Your product’s onboarding might be blocking users from reaching value

“Aha! …. Um … What?” 5 Steps to Ensure Your Product’s “Aha! Moment” is Working

Most SaaS products either rush value delivery in onboarding or rely on users to find value on their own. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Let’s get into it.

Your product’s users need to go through 4 stages of product experience to feel and remember the value they gained. 

Let’s use a concrete example so you can use these steps as you’re reading this.

The example: In their own words, Heidi is a B2B medtech platform for doctors. Their core value prop: reduce time spent on admin tasks so that doctors can provide better care for their patients.

In theory, the value is clear. Here’s how they’ve nailed product-led growth so that the Doctor using it reaches value and attributes value to Heidi. 

A Doctor uses Heidi to transcribe a consult. Not having to constantly write things down and remember important notes is the value. Being able to see and use the notes within the consult is value attribution.

Both are important - reaching the value + remembering that the value created was with the help of using Heidi. Psychologically, reaching the value early creates a positive association with the product and remembering where the value was created establishes a want to use it again. 

If the Doctor has to do a lot of editing and manual work to make the notes useful - the value is felt but the attribution is lost because of the lag between transcribing notes and using the notes.

Here are the 4 steps you can follow right now to ensure your product’s users reach and attribute value back to your product:

Step 1: Identify the value for a behaviour, not a person. 

Instead of designing the product experience for a person, design it for a change in behaviour. Continuing to use Heidi Health as an example. The transcribing feature in Heidi Health is not useful for all doctors in the world. Why? Because doctors all over the world make notes in many ways. Think of a doctor with low-to-no internet connection. Think of another doctor with no digital device to record audio. Think of another doctor who isn’t allowed to use external products.

So, instead of designing for doctors. Heidi Health’s transcribing feature is useful for:

Doctors who:

• maintain and manage patient records, 

• have internet and device access, and 

• are legally allowed to use external products.

This particular situation could be improved with one change - a transcribing product that removes the need to manually update patient records and care details. 

Step 2: Build awareness about the value

Looking at Heidi’s homepage, they articulate the value right from the start: save time, provide better care, get home on time. This means, a user doesn’t need a sales rep to tell them what value they should be expecting. The user reads 2 lines, they make sure Heidi is compliant, and they’re ready to try the product. Heidi offers a 14-day trial to help users try the product in their own clinic with their own patients. If they find it useful, they pay to use it. 

Step 3: Deliver value WHEN the behaviour shows up

When a Doctor is ready to transcribe, nothing else should come in the way. This is the moment where a Doctor is hoping they feel the value. This means a few things for the Doc:

• Was it easy to start transcribing?

• Did the Doctor know if/when transcription had errors?

• Did the product safely manage issues with transcription?

• Is the transcription correct according to the Doctor?

If all of the above worked well, the value is created. Most products rightly focus on getting this step right because arguably that’s what the product was built for. But what if the transcription was broken? What if the Doctor had to manually choose which words were spoken by who? What if the transcription wasn’t correct according to the Doctor? That’s where attribution plays an important role. Time for step 4.

Step 4: Attribute value to the moment

If transcribing was easy to start and stop for the Doctor but the actual transcription had errors and needed manual fixing, attribution is lost. The amount of effort required to change behaviour should be low enough for the Doctor to want to use it again.

Attribution happens in a few ways:

• Timing: the transcription needs to be accurate, void of errors, and ready to export without the Doctor needing to manually do anything. The faster this happens, the more likely the Doctor is able to associate “how easy it was to transcribe” to “how easy it was to use the transcription”. Without this link, the Doctor has time to think about the good old days when paper and pen did everything. When your product is asking a change in behaviour, the experience needs to guide them from value creation through to value realisation so that old behaviours don’t seem better.

• Memory: Timing can’t always establish value realisation. For example, a cyber security product’s creates value on a daily basis by blocking malicious visitors and bots. The value is attributed back to the product only when compliance reporting can show the quality of security. In this use case, the CyberSec product needs to ensure that the report clearly shows how the product increased the quality of security. Jogging a user’s memory to attribute value back to the product is a great example of intentional product design. This method is used by Uber when you try to cancel your Uber subscription.

• Repetition: In some products like Running apps, value is created with every run. But value is attributed back to the product in increments with every additional run. It is the product’s job to connect the dots between the previous, current, and next run. 

If you’re building or improving your product, these 4 steps will make sure you’ve designed an onboarding experience that:

• clearly creates value for the user and 

• Helps the user attribute the value back to the product

This cycle helps the user change their behaviour. Design your product to change behaviour so that you can hyper focus on understanding the existing behaviour, designing based on it, and then changing it. A user has many behaviours, pick which one you want to change and design for the behaviour change because that’s what is really in your product’s control. 

Follow the 4 steps right now, highlight what’s missing in your product’s experience, and experiment with it. There is no one size fits all solution so experimenting is your fastest way to learn about your users.

I use these exact 4 steps when helping scaling products hit their growth goals. We define the audience, focus on one behaviour, design the product experience for that behaviour, and then test rapidly till we’re confident in our decisions.