May 2019 Summaries

The Intercom team has launched a new visual identity on their website, which they believe accurately represents the brand promise of helping businesses build better customer relationships and drive faster growth. The redesign features fresh animations, bold new colors, and portraits of customers to emphasize the company's focus on people and relationships. The updates aim to clearly articulate Intercom's mission and values, making it easier for visitors to understand what the company stands for. The new design is intended to evoke an opinion and make a statement, while also providing a clear and straightforward message about the benefits of using Intercom's platform.

The critical importance of onboarding for SaaS companies cannot be overstated, as it transforms new customers into lifelong power users and is a key factor in higher customer retention. Onboarding is a continuous process that ensures customers get value from the product at every stage of their lifecycle. A simple yet effective tool like Product Tours can help businesses create rich interactive guides to onboard users without involving engineering or design teams, resulting in 7x more engagement than email. To level up onboarding, it's essential to start with user interviews, understand the "why" behind the product, define who the target audience is, and measure the success of active users. By implementing these strategies, businesses can drive more engagement and achieve a better customer experience.

I've analyzed the text and created a summary that covers the key points. Working as a designer in a foreign language can be challenging, but it's also an opportunity to learn and grow. The design industry often assumes English as the primary language, which can be daunting for those who need to work in an English-speaking country. However, tech companies are filled with people from diverse backgrounds who speak different languages, making it easier to adapt. To master a new language, one must familiarize themselves with the company's "grammar" and culture, including its specific terminology and traditions. This process takes time, patience, and practice, but it can lead to fluency and confidence. By embracing the challenges of working in a foreign language, designers can develop their communication skills and contribute to the growth of their company. Ultimately, learning a new language is an act of translation and immersion that requires courage and dedication, but can lead to a fulfilling career abroad.

The second edition of 'Intercom on Onboarding' has been released, reflecting the latest thinking from Intercom experts and built on their experience with onboarding tens of thousands of customers. The book captures everything they've learned about creating effective onboarding experiences for software users, including how to identify low-hanging fruit, make a great first impression, design an onboarding flow and narrative, show continuous value, and more. With seven new chapters alongside revised material from the first edition, this refreshed book aims to help companies improve their onboarding strategies and create better relationships with their users.

Being new in a job can be both empowering and intimidating. It's normal not to know everything, but setting learning milestones, being known for one thing you value, asking people what they're learning, finding a buddy, and just saying the thing when needed can help make the most of this experience. These skills are hard-earned and can serve as a foundation for success in any organization. By embracing these strategies, new employees can accelerate their learning, build trust with colleagues, and contribute to the team's overall growth.

The Agile Arrow is a visual framework for managing complex sales deals, applying popular project management principles to sales work. It helps prioritize individuals, work, and outcomes that will make or break the deal, enabling salespeople to navigate complex deals with visibility into their progress. The framework emerged from a personal experience with a $250k renewal, where it helped turn around a deal by simplifying communication, visualizing milestones, and identifying stakeholders' roles and priorities. By embracing agile values and principles, such as simplicity, customer collaboration, and responding to change, salespeople can effectively manage complex deals and close them successfully.

A content-first approach to product onboarding focuses on understanding the user's story, goals, and journey before designing the onboarding experience. This involves creating a narrative structure that dictates how the story of the product is told, with a focus on people rather than products. The six key elements of an effective onboarding flow are: welcome message, identity for the product or company, problems to be solved, explicit value proposal, mechanics of using the product, and at least one call to action. To deliver content effectively, use voice and tone that speaks in a way people can hear, considering factors such as punctuation, grammar, emojis, and design elements. Ultimately, great content helps users reach their goals by providing a clear structure, focus on success, and effective communication.

With the release of Product Tours in Intercom, users can now customize their onboarding experience with a single platform. The possibilities for customizing the onboarding experience are endless when considering app integrations, such as surveying new customers about their user experience or inviting them to join a Zoom demo. To choose the right onboarding tools, determine what parts of your onboarding experience need improvement and ask yourself questions like "What do users like about our onboarding?" and "Where are they having trouble?" Eleven onboarding tools can be connected to Intercom, including Wistia for videos, Bonjoro for personalized greetings, CloudApp for creating custom onboarding videos, NeverBounce for verifying contact lists, Smartlook for visualizing customer data, Grow for visualizing metrics, Typeform for collecting feedback via forms, Survicate for distributing surveys, Wootric for measuring customer effort, Article Inserter for suggesting relevant help docs, and coview for seeing what users are seeing. Consolidating onboarding tools within or that integrate with existing platforms prevents confusing experiences and keeps costs low.

The digital data created and copied each year is predicted to hit 44 trillion gigabytes, making it a challenging task for content marketers to break through the noise. To rise above this digital noise, having an opinion is crucial, as it allows you to create unique and engaging content that can spark conversations and establish your reputation as a trusted source. Being opinionated does not mean being angry or contrarian, but rather taking a clear stance on a topic. This approach can help maximize the audience, especially when combined with SEO-informed content strategies. Furthermore, opinions are essential in sales, as they provide value to customers and differentiate businesses from their competitors. By focusing on creating high-quality, opinionated content, marketers can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry and achieve long-term success.

The text discusses the concept of product adoption, which is the process by which users become aware of a product, understand its value, and begin using it. The author identifies four forces that influence product adoption: push-away (pointing out flaws in the current solution), product magnetism (showcasing the benefits of the new product), decreasing fear and uncertainty of change (alleviating concerns about switching), and decreasing attachment to the status quo (highlighting the unique value proposition). The text also provides three techniques to improve product adoption: improving onboarding experience, improving the product itself, and making support more accessible. By understanding these forces and applying the recommended strategies, companies can overcome customer inertia and increase product adoption.

We set out to design a product tour, which is essentially a guided experience for new signups to get started with our product. We started by writing an Intermission, a project brief, and defining the Jobs-to-be-Done for this problem. These jobs included guiding users through the core elements of the product and making them aware of new features. We also established guiding principles that would help us make decisions during the design process. One key principle was to learn by doing, which meant we wanted our solution to be interactive rather than just a passive experience. We looked at real products in our target audience and considered how a great onboarding experience might look like for them. After creating multiple prototypes, we validated our design with customers through interviews and feedback loops. However, we also realized that our initial approach needed adjustments as some customers found it too complex. We ultimately decided to proceed with view-only tours, which appealed to the broadest market and represented a big opportunity for growth. This decision allowed us to ship and learn early while still iterating on our solution based on customer feedback. The process taught us valuable lessons about including multiple feedback loops in our design process, considering market and business needs, and gaining confidence in our initial idea through experimentation and iteration.