persona examples, which we’ve developed over time. Each of the fifteen personas is based on how the user:

• Actually uses ProdPad as a tool
• Contributes to (or oversees) their own team’s product management and success.

Those are the titles of our’s as examples. But what does a persona look like beyond its title? When you click on one in ProdPad, you open a larger profile where all the insight is stored. 

Check out this mock-up of “Coordinating Christina”. This is a great example of a personified user that’s not stuffed with irrelevant demographic information.

User persona template

A template can help your product team create personas that are standardized and well-rounded. Plus, just like with other parts of product management (such as user stories or collecting feedback), templates make the process more straightforward. No matter who is filling out the persona, they know exactly what information and context to include.

At ProdPad, our user persona template includes the same four elements, covering different facets of the persona:

• Description
• Goals
• Behaviors
• Frustrations & Limitations

The beauty is that this user persona template could work for any product in any market.

The beauty of using ProdPad to manage your product is that all of the team’s discussion and documents related to user personas are stored right there in each profile. Anyone can ask questions or annotate directly in the app, which helps drive the continuous innovation of these personas forward. More on that in the last section.

How to present user personas to the wider team

When it comes to user personas, communication is key. User personas are meant to be spread throughout the team so that everyone is aligned on who you are serving and how!

Once you’ve defined your user personas and shared them with the team, there are two common problems:

• The personas aren’t ever used. They are made once, and then they’re stored in a Google Drive or somewhere else on the internet that’s hidden away. They’re not connected to the work that’s being done day to day, and they just get lost
• The personas are seen as untouchable. They are made once, and then they’re treated as law. I’ve seen some user personas actually carved into plaques, written in literal stone! These personas don’t adapt to changes in your product or the market, so they’re gradually less effective and even become misleading

Both are a waste of valuable research and potential! So, what should you do instead? 

5 tips for sharing user personas with the team

1. Present the personas in a simple format. No need to invest tons of money; these might (and should) change
2. Put them somewhere accessible and visible, either within your product management tool or near where your team does their work
3. When you present them, share your screen or print them out and stick them on the walls around the office. Talk through each one and field questions from the group
4. Make it clear that these personas are subject to change. The point is to keep them current
5. Welcome feedback! The team should feel they have some impact and responsibility around user personas

In ProdPad, we keep personas in our navigation at the top of the page, right next to all the customer feedback you are collecting in the app. The team can access the personas at any time, and certain members can easily edit them.

How to apply personas in product management

Once you have created and shared your personas, how exactly do these abstract concepts about your customers come into play on a practical level?

User personas can be used to:

• Provide the jumping off point for writing great user stories
• Categorize customer feedback or new product ideas according to user type
• Understand and prioritize the product roadmap, according to who needs what
• Conduct user persona segmentation, to drill down and get valuable insight into individual personas, or compare behaviors across different personas

For even more guidance, read on about how to work with user personas when you’re a product manager.

As we have said before, user personas are meant to be used and reviewed regularly! They require iteration, just like any other part of your business. When you are learning through continuous discovery practices – whether it’s about your market, your customers, or your product – be sure to include these personas as a facet of your business that might need updating.

With solid personas in place, as well as a process for iterating upon them, your team is bound to build the best product possible for your customers’ needs!

The post What Is A User Persona And Do You Really Need Them? appeared first on ProdPad.

I’ve performed a lot of user tests throughout my career using some standard user testing templates to help me. I’ve worked with participants from every type and size of organization from startup to enterprise and everything in between. There are a couple of comments that I hear regularly during these sessions:

The other scenario I commonly hear is:

We have a small but growing team at ProdPad, so being able to test something quickly, learn from it, iterate, and then test again is really important. It enables us to keep up the pace at which startups need to move, and it enables me personally to keep ahead of our Development team – and keep them fed with a constant supply of features and improvements that we know our users want. 

In this blog, I aim to highlight the tools that I use to perform my user tests to show that you don’t have to break the bank to start this kind of work.

Design

In order to perform a user test, you first need something that you want to learn from. You don’t need a finished, high-fidelity design to user-test a theory, you can do it with paper and pens at the most basic level. Just draw rough sketches of an interface on a piece of paper, and then take photographs of the pages. These can then be linked together using wireframing tools, allowing users to navigate through a workflow made up of rough drawings. It’s enough to start learning from.

Many designers use Balsamiq to create low-fidelity wireframes to use in their testing sessions. A free, open-source alternative to this is called Pencil, and it comes fully equipped with basic shapes and many common interface components and controls so that users can simply drag and drop and create an interface design in minutes.

All of my interface designs start off life as simple sketches in a notebook, and then evolve into a Pencil interface design, before reaching high-fidelity for hand-over to Development.

Wireframing 

Once you have an idea of the workflow(s) that you wish to user-test and have designs/sketches for each of the screens in the workflow, there are a number of tools that will allow you to sequence these together in order to test your assumptions. They will also allow you to identify the troublesome areas of the design.

I primarily use Marvel for this, it’s a tool that allows users to upload images (of any fidelity) and then sequence them together with invisible hotspots. Test candidates can then navigate through the images and you can observe their interactions.

It is a very feature-rich tool, with the ability to have not only click-interactions, but hover, fixed elements, transition animations, and more. It’s very simple for even complete novices to use, with very little difficulty in terms of a learning curve.

Marvel offers a free plan with users able to have two active projects at any time.

A popular (and probably more well-known) alternative to Marvel is InVision. The two tools are fairly similar in terms of wireframing functionality, and it’s purely down to personal preference as to which tool suits you.

Test Preparation

Once you have a suitable wireframe that covers the interactions that you would like to user-test, then it’s time to write your user-test tasks.

I use a template for user testing, where I can write a scenario and task details, with space available for note-taking and the ability to grade each task so that I can capture both qualitative and quantitative data from all participants.

I use Google Docs to write these user-test documents, which is free to use

Recruiting User Test Candidates

Organizations have a variety of procedures for product teams to contact their customers. In my previous companies, I have had difficulty in getting permission from account managers and such to invite their customers to take part in user testing. At ProdPad we have a very open and direct line of communication between the company and customers, so it’s much easier for me to recruit user-test candidates than the experience that some of you may have.

That being said, there are a few basic tools that I use to recruit user-test candidates and manage sessions. 

Calendly is a tool that integrates directly with whatever calendar that you use (Google Calendar for me). It allows you to create an ‘Event’, set a date and time, a meeting place (virtual or physical), duration, and more. Once an event has been created, you simply send it to your potential candidates by whichever means are available to you (email is likely the primary form of communication for most companies). 

I take the approach that user-test candidates are helping us out, so I am extremely flexible and accommodating with regard to availability. Candidates are able to book themselves into my calendar at whatever time is convenient, and regardless of what I am doing, I will drop it and perform the test, as they have offered their time to us.

Another method for recruitment is Slack. ProdPad has nurtured an amazing ProdPad Slack Community and has a very engaged customer base. When I have a feature or product improvement that I wish to user-test, I can post a message to the community with my Calendly event link, and am guaranteed to get a handful of customers who are willing to participate. You only need a handful of candidates in order to start learning and spotting commonalities between tests. It’s definitely worth checking out what communities exist in your industry or in the problem space you’re supporting, and see if anyone is willing to offer you their time.

Remote User Test

As with most companies these days, ProdPad has customers in all corners of the globe. This means that the most efficient way of performing user tests is remotely.

The majority of user tests that I perform are moderated, and I sit in remotely on the session with the candidate.

I use a couple of basic tools to facilitate this. I use Google Hangouts as the remote video conferencing tool to perform the user tests. It allows for video and audio, as well as screen sharing and text-based messaging. Of course, many of us are now using Zoom, which is an alternative to using Google’s tools.

I use a tool called OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) alongside this, it allows me to record the video and audio from my computer so that I can facilitate the user test without any distractions. It also means I can review and take notes from the session at a later date.

Reviewing User Tests

After a session has finished and I’ve saved and exported the OBS video file, it’s time to review the session. You will first need a media player to do this, with VLC being one of the best available.

I then take notes against each of the tasks in the original user test Google Doc and grade each task.

In order to visualize the quantitative data (task grades), I copy the tasks and grades into a Google Sheet and create a chart from the data. This shows which tasks users were able to complete successfully and immediately highlights any problem areas.

It’s easy to get started

When you’re just starting out, consider doing user tests on specific, small, changes, and with some of your internal stakeholders first, so you can get used to the process and iron out the wrinkles. You don’t need to spend a lot of time on each test – maybe only 10-15 minutes. This will help you have more confidence when you start talking to customers and make the whole thing run according to plan. In general, I find that customers are keen to share their thoughts, and are happy to be listened to, so see this as a way you can hone your product skills in a structured way.

To summarize, it really isn’t as hard to get going with user testing as you’d expect. The cost doesn’t have to be high, and if you practice beforehand, you’ll soon know what you’re doing. 

If you want to learn more about how ProdPad supports the design team, check out our article on How ProdPad Fits with Design

The post Rapid User Testing with $0 Budget appeared first on ProdPad.

Much like a product manager, I am solving problems but through the art of design. A feature could be accurately specced out, and on paper provides a solution to a customer’s pain points, but if it doesn’t look right or isn’t clear then the feature isn’t going to work. It’s important for product designers to test, learn, iterate and pivot – the same way any decent, outcome-focused product manager would work. Why wouldn’t a product design team use ProdPad to achieve results?

ProdPad allows design teams to do their jobs better – here’s how: 

Reviewing and contributing 

If you take one thing from this blog post, then this is it: make sure all non-product teams within your organization can review product ideas and contribute their own. Who knows, perhaps someone in marketing, design, sales or development has that winning thought you’ve been searching for? Other teams will have different approaches, different experiences, and thoughts on how to make your product the best it can be. By providing this opportunity you’re able to maximize your chances of building the right stuff. 

As a designer, I can utilize my experience and knowledge for the greater good. Based on design patterns or interesting things we’ve seen elsewhere, we’re able to capture ideas in ProdPad that can be picked up by our product team. I gather a wealth of information during testing sessions, including valuable pieces of customer feedback. This intelligence is super valuable when deciding what stuff we want to build next. ProdPad lets us capture this feedback to stop it from getting lost or neglected. We log it in the feedback section in ProdPad and then link it to any relevant ideas, providing further validation. If the feedback doesn’t link to anything, then we create a new idea off the back of it and link them both together.

Example mapping

Before we do any designing we look at the idea to see what it’s about. We then get a small cross-functional group together to solve the problem from different perspectives. We work with a product manager, a developer, and a QA to get an understanding of the problem, and come up with various constraints about how to solve it. This helps guide the design as it means we have workable boundaries, rather than running completely wild and bloating the scope of the feature. Once we have the designs nailed, we then spec it. ProdPad acts as the hub which supports this important process. Thanks to its functionality we’re able to follow this process:

Example Mapping > Designs > User Testing / Iteration > Specs > Development.

Task management 

Looking at the roadmap in ProdPad lets us see what is being worked on. We pay specific attention to the ideas on each of the roadmap cards which allow us to group work into various themes. This makes it much more straightforward to split tasks out between us. For example, I might look at all work related to infrastructure, whereas our UX Designer will focus on initiatives based around usability. The tagging system available on ProdPad’s lean roadmap allows us to see the types of projects easily, which provides great insight when planning our workload.   

Within ProdPad’s kanban workflow we have a ‘Needs Design’ column. This allows us to see which ideas on those roadmap cards specifically need our attention. We can order them to help prioritize our tasks, as well as show our bandwidth when looking at taking on more projects. 

Staying outcome focused

We also use our product management software to help understand the why. We spend time on various ProdPad ideas, looking at the descriptions and understanding the business case so we can identify clearly what value this would bring to your customers. 

Looking through linked feedback provides a greater understanding of why a particular idea exists. This provides us with useful insight into what the customer expects. Granted, an idea summary is perfect for outlining what we need to do. But, our ability to be able to action feedback allows us to really understand the benefit. We’re then able to design with as much information as possible.

Being transparent and efficient  

We capture all our designs in ProdPad in each idea’s design tab. This means that any work or developments completed during discovery or user-testing stages are can be easily found. Design teams can rest easy knowing that their work is safe and in the right hands. Most importantly it means that other teams can see the progress of your work. They know exactly where you’re at with a particular item (ProdPad alerts you, duh). 

ProdPad allows us to group all the relevant information in one space. We’re able to go back and check that the functional specs are accurate and align with our design testing. Fortunately, ProdPad’s in-app discussion feature allows us to start worthwhile conversations with the product or developer team.

Don’t believe me? Sign up for a free demo of ProdPad and learn how teams outside of product can use ProdPad to benefit their own work as well as the wider organization. 

The post Product Design Teams Thrive With ProdPad – Here’s Why appeared first on ProdPad.

To link to an external design

• Go to the Designs tab (either within an idea or the main navigation)
• Click on Add Design
• Select Link to external design/wireframe

On the slide out menu, select the app your design is hosted in.

Here’s an example linking to InVision

Once you have selected InVision as your external design option, you will be asked to provide the Embedly URL.

To grab the URL, first go to the project you’ve created and click on “Share” at the top right.


Click on “Link settings” on the pop up.


Copy the private share URL and paste it directly into the ProdPad URL field for the design.

This means that you only have to share the link for Invision or Marvel the once. As you give feedback and have discussions with your design team, you’ll be able to keep an eye on how their work is going directly from ProdPad.

Easy peasy!

Want more? We support the following apps:

• Adobe XD
• Axure RP
• Balsamiq
• Box
• Figma
• InVision
• Marvel
• Moqups
• Sketch Cloud
• Zeplin

If that’s not enough for you, you can also link to generic links where your designs are hosted.

Mic drop.

The post Link to your favorite design systems! appeared first on ProdPad.

We’ve been experimenting with our new user onboarding since we launched ProdPad, but our latest iteration is getting us quite a bit of attention.

• It’s unexpected. We’ve shortened our trial period from the standard 30 days to just 7 – and no one’s complaining.
• It’s fun. We’ve gamified the trial, rewarding our new users with more free time in ProdPad the more they use it.
• Most importantly, it’s working. It’s helping us meaningfully engage with our newest users, and speeding up our trial-to-conversion rate.

Here’s how following our nose (and our customer data) helped us design a user onboarding process that has been winning us paying customers faster than ever.

What’s the point of a 30-day trial anyway?

When we first launched ProdPad in early 2013, we had no good reason to offer our new users a free 30-day trial. We did it because everyone else was doing it.

But in addition to our conversion rates, we kept a close eye on our time-to-conversion rate. We wanted to track not only how many trial users were converting, but how long it was taking them to make the decision.

This turned out to be a worthwhile effort, because what here’s what we found:

We found that on a 30-day trial, we could tell with 85% certainty by Day 9 whether a trial user would sign up.

In other words, it was taking our users on average only about a week to decide whether they wanted to pay for ProdPad.

So why were we giving them another three weeks? As an experiment, we decided to halve our trial period to 14 days and keep everything else the same.

That one move doubled our conversion rate.

Without that luxurious month-long trial to waste, users immediately started to value their trial time more. They were getting right to work, completing key tasks within the first few days and signing up for paid accounts within days, not weeks.

From this zero effort move, we learned that many of our trial users were actually ready to make a decision quickly – and longer trial times were a distraction.

We had our chance to make another radical change to our user onboarding when we launched our new version of ProdPad late last year.

The overhaul was geared toward our existing users, who were starting to ask for more advanced functionality to support their product management workflows.

But we had left our new users behind. We were sending them to a new dashboard that stared blankly back at them. No help and no guidance around what to do first. And accordingly, our conversion rate flatlined.

We had the opportunity to start from scratch.

So we threw out the idea of a fixed trial time – after all, we already knew that not all our customers needed a 30-day or 14-day trial to know they wanted to buy ProdPad.

At the same time, our most frequently incoming support tickets were requests for more time – mostly from engaged users who needed more time to test.

We looked to Dropbox’s free extra space you can earn and Slack’s free credits. Both solid systems that offered attractive incentives for new users.

We didn’t have either of those mechanisms, but what did our users value that we could give away?

Time.

So what if we offered 7-day trial…but the more you use ProdPad, the longer your trial becomes?

What if we gave every new ProdPad user exactly the amount of time they need to decide they want to be ProdPad customers?

It was just an experiment, but we started digging in.

How we designed our magically extending free trial

First, we brainstormed: 30-second mockups

Remember, at this point we had no user onboarding. Nothing.

And if we were going to put our money on a 7-day trial, we needed to make sure our users could see immediate value during their first session.

So we started with 30-second mockups.

If and when you have nothing (or you’re building a concept from scratch), I highly recommend trying 30-second mockups.

Making impulsive design decisions gives you a tangible place to start when you have a big question like, “What would be the perfect onboarding flow?”

This is how it works: Take a piece of paper and fold it in 4 so you have 4 equal boxes. Then timebox (3-5 mins) and get everyone to try to do 4 sketches each.

The time constraint forces people to get a concept on paper without giving them time to overthink it. The result is a lot of creativity and interesting ideas that otherwise might not come out.

We got together in a room – myself, our Head of Customer Success, and Head of Growth – for one of these sessions.

We already knew through tracking past user behavior which three steps we could be reasonably sure would lead to conversions:

• Enter their first product
• Start their product backlog by adding an idea
• Start their feedback log by adding customer feedback

So we needed to think about how we could communicate these key actions to all our users.

With an account-focused onboarding wizard, like Appboy?

With a doing-focused onboarding flow, like Typeform?

Unsurprisingly, our first round mockups all looked very different. We expected that. This exercise was designed to bring out our interpretations so we could reconcile them with our experience and intuition.

After our first round, we took turns explaining the design decisions behind our rough onboarding flows.

We took what we liked and went through a second round of 30-second mockups.

Each round, we played devil’s advocate.

How would they use this? What happens if they do this instead? What would this look like if X were left blank? Did you think about X as an option?

And at the end of our 30-second mockup sessions, we had combined our ideas into a single flow.

Now, how could we turn this into a high-converting dashboard for our new users?

We designed an introductory dashboard for badass users

Here’s what we knew we were dealing with:

• Our customers are product managers. (They’re self-directed and many already have a strong sense of what they want/need.)
• They don’t want to be forced down a certain path. (One path would be restrictive when our customers come to ProdPad to solve varying pain points.)
• They sometimes have deal-breakers. (For example, they’re looking to test a specific integration and want to move on fast if they don’t find what they’re looking for.)

And here’s what we wanted to do for them: make them feel badass.

The idea of badass users comes from Kathy Sierra, who suggests in her book, Badass: Making Users Awesome: “Make people better at something they want to be better at.”

Product managers come to ProdPad from different paths – some as seasoned pros and others as newbies.

We wanted to make both feel like they were becoming better, smarter and more confident product managers from the moment they land on our dashboard.

And so, taking a page out of Sierra’s book, we made this the first thing our new users would see once they created their account:

Here’s what new users would now see:

1. “Your first steps in ProdPad” list

The three steps we identified before surfaced here on the dashboard as a suggestion of how to get started on ProdPad.

It’s not a forced onboarding flow. Once you land on the dashboard, you’re free to explore the product as you wish.

This is a concession to those product managers who come storming in looking for the features and functionality they already know they need.

For all other users, these three steps offer direction and a bit of handholding.

Our first steps were benefit-driven and heavy on context. In Step 1 (“Tell us the name of your product”), we explained that we need a product name to create a product canvas and a product roadmap.

Then we send them straight to their new product canvas, where our Appcues hotspots take over to point out what to fill out next (and in the example below, even link them to useful references).

This helpful-but-not-Clippy onboarding strategy helped us build an early sense of trust with our new users.

2. Masterclass videos

We included a link at the top right hand corner of our dashboard to a short series of videos. Some people learn by doing, and others learn by watching. With these short two-minute clips, we had now covered both.

This too, was a concession to the possibility that not all our users invest in learning new products the same way.

3. An easy, limited dashboard view

Once you’re in the swing of things, the ProdPad dashboard becomes more active. For example, we open up this product backlog overview:

And then we introduce you to your activity feed:

But when you’re just starting out and you don’t have an idea backlog or colleagues with you on ProdPad yet, you don’t need an empty stats and activity feed starting back at you.

We keep the introductory dashboard simple until our users complete the initial three steps. Then we open up new layers of functionality.

It’s the classic concept of progressive disclosure at work.

Ready, set…let’s launch our new 7-day trial!

Now we had a new dashboard and guidance for our new onboarding flow, we were ready to halve our trial time yet again. This time, to 7 days.

Our magically extending 7-day trial start extending almost immediately.

Entered the name of your product? 2 free days.

Added your first idea? 1 free day.

Getting an integration up and working is a bit more intensive, so 5 extra days for that.

We’ve made a list too, so our users can find more ways to win themselves more time.

The unexpected gamification has had a sunny effect on our users.

They’ve been playing along, following the first three steps, and then seeking out more ways to get free trial time.

Some users are completing all the steps and unlocking the maximum trial time of 28 days. Along the way, they’re essentially teaching themselves how to use ProdPad.

In turn, the probability of a new trial user turning into a paid customer is increasing too. The odds are good.

What’s happened since then?

With our new user onboarding, we’ve seen our trial-to-conversion time once again double, and our overall conversion rate has tripled since our previous version.

It’s exciting to see the numbers roll in, but it’s not just about the numbers.

We’re getting great feedback too, which shows us that we’re on the right track.

This experiment has worked for us, but it won’t work for everybody. In fact, I’m not presenting this as a best practice at all.

Our magically extending 7-day trial is the result of data, intuition, and also the kind of unique relationship we want to build with our customers.

Our users are product managers just like us, so a lot of them have a deep appreciation for a well-done user experience. Our 7-day trial has caught a lot of them off guard, but it’s a good kind of surprise.

We know they want to see value fast – and we want to show it to them.

We know they want to feel confident at work – and we want to help them feel that way.

We know they want to feel supported – and we’re definitely here with resources and top notch customer support.

And this commitment only starts with our onboarding flow. If anything, it sets the tone for what’s to come.

In our next post, I’ll talk about how we designed persona-specific onboarding emails to boost our conversion rates along with our rad new onboarding flow. The two work together beautifully.

But for now, this is a reminder to follow your nose, folks.

We’ve designed our user onboarding – and our product management tool – to turn you into a highly effective product manager. Try ProdPad free today.

The post User Onboarding: The UX Behind Our Magically Extending Free Trial appeared first on ProdPad.

3 UX principles for better product development

1. Start by eliminating the negative experiences

No matter what your starting data source – from usability testing to customer support feedback – identifying and removing your customers’ stumbling blocks is the first step towards offering them a better user experience. Removing friction to a seamless experience is an essential prerequisite before you can really start to create additional value. Product people have much to learn from the classic psychology principle of negative enforcement: removing adverse stimuli can reinforce behavior for your users to return again and again. And those adverse stimuli should be sought out at every step of the customer journey. Removing friction goes further than high-level problem-solving, and deeply understands user behavior to make sure that a good idea to solve a problem isn’t thwarted by sloppy execution.

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2. Stay focused on long-term user goals

To remain experience-focused, product managers must continually seek to balance user and business needs. We could easily argue that this question of balance is misleading as ultimately, these are one and the same thing. Continually meeting their needs puts you in the strongest position to retain your users’ custom. But every product manager knows that day-to-day decisions aren’t immediately that simple. When faced with short-term commercial concerns, technical objectives and even pure asthetics, it’s easy to lose sight of your raison d’être – long-term business success. Paul Brooks has neatly adapted the Steve Covey time management quadrant for this balance, where intelligent design is the sweet spot for meeting long-term goals.

3. Be one step ahead with proactive experiences

Living and breathing your users’ needs means that you can delight customers with proactive user experience design. Going a step further than removing friction, you can actually anticipate where your customers will encounter problems before they come to you with them. Ensure that the products you build guide your users rather than provide them with information to figure it out themselves. And to really meet their long-term goals, dedicate time to imagine features that go beyond the expected. A completely comprehensive approach to user experience considers every possible angle and aims to never leave customers waiting for more.

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