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However, “aha” moments can happen before you even sign-up to a product, or sometimes after you have been using them for quite a while. It’s commonly thought that “aha” moments occur during the first use of a product – you start using the product, then boom, you realize the value if offers. There are also some misconceptions about when an “aha” moment occurs in the customer lifecycle. “I hypothesized that if we knew our product’s ‘aha’ moments, they could form the basis of our activation metrics”īut while the “aha” moments prompted by your product will differ from person to person and from use case to use case, it is possible to spot patterns or themes, and thus to anticipate when people might encounter them.Ĭrucially, once a product’s “aha” moment has been identified, you can then guide users to it in user onboarding or other engagement activities. For these two users with such different jobs to be done, it’s inevitable that they’ll experience different “aha” moments.
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That’s because the sensation is tightly related to the discovery of value, and value is dependent on whatever job the user is trying to achieve.įor instance, think about the reasons someone may sign-up to Dropbox – one person may need to access documents from multiple devices, while another may want to share folders with others. The predictability of your “aha” moments across users will really depend on why any individual user has signed up for your product. It is important to consider whether “aha” moments are the same for every user, or how and why they differ. An example of an “aha” moment we found was when customers see the performance stats of the first message they send – they experience a sensation of delight as they see the demonstration of value that can be achieved. Looking for this emotion led us to identify “aha” moments for various customers. Throughout the conversation, we looked out for moments when the participant had a lot of positive emotional energy behind what they said. We spoke to customers who had just signed up, and asked them to talk through their first experiences with the product. Here at Intercom, we’ve conducted research to identify the “aha” moments in our Messages product. What can a product do that other product’s can’t, or what can it do better? Why would people use this product rather than another? Does discovering that value spark delight in users? Listen to how customers experience the product Most obviously, the “aha” moment may be directly prompted by experiencing a product’s value proposition. Identifying “aha” moments in user onboardingĭuring the course of our research, we became aware of a few factors that are worth bearing in mind when trying to identify a product’s “aha” moment. But just because they are somewhat elusive doesn’t mean they can’t be identified, measured, and tracked.
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From a research perspective, user behaviors are easy to measure and track, but “aha” moments are more elusive, because they are actually the positive emotions behind the user behavior.
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“These ‘aha’ moments are an emotional reaction to discovery of a feature”Īs the phrase implies, “aha” moments are an emotional reaction to discovery of a feature. “Aha,” you say to yourself as you realize you now have an entirely new medium for communicating with groups of friends. Do you recall the first time you participated in a group message in WhatsApp and you suddenly realized this was nigh-on impossible to achieve in your phone’s native SMS app? While WhatsApp might have seemed to be a like-for-like replacement of SMS when you first heard of it, this moment of discovery reveals it to be something far more powerful and transformative. For instance, there is a common example of an “aha” moment that most people can identify with. “Aha” moments can be tricky to define, but most of us know them when we see them.
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