Claire Suellentrop: Part of why friction gets a bad rap is it is entirely possible that friction in an onboarding experience can be introduced in ways that don't actually help out the user or help them get to a valuable moment. Uh, this is why marketers can't have nice things like including questions for your new user. That helps you as a business, but that doesn't, don't support the user's experience.
Intro: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Forget The Funnel podcast, where our goal is to help you, as a SaaS leader, finally stop guessing, understand your best customers and drive more predictable recurring revenue. We're Gia and Claire, founders of Forget The Funnel, a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps SaaS businesses learn from their best customers, map and measure their experiences and unlock their best levers for growth. If you're looking to help your team make smarter decisions, this show is for you.
Claire Suellentrop: All right. Hey everyone. Today we are trying something a little different. Uh, so if you've ever scrolled through LinkedIn, who amongst us has not, it probably didn't take long for you to be hit with some shiny, best practice that promises to help you win new customers and scale your business and blah, blah, blah. But the problem, in our opinion, is that a best practice usually isn't actually best at all.
Best doesn't leave any room for flexibility or your context. It implies that there's only one answer to a problem. But that's almost never the case. So, on this new series, we're inviting experts and friends from the world of SaaS to share a best practice that they think is broken. Then, Gia and I will share our take on what you should do instead.
So today, to start this off, we're excited to be joined by Ramli John from who is Content Programming Director at AppCues. Ramli is going to be sharing his thoughts on eliminating friction in user onboarding. So here he is.
Ramli John: My name is Ramli John. I'm the author of Product-Led Onboarding and currently Content Director at AppCues.
What is a flawed best practice in SaaS? A best practice that's flawed in SaaS is the suggestion that you have to always remove friction in your user journey. And I hear that all the time, so just remove all the friction and your users will be super happy. Why do you think people get so upped in this best practice?
I think in general, the word friction is bad. I think when you say remove friction, of course, it sounds bad. Like it's a good thing. They think about, Oh, if you look at a car, try to remove as much, try to make it as aerodynamic as possible. So you remove friction. And I think because it sounds good and the word friction is bad, people just accept it for what it is.
And I think that's something that when you start working, trying to improve the user journey and the onboarding, you realise there is like, once again, there is some friction, that is, that is helpful. That actually adds value to the experience. It actually helps users to see the value sooner than later and actually helps people to purchase the product.
What should they be doing instead? I would suggest that they break down their whole journey, and this is something that Claire and Gia suggest as well, where you map out the whole journey of the customer, then you and you and your team. You try to use a red, yellow, and green system, or red is something that is unnecessary. This is based on data from user interviews. I'm getting stuck here. Yellow is something that you can delay after the experience after they've seen the value of the product, and green is mission-critical. These are ones that seem like friction, but users actually say, ah, I get it in another example of one where, oh, it looks like friction, but it's actually helpful with wave app where they ask for a logo up front.
They're an easy way to create invoices for entrepreneurs. And one of their onboarding steps before was to upload your logo. And people are like man, that's a lot of friction, right? There's a ton of friction there. Of course, there is a ton of friction. But what happens when you upload your logo is they show you an invoice with your brand colours, your logo, and your former head of growth.
Uh, Vivek was like, we talked to customers and users, and they were like, this is much better than what I'm using right now. So actually, based on your interviews with users, they realised that it was a moment of delight for users. Of course, they iterated that and they added a way to just grab your email address.
If you have a work email, they can get your work website. And based on that, they've tried to find your logo based on that. But I think that's an example where it seems like a red. Which is unnecessary, but it's actually green. And I think the last step to this is, of course, you want to discuss this with a team, with a sales team, product, or customer success thing is mission critical, or even what's friction might not, you, your whole company might not agree on it.
And I think this is something that any teams can approach is like more of, not just database data is qualitative or based on an interview, but also you. Team-based, where you try to analyse the trade-offs, should we add this friction because it adds to the experience, or does it help us show the value quicker or sell the product?
I think those three, three steps can be helpful. So map it out, red, yellow, green, bet each step. And the third is to discuss it with a team.
Georgiana Laudi: Okay. So, uh, we love Ramli and that was great. And we agree. Not a big shocker there. Ramli is super experienced with product onboarding. Literally wrote a book on it. He thinks a lot about this topic.
And so we really, um, appreciate his input here. And again, a big plus one to a lot of what he said. What I think is really interesting and worth digging into is that he even mentioned this idea of friction and the idea of it being bad. Why? So let's talk about what friction is. What does that mean, adding friction to an onboarding experience?
And then why do we automatically assume or inherently believe that friction is a negative?
Claire Suellentrop: We can think about friction, particularly within the context of user onboarding, as the steps that you might introduce prevent a new user from getting into the core of the product. And I think part of why friction gets a bad rap is.
It is entirely possible that friction in an onboarding experience can be introduced in ways that don't actually help out the user, or don't help them get to a valuable moment. So a, uh, this is why marketers can't have nice things like including questions to your new user that help you as a business, but that don't support the user's experience.
So as they're signing up for your product, imagine asking them for a ton of details that don't pertain to what they're about to do. So how did you hear about us? What is your job title? What is your company size? What is your phone number? Big red flag, because if somebody is trying to onboard your products, that's not an assumption that they want to be chased by sales.
And again, product designers who are hearing this, I'm sure, are just cringing because this sounds like such an obvious no, but it's absolutely something that's been done over the years. Um, I'm sure you've experienced it. I know I've experienced it. I think it's gotten
Georgiana Laudi: I think it's gotten worse over the years too, because like we've gotten into this habit of we've got to, we've got to learn all the things like marketing and sales has to learn all of the things about everybody signing up for the product.
And there's yeah, just this like, Oh, we've got this captive audience right at this spot. We should learn everything that we can. Um, and so, yeah, I think friction has this bad rap because. It is, you know, you just sort of see a long form in your mind's eye. Right? There are also other types of friction that are added to, right?
Like, uh, sometimes when you're onboarding into a product, you might be asked to upload a logo or install a script. That's my favourite, as is installing a script on a website when you like. That might be a really hard thing to do. That's a really good example of friction. In either case, I'm not saying good or bad; it's just friction in and of itself.
So why is friction perceived as this negative thing?
Claire Suellentrop: I think any one of us, either you or me or Ramli or anyone, you know, listening to or watching this episode, can relate to the experience of trying to test out a product and being hit with these asks for information that feels like getting into the product is going to mean more of a chore than it is going to be valuable.
A great example of that, I can actually pull from a recent discussion with a CEO we're working with and a head of sales. So, I was on a call with these two folks, and the project we're working on is improving their website visitor-to-demo booked conversion rate. And we sat down with the head of sales because we wanted to understand their current demo request form. Do we really need all of the tasks that we make of people who are potentially going to sign up to book a demo?
And, you know, way back when, whenever this form was originally built, gathering a bunch of information about the potential customer up front was meant to create a better demo experience and enable the sales team to be more tailored. But in this conversation, the head of sales was like, you know. Actually, I use this, this, and this.
I use those three fields. that get pushed into HubSpot. These other five fields, I never really look at these. And think about the number of people who are opening that form and being asked to fill out like eight different fields in addition to their first name and last name and their phone number, not even to get into a product, just to have someone call them and walk them through the product.
Again, it goes back to how friction is interpreted as bad because friction, when improperly inserted into the experience equals getting into your product or taking whatever action needs to be taken feels like a chore.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. It's like the pendulum has swung in the completely opposite direction, right?
So we went through this world where it was like, okay, we need to ask all these questions. We should find out everything we can. And then the absolute opposite happened. There was a complete pushback And we're in this world right now where there's been such a pushback against friction, that in some cases you get dumped into a product experience with no context whatsoever.
You've been asked nothing. The company has your email address, and that's it. And they don't know anything about you at all. And that's also bad. And so, in what circumstances does it make sense to add friction? Unnecessary friction, I think, is what fate is like; we can all agree that unnecessary friction.
Equals bad necessary friction equals good. But in best practices, I mean, I think I heard this a couple of years ago with slack as, as the example. And this, this is maybe 5 years ago where there was this best practice of where it should take no more than 4 actions to get to a moment of value, where did this come from?
Claire Suellentrop: Who made that choice?
Georgiana Laudi: Right. And it's very much in the context of Slack in this case, right? I think, uh, like, the product had a product at the time that had discovered that four was the magic number for Slack, but people took that and ran with it. Okay. It's four. It should never take more than four. This is now friction. This is now law.
That's exactly right. So unnecessary friction. Bad. Necessary friction. I mean, let's talk about necessary friction.
Claire Suellentrop: Walk me through some examples of where this idea of reducing friction actually isn't the best approach. I know Ramli shared that Canva has a What is your use case overlay as an example to set the context, but what else might you add?
Georgiana Laudi: I think the Canva example is great because Canva's onboarding is actually pretty intense. I don't know when the last time you onboarded into Canva was, but it is something else. Like they're, they ask, I can't even remember how many questions. I want to say like five, six, seven, and ten different things before you actually get into the product because really, their intention is to really tee you up.
So once you get inside of the product, it can be kind of overwhelming. And it is kind of one of those products that allow you to do a lot of things. They're trying to cater for the experience as much as possible. So I think the Canva example is amazing. I like the Wave example that Ramli gave, too, because it's so simple and straightforward to understand.
The reason that Ramli raises this example is because it's a really straightforward way. to add friction to help the customer get to value more quickly. So it's, it's about uploading a logo so that that customer could visualise what their invoice would look like, branded as opposed to the, your logo here, standard kind of thing.
So it's a very low-barrier thing to do. And also, there are some ways to preload the logo. And I know a lot of product teams love doing the domain lookup and like preloading a logo without actually having You have to upload the logo yourself, but I think just that little investment actually is a very valuable experience in that product onboarding experience to help customers feel like a little bit more, or these new customers a little bit more invested in the outcome and feel like, Oh, I made this thing.
So I think the wave example is great, too. Another example that comes to mind as I was just thinking through this is, and this is especially related to best practices, the team that we're working with right now. Actually, we haven't done the full CX review yet, but the research that's coming back is really interesting in that it's a developer-focused product.
And the thing that keeps coming back in these conversations that we're having with their customers is this idea that the documentation is amazing. The API documentation is amazing on its surface. My immediate reaction was. Yeah, yeah, but that's like saying customer support is good or it's inexpensive or something like that.
Like, let's not focus on documentation. But in conversations with Heidi, she's like, no, no, like, genuinely, the documentation is like an actual aha moment. For these customers, we have not crafted with the new onboarding is going to look like yet. We're in the weeds of that right now, but it's so interesting because another expert onboarding expert would come into this scenario and say, Hey, team, you need to remove the documentation and get your developers because their developer customer into the product immediately because developers don't like onboarding their anti-marketing.
Best practices would tell you to get that developer and dump them into the product. But because we've done this research, we learned that actually seeing these very specific parts of the documentation is what convinced customers to keep going through the onboarding experience. And so that's a really interesting spot where, again, an onboarding expert.
Following best practices would say, remove it. And we're actually seeing the exact opposite. We're saying, add it in, highlight it more, double down there. So that's a decent example that came to mind for me.
Claire Suellentrop: So what I really like about that example you just shared is you did a great job of really comparing and contrasting what best practices would have one belief, which is like, get all of this additional material, get, get documentation like out of the way, and just let, let developers get into the product.
But learning from customers has actually taught the team that the exact opposite is true and that the developers getting into the product love that element. Like, that's such good advocating for, such strong advocating for understanding what the customer cares about before just making the assumptions.
Let's dig into this a little further so when we think about the impact of adding in that friction, whether it's. The goal, right, is to improve customer adoption and improve long term customer engagement, but also internal goals, like better understanding what customers are doing. I know you've been working with Bitly on a related project.
What can you talk about there?
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. So, the team at Bitly introduced friction to the product onboarding experience through the signup experience in a really interesting way. It came out of research that was conducted last year. We did jobs to do research and identified and got more intelligence on what kind of use cases customers were using the platform for.
So a little bit of context setting is probably needed here. Like, if I say the name Bitly, what everybody understands is short links. Bitly has been around for 13 years and is very well established in the short links space. But over the past year and a half, Bitly has evolved into a connections platform. What that means is they've got multiple products, and they have a multi-product solution now.
And so part of the research that we conducted last year for the jobs to be done research that we did last year was actually to learn more about what are these other use cases that people are coming to Bitly to solve or what other use cases are they able to solve with Bitly? One of the things that came out of that research was A question added to the onboarding, which asks about use cases, like, I can't remember the exact wording right now, but it basically highlights a couple of potential use cases that span beyond short links, right?
Short links is one of them, but QR codes is another one of the products in that suite. So there's some use cases that are actually more about QR codes. Um, and then there's like bitly pages and there's tracking and there's a couple of use cases added there that does a number of things. So one of the things it does is it informs the Bitly team on what use cases are people coming to us for?
What are they most interested in when they come through the front door? Super interesting learning. Like even if they don't act upon it, having that input and understanding what kinds of customers they're attracting and what kind of use cases they're attracting is really, really important learning for the team.
But maybe even the more interesting Use case is not to get too meta on this, but the use case for adding use cases to the signup process is educating customers. It's almost like a little piece of marketing sitting right there inside of that, you know, signup flow that actually shows to customers that they can do these other things, even though they might have this, like, single sort of product or more like narrow.
Understanding of Bitly in their mind's eye when they sign up. So it's doing those two things at once. So it's sort of giving the team Intel, but it's also educating customers on what they can do. But again, it's adding friction to the signup process because they just want to get in there, right?
If they've got a short link in their mind's eye. And they want to sign up for the product. They want to create a short link. They were pretty single minded, these customers, but adding this little point of friction to that signup process just does so much more for the overall experience for those best customers.
What we learned was that their best customers are multi-products, and this is why they are the best customers. They're using more than one of Bitly's products. And so, Bitly has more opportunities to surface those additional use cases. The better, healthier, more engaged customers overall, they will have, and that, that little point of Intel too, not only tells the team what use cases are, are people aware of when they come through the front door or interested in, but also floats the opportunity for down the line post-acquisition, the team now has the opportunity to say, okay, so they asked for this, they were interested in this use case when they first signed up.
Now we know because we've done the research on the next most natural use case for them. Or the next most natural thing for them to need would be XYZ, whatever that happens to be. So it's just like the trifecta there by adding that friction that if they hadn't added it, think of how much less informed customers would be, the team would be.
So anyways, I just think it's brilliant. I think they, you know, that's, it's such a smart way to add friction that will pay dividends for years to come. So I've talked through adding friction in two very specific examples now where we're adding up where we're like, okay, yes, this makes more sense.
Let's add friction. I would love to hear an example of where you have seen this actually hurt companies where they've removed friction. Because we're talking about adding it, but what happens when you remove
Claire Suellentrop: it when you shouldn't? I want to set the stage using an analogy that I stuck into a conference presentation that ended up going over with the audience really well.
I was referencing a case study of when you and I helped a company introduce friction into an otherwise like super empty onboarding experience. And I teed it up by asking, like, has anybody in the audience ever built IKEA furniture? And of course, like, everybody raises their hands. We've all, we've all built something from IKEA.
And so I asked the audience to imagine bringing home a complicated piece of IKEA furniture, right? So not like a nightstand, but like a, like a set of kitchen cabinets or something. And you get home and you take all the pieces out of the box and they're all on the floor and there's no instructions. And you're like, Great.
What do I do? Where do I even start with this thing?
Georgiana Laudi: Even if it was a nightstand, Claire, I'd probably be like, uh, Still, what do I do?
Claire Suellentrop: And completely removing friction or removing too much friction can leave your new users feeling like that, feeling like they've gotten into your product. You, as the internal team, have built that piece of Ikea furniture many times, and you intuitively know how to go in there and start to take the steps required to get value.
But this is your new user's first time ever building this piece of Ikea furniture. And so they need instructions on what to do first and second and third and fourth, if they're slack, or fifth and sixth and seventh, but you can't know. Like, what steps they need to be taking, unless you know, going back to something you mentioned earlier, what's valuable to them.
But a very tangible example of this that comes to mind for me is, I don't know, I want to say it was like six, or maybe more years ago now, trying to use Notion for the first time, when it was very new to the market. There's such a learning curve involved in Notion, because it is so robust, it is so customizable, you can do so many things with it.
I remember having at least two, if not three, false starts when I used it on a project, and I just felt like I was using a pretty version of Google Docs. I'm not really getting this again. That was at least two times. And then I remember it wasn't until you had seen somebody post a tutorial on how to create.
like a global task list in Notion and leverage it for all these cool things. And I could, I could understand how it fit into a business use case we had, where I was like, okay, now I get how this thing is supposed to work. And Notion has obviously figured out that their platform is complex and powerful enough that people need that type of context, because when you get into the product now, it's much more like what you mentioned about Canva.
There are templates that you can start with. There are use cases. They ask if you want to. You know, begin with like, there's much more of that. We'll call it friction, but really, it's just context on how to get to a moment of value. But in their early days, it was really up to you to just kind of figure out the IKEA furniture without any instructions.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah, it's a really good example, especially when you've got a tool like that that has so many potential use cases.
Claire Suellentrop: Right, right. The more you're selling a platform versus a teeny-point solution, the more true this becomes.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. We always talk about positioning and messaging, particularly messaging.
We say this a lot, right? Like it's hard to read the inside of the jar, but it, the same thing happens with. product experiences where you're so familiar with the experience, you're so familiar with the use case often, right? It can be difficult to remember the context that might be missing for somebody that new that should be added.
So it's because we're so close to it, it's too easy to forget. All right. So let's dig in then. How do they avoid removing friction because they're being told to remove friction? How do they avoid removing good friction?
Claire Suellentrop: So, and this can be done in a number of different ways. We talk about academia like customer research, but do not pass go is getting clear in whatever way is relevant to your business, like getting clear on what within your product actually matters to your best fit customers.
And this was actually the core of this presentation that I was giving last week, like what you and your team assume is most important. about your product to your customers, it can be surprisingly out of sync with what's actually the most important to them. But whether it is through something more lightweight, if you have a large customer base, you know, like running a survey, or if it's something more like running a handful of interviews, validating, what's actually most important to your customers about your product is the foundation, because you have to understand What matters to them when they are getting into that product for the first time, you have to know that and that is what will enable you to make decisions about when to follow a best practice versus when to ignore a best practice or adapt it for your context.
Georgiana Laudi: But the point is don't assume you know better. There are a lot of reasons why your assumptions may be wrong, either because your product has evolved, the market has evolved, or your team has evolved. There are many, many reasons why your team might be out of sync with what you're doing. Actually, it matters to your customers as they try to onboard your product, and what they need to see are those critical things. You know, we talk about getting to 1st value. People use terminology like aha moment magic moment, or happy path. There are a lot of different terms floating around the Internet to sort of encapsulate what we're describing here, which is like. That onboarding experience leads your customers to experience what they need to do in order to be convinced that I'm going to keep going with this thing.
I didn't make a mistake by signing up on the website and getting to that actual moment of value where they're like, yes, this thing is going to actually solve my problem. And so, that experience, what would you say? I mean, I want to say pretty well every company that we've ever worked with has.
Needed to optimise that part of their product experience way before sending more traffic to the front end of this thing, right? So a lot of teams will talk about how we need to drive more traffic. We need more leads. But do you actually need more leads? Or do you actually need to fix and maybe add?
Some meaningful friction to your onboarding experience so that you can take advantage of not only the learning for your team but also educating customers, helping your customers feel more invested in that experience and feel like, yes, this thing is actually going to solve my problem. But in order to design that experience and optimise that experience, you have to know what actually matters to your customers.
And you have to map that to the specific parts of your product that deliver that value, which then ties us back to. Like, how do you know that it's working, which is you have to actually develop KPIs that tell your team that your customers are not only signing up, they're not only entering a credit card when the time is right, but they're actually making it to a moment of value in your product experience.
So, we talk about this as the first value, and we talk about activation KPIs. Super tied to the value that your customers say that they get from your solution mapped to the specific part of that product of the product experience. And what does that need to look like? Is that like a single use?
Is that a W? So, one example that comes to mind for me is an email software that we worked with not too long ago where sending one email was not enough. There was a test email process, and just one test email wouldn't have indicated to the team that that customer actually reached the first value.
All it would do is indicate that they sent a test email. It doesn't actually indicate value. So, how many times does that particular feature need to be used in order to demonstrate that your customer has gotten to that moment of value? That is where you find your KPI, your activation, first value, aha moment, magic moment, whatever you call it, KPI. And that's how you know that you've done the job.
Claire Suellentrop: An example of implementing that knowledge. Once you have figured out what those features drive that value is and what this could be a checklist inside of your product, or it could be an email series that you send out shortly after signing up whenever, but it's the difference between sending education content that is as generic as like explore our features, which I have absolutely seen, particularly in more complex products versus Transcribed Hey, given what you mentioned in, in signup, here are the three features that customers like you appreciate the most.
Here's how to get to feature number one. Here's how to get to feature number two. Here's how to get to feature number three. When we were preparing for this recording, you mentioned, I think it was Lou, you said, and you were like, they had a checklist in the app, but it was a good checklist. And what you meant was it, it did that.
It is important for you to value versus being like, welcome, and get seen as very, very generic. I'm not going to say lazy, uh, because the creation of educational content is a good thing, but it's, it's just so much more informed and therefore more beneficial to the person getting it. Yeah. It, always kind of blows my mind
Georgiana Laudi: when we work with a team and all the intention is there to do this type of thing, like revamp, they're getting started guides or get them to value very quickly, like everybody's intentions.
are good, like genuinely good. But wow, it always blows my mind how many teams have just not gotten there yet. I don't know if it's because there's no clear ownership in the company. Like sometimes the onboarding experience, there isn't clear ownership. Who owns the onboarding experience? Is it marketing? Is it a product? Is it product marketing? Yeah. It's kind of in this
Claire Suellentrop: Yeah, this is weird.
Georgiana Laudi: Is it customer success? Is it sales? Like, who owns that experience? I think that might be part of the culprit, but also because there's just this tendency to see, to equate revenue growth with more leads for some reason versus optimising the space between, which, There are always massive opportunities to do again.
I would say that 10 out of the ten companies that we work with have room to improve here. And in the case of a great example, they literally doubled their child to pay conversion rate because of a very small update that was made to their onboarding experience. Doubled the child-to-pay conversion rate, like do the maths on that.
Any anybody listening, do the maths on what doubling your child-to-pay conversion rate could be worth to your business. And I'd wager you turn off your ads and go fix your onboarding. So anyways, um, that's my little soapbox that I will now. Step off.
Claire Suellentrop: I think that was perfect. Uh, that was a perfect wrap-up. Yeah, the topic at hand. Yeah, that was fun. And see you next time.
Outro: And that's it for this episode of the Forget The Funnel podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topics we covered, don't hesitate to contact Gia or me on LinkedIn. And you can also visit our website at forgetthefunnel.com.
This is still a new podcast for us. So ratings, reviews, and subscriptions in your podcast platform of choice make a huge difference. See you next time.
