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The Company Timeline vs. The User Timeline

A long-held belief in UX is that designers need to balance the company's needs with the users' needs. In this episode, we reexamine that two-headed monster from a different perspective: thinking in terms of timelines. Your user flows will always be affected by company-timeline considerations, but diving further into your USER's timeline is an easy way to find insights for healthy conversion and retention.

Self-Serve Podcast
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Table of Contents
The Company Timeline vs. The User Timeline
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Sections

What is the company's timeline? How does it differ from the user's timeline? (2:16)

How to understand and positively impact the user timeline (8:54)

The consequences of ignoring the user timeline (17:48)

How to prioritize business interests within the user timeline (29:43)

A real world example of prioritizing the user timeline: Buzzsprout (35:40)

Highlights

What the difference between the company timeline and the user timeline?

The company and its users are on two different timelines. The company is on a trajectory of growth. Users, on the other hand, are on a trajectory toward an improved set of circumstances they care about. To be customer-centric is to actively make sure that business decisions are informed by the user's timeline rather than the company's. (2:16)

Creating realistic user timelines

Companies typically rely on abstract models of the user timeline (like Pirate Metrics and User Journey Maps) to improve it. The problem with this approach is that the map is not the terrain — the models often misrepresent the flows users are actually choosing to work through. (19:20)
Your best subscribers should be your biggest source of inspiration — they're an example of user value and business value coming together perfectly. How can you detect, as early as possible, which users are on that kind of trajectory and support them better? (8:54)

Abstract user timelines don’t benefit users

We hold it self-evident that user motivation is the energy that drives any successful software engagement. If you're measuring user engagement in terms of pirate metrics, or virality, or things that are good for the business, but are not necessarily good for the user, then you are misunderstanding the specifics of their desired goals and their timeline. (25:41)

Aligning the user and business timelines

Ultimately, the goal is to merge the business's process with the user's as much as possible. If you think of the user and the company as dance partners, you want your offering and the experience of using your offering to follow the lead of the users' dance, rather than to be imposing its own dance onto the user. (28:46)
Delay business-centric steps for as long as possible. You lose the largest number of people early on in the process. The more you delay steps that provide no benefit to the user, 1) the more users will make it further into the process and 2) the more likely they will be to be generous and actually engage with the business-centric activity.

Written by

Yohann Kunders
Yohann Kunders

Co-founder: Self-Serve SaaS, prev Airbase and Chargebee

    Written by

    Samuel Hulick
    Samuel Hulick

    Co-founder: Self-Serve SaaS, prev founder of UserOnboard

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