growth hacking with lean ux
TRANSCRIPT
Growth Hacking with Lean UXJohn RocksonCo-founder, Growth Machine
@growthmachine_co
A talk for HashChing’s Growth Hacking Competition, 2015
What is Lean UX?
Lean UX is researching and validating your user experience as quickly and cheaply and possible. If you have UX already, it’s about getting UX from being about outputs (design documents) to being about outcomes.
If you’re in a lean startup with no UX, it’s about cherry picking the best learning tools from the UX toolkit to match your situation.
What are the standard UX tools? ● User research● User needs● User personas● User journeys● Wireframes● Mockups● Prototypes
Everybody knows UX is important, but there is no accepted framework for measuring the ROI of the UX process.
So we use research & lower level metrics to measure success, and constantly refine our UX artefacts.
Is growth hacking a good use case for Lean UX?
‘Functional, task flow projects work well (with Lean UX). There’s a clear end goal.’- Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX
My typical Lean UX Process
Background research
User research
User needs
User journeys
UI Sketches
User Validation Production
Feedback & analytics
User personas
Hot spot prototype
Tools I only use in more involved projects
Why do user research?
It’s cheaper and faster to test assumptions and iterate with interviews, mockups and prototypes than it is to test and iterate after
your product has launched.
Everything is an assumption.
So test your assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible.
User research & user needs
Aim first to thoroughly understand the problem space, not to create a solution.
That way, you’re far less likely to encounter confirmation bias in your findings.
So in this case, don’t aim to create a winning growth strategy straight away. Instead, understand the user and their needs and pain points.
User research
Determine your research questions.
The general topline research question:
“What are the user needs and pain points?”
User research
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia
User research & user needs
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia
User research & user needs
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia
User research & user needs
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia
Choose something from each quadrant to triangulate your findings
User researchYou can build user needs from competitor’s social media comments.
How to generate user needs: Step 1
Paraphrase quotes from your research in this format: “I want to X”
“I want to know what’s happening to my flight in
unexpected extreme weather” “I want to be able to choose my flight time if my flight canceled” “I want online pre-check-in”
Step 2: Create an affinity diagram
● Write your user quotes on yellow stickies
● Arrange them into related clumps
● Describe each category with a blue sticky
● Arrange the blue categories into related clumps and describe them with top level areas in pink
User PersonasBuild user personas if:
The product is totally unprecedented.
The team is of a totally different demographic to the target user.
The team lacks a common direction.
One of my user personas for EyeKite, a drone tourism app
User PersonasIf you create more than one user persona, make sure each is easily definable in a single phrase and there is no overlap.
They can then be easily referred to by the team throughout the dev process, with matching Agile user stories.
The social traveller
The adrenalin
junkie
User Journeys
Every sales marketing or software experience needs a user journey. Yours only needs to be a sketch. But refine it throughout the process. The user journey provides the sequence of steps in the funnel to A/B test. Source:
OGT, servicedesigntools.org
Optimize for Understanding & Engagement
Before finding out “do they like my product?”, find out “Do they understand my product?”
Pay razor sharp attention to testing taglines and USPs.
The same applies not only to your product, but also the CTAs in your growth strategies.
UI SketchesDetermine what sections you
need in your landing page or app screen.
Sketch multiple versions of each section.
Pick the best design for each section, based on your assumptions.
Cut them out so they can be swapped in easily.
Stick your sketch up on the wall and annotate with your testing sequence - stickies work well for this.
Swap in sections after they’ve been tested.
Validating after launch
Validation after live is the most expensive and relies on high traffic.
Cohort A/B test with Optimizely or Google Content Experiments (Eric Ries did this)
Long term satisfaction survey across all site users (Google Drive did this)
Live chat agents (Zendesk, Intercom etc)
Choose particular analytics to test your assumptions - then confirm your quantitative results with a qualitative survey
Narrowing your niche with analytics
My first business, Online English Tutors:
4,000 users in the first year
$20,000 of mostly passive revenue
Narrowing your niche - what worked for me
Keyword search volumes (Adwords keyword planner)
Competitor rankings and top incoming queries (Alexa)
Set up a site with keyword rich content and measure your top queries
Pivot quickly if you find something unexpected -
In my case, my analytics revealed queries to my site asking for a product I didn’t have. So I built the product straight away and gained 4,000 users and $20k in revenue.
The major growth levers
Having a great product“Businesses grow when the product falls into a conversation.”
- Dan Norris, founder, WP Curve
The lean UX tools will help get you to product market fit faster and cheaper.
Building virality into the product
● Requires a large network and a smooth user experience to work
● Is adding friends necessary or beneficial to the product’s experience?
● Could the product become a habit? If so, use Nir Eyal’s cycle from hooked: Trigger, Action, Investment, Variable Reward.
Content marketing● How-tos, emotionally relatable stories, and controversial information get the most
traffic.
● Content helps attract relationships and opportunities.
● Content, press articles and SEO can feed each other synergistically.
Outreach● Finding influencers and asking them via email, Twitter or Facebook for specific help
that also benefits them - e.g. sharing a deal with their group or followers
● If targeting end customers, be sure to profile them correctly. Hassling people who don’t need the product does brand damage.
● Warm emailing based on existing relationships works better than totally cold emailing
A few final actionable tips for the hackathon
1# Get good insight before you decide which channel to
focus on.
2# Allow your learning on the user and the channel to guide which UX tools you include in
your learning process.
3# Nail one channel.
Don’t try to build an across the board integrated marketing strategy.
Resources & Tools
Interactive prototyping: (especially for building virality into the product)
Sketch + Invision
Growth hacking strategies: criminallyprolific.com
A/B testing:Optimizely, Google content experiments
Advice and feedback from fellow entrepreneurs: 7 day startup (open) Facebook group
Reading
This presentation is available at:
growthmachine.com.au/growth-hacking-with-lean-ux
And feel free to email me with any questions.
Good luck!