Awareness in the Product Journey
It’s a long holiday weekend, so I’m going to keep this pretty short. If you’re celebrating here in the US, have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Part of the fun thing about learning about “journeys” in the realm of customer experience is that there isn’t a single journey. There are multiple journeys (we explored users vs customers recently) and the basic steps are the same in each journey:
Awareness
Evaluation
Conversion
Success
Advocacy
You can nit pick what to call each step and insert additional steps if it’s helpful (I like to add onboarding/implementation between conversion and success), but the basic steps are the same and apply in all sorts of places.
When you start thinking in terms of “journeys”, you start seeing it everywhere. One thing I picked up on recently is the way Apple drives awareness for individual product features. We’ll look at a few examples.
Photo by Natalie Grainger on Unsplash
Product Feature Journeys
You can design the coolest features in the world, but they mean nothing if nobody actually uses them. Apple gets this. Using the journey steps, you can observe Apple’s attempts to drive awareness and evaluation of new features.
Here’s an example from the Apple Store iOS app:
I’m not even sure I need to know about these features, but it’s pretty low friction and gets out of the way if I want it to.
And here’s a screen after a recent update to Apple TV:
An actual picture of my TV
I like how this is informative, but mostly gets out of my way. These serve as reminders that Apple is continuing to invest in the products that I’ve purchased.
Both of the images from above are part of the awareness and evaluation stages, trying to drive you toward the conversion and success phases. And if you get value out of the new features, you’ll end up in the loyalty stage. It might be weird to think of feature adoption in terms of “conversion”, but that’s exactly what it is. You have to meet the user on their journey to drive towards a moment when they decide to use the new feature—conversion—and then continue on the journey with them to make them successful.
Speaking of making the customer successful, I recently had a great experience setting up new AirPods Pro:
I was surprised that AirPods Pro are quite a bit different in functionality, so the additional guidance to get started was helpful. This is that “Onboarding” step that often gets overlooked between conversion and success. Apple generally does a great job guiding users through product adoption and implementation.
Journeys, journeys, everywhere
In addition to outing myself as a possible Apple fanboy—I’m really less of a “fan” and more someone who appreciates a consistently reliable experience—hopefully this shows how you can apply journey thinking to pretty much anything.
Journeys aren’t magic. They’re just taking the time to think through what someone on the other side will experience when they encounter your company/product/feature/brand. It’s taking the time to put empathy into action by feeling what it’s like to get in someone else’s shoes before they get there themselves. Do this often enough and you’ll be rewarded with their loyalty.