Des Traynor at Intercom, wrote a great guide about how to onboard users with stories and addresses a common problem in customer interviews, misunderstanding the customer's true motivation.
When conducting your interviews, try to keep the participants focused on their actual actions and feelings when making the switch [into an active user of your product]. People are notoriously unreliable at predicting their future behavior and attitudes, so framing everything around what really happened (not what usually happens, or could have happened) during their onboarding experience keeps your emerging story tethered to the realm of reality.
Asking for specifics also helps transport people back into the actual moment, which brings up lots of super valuable accessory details. Rather than asking them if they had an easy time with setup or not, get to specifics by asking which part was the trickiest, and deeply explore that moment. By way of a real-world example, while someone might not have a lot to add to "are you a safe driver?", asking them to specifically recall the last time they were pulled over would immediately thrust them into a story rich with emotional details.
Also, be sure to track every story's breadcrumb trail as far back as you can get your interviewee to remember. The narratives that lead up to our decisions can be surprisingly long-much longer than the surface would show. A journey to a car dealership may at first seem to begin with seeing a newspaper ad, but after even a little bit of digging it could turn out to have really started with a funny noise in the engine two months before. Onboarding always begins with the motivation to change, which always takes place before the user ever pulls up your site.
In customer interviews, it's helpful to look for particular triggers in their life. Des describes a motivational trigger here, but there are others like:
- awareness triggers: when and how they became aware of new, possible alternatives
- decision triggers: what happened in their life that actually got them to start shopping
Together, these provide you with key landmarks in the users journey toward being a customer. With this knowledge, it's much easier to figure out how to attract, onboard and keep customers.
In addition to Des' post, Mckinsey's Customer Decision Journey elaborates on this, and it's relationship to your brand and competitors, and Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test elaborates on customer interview techniques.
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