Every summer, many people find themselves wondering how much better off they'd be if only they'd stuck to all the resolutions they made at the beginning of the year. They'd be eating healthier, in better shape, maybe they'd even speak a new language. But no matter how well we plan out our resolutions, many inevitably end up in the graveyard of wishful thinking.
The key to sticking to those New Year's resolutions is motivation – and it's exactly the same for app users. When users aren't motivated beyond sign-up, activation rates drop off. In reality, motivation needs to be carefully cultivated and planned. This is also true in software, where improving and maintaining user motivation is crucial to the activation stage of their user journey.
Given the outsized impact of activation on your bottom line, getting users to complete your product's activation event – through which they achieve real value and experience an aha moment – is one of the most important things growth teams can do. Below, we'll explore 6 strategies for keeping users motivated through the activation stage of their user journey.
Understanding Activation
Activation occurs when users first achieve the value you promised. It happens when new users reach their first aha moment and the lightbulb goes off – after this, they become activated users. Activation rate is expressed as the percent of activated users out of total acquired users. How to define activated users is something each team needs to figure out for themselves, by analyzing the user journey and mapping backward to figure out the early events that set successful, retained users apart from those that fizzle out.
Boosting App User Experience
Activation starts with signup and user onboarding. These first experiences are the rare moments where you might have the user's full attention, so it's crucial for your user onboarding experience to convey excitement and provide a warm welcome. Take a look at how Tumblr greets new users and showcases its range of content during signup: When reiterating your value, keep the statements short and sweet so that users are able to get into your product faster. And as much as possible, use language that makes users feel the experience is about them.
Goal-Setting
Another motivation-building tactic is goal-setting. Getting users to commit to a goal during signup can help you maintain momentum through onboarding and beyond. Keeping motivation high is especially crucial if your key activation event or aha moment takes a bit of work to reach. It's much easier to ask people to complete one small thing at a time than to make one giant commitment.
Breaking Up Steps
Think about the difference between filing your taxes yourself and filing them with a tool like TurboTax. Part of what makes filing with TurboTax feel easier is that the process is broken down into logical, manageable steps. Those steps are further punctuated by checkpoints, which give users a sense of accomplishment along the way.
Measuring Success
Breaking up steps can also help measure the effectiveness of your onboarding experience. With smaller units to measure, you can better pinpoint why something isn't working. As Quick Sprout product designer Ian Main said, "The single most important thing we've done to improve user onboarding is to split our onboarding up into more bite-sized smaller steps. This has enabled us to measure our user onboarding funnel more granularly and has made it easier to move the steps around when we are trying to optimize the funnel."
Minimizing Forms
Minimizing the amount of forms a user has to fill out upfront is a surefire way to get users into your product faster. To ensure that this approach doesn't just bloat your acquisition numbers with users who won't actually continue using your product, you can delay the account creation until after the user experiences true value.
Progress Bars
Progress bars are a simple way to let users know how much progress they've completed, and how much more they have to go. They both celebrate what the user has already done and maintain momentum as users get closer to the finish line. Quora's onboarding flow uses a progress bar to keep users engaged enough to finish setting up their account.
By starting users off with a progress bar that's partially completed, Quora also hits on the goal gradient effect, which states that motivation tends to increase the closer we are to completing our goals.