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Yohann: The first tactic we'd recommend is to familiarize yourself with the critical pathway, and by the critical pathway, we mean all of the steps that users have to take in order to complete paying you for the first time and actually becoming a customer. So, you can go as far back as you like and you can go as far forward as you like. But let's say for the purposes of this conversation, we choose Sign Up as point A and becoming a customer as point B.
What actually has to happen between those two points? What do users actually have to go through, and what are the necessary steps that they have to take? Because, understandably, you can't map out every single screen that they see between these two points — because especially if you have an expansive product — the number of paths that users could be going down is infinite. The permutations and combinations are mind-boggling. But the necessary steps, surprisingly, turn out to be just a handful. They have to create an account, they have to set a password. They have to find value in some way, there are some activities there. Then they have to go through your billing flow, they have to press an upgrade button, and provide card details. The necessary steps that they have to take between point A and point B, you can map those out. And when was the last time you did that? When was the last time you looked at how many users make it from one to the next? What's the drop-off like between each step in the critical pathway?
Samuel: Yeah, fully agreed. And even if you aren't looking at the data and are just trying to do this heuristically, it helps in our experience just to map them out and just look at the screen state, side by side, like in a big Figma board or something along those lines. But there are a lot of generally speaking, a lot of overlooked points of friction, especially in your signup experience itself that are just kind of sitting there collecting dust.
Another one is like, so many times you see a sales survey asking how many employees are at your company, and so on and so forth. Lot of different things that you're asking people to do that are probably not ultra-relevant to what they're trying to accomplish. And a lot of times the biggest performance gains that you can get right out of the gate are just by going in and removing the points of friction that are irrelevant to the user's value creation process and might be hindering your own value creation process.
Yohann: Right, right. Traditionally when you are laying out an experience like this, you're not laying out the screens that users actually look at. You are abstracting away from the real experience and coming up with some kind of model, like a user journey map, in order for users to get to another abstract concept, the aha moment, then they would have to go through these steps. How many people are actually making it through these steps? We are not recommending that. We are recommending actually laying out the screens in the Figma canvas, lay out the screen side by side and rather than thinking about aha moments, think about conversion.
And instead of thinking about time to value, you know, manufacturing a valuable milestone super early in the user journey, instead, think about momentum, think about how easy it is for users to move from one step to the next, even if it is an eight-step process. How can you keep that momentum going all the way to conversion rather than just an abstract Aha moment or a manufactured step two that you think might be valuable to users, but you don't actually know?
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