UX Writing That Leads Users to Water
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UX Writing That Leads Users to Water
There is a proverb: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." It means there's no use bringing a horse to the water if it doesn't want to drink. But people don't seem to realize that simply dragging that massive horse all the way to the water is actually quite an encouraging achievement in itself.
From a product management perspective, blindly leading users to water often results in a lukewarm reaction (even when they seem thirsty). If we explain the subscription journey of Alarmy premium features using this analogy, it would look something like this:
Let's dive a little deeper here.
Recently, a new feature called "Multiple Missions" was added to Alarmy premium. Adding a single mission to an alarm is a free basic feature, but you need an Alarmy premium subscription to add a second and third mission.
In other words, it's possible for free users to select the first mission slot and save it, but if they select the second mission slot and try to save, the purchase page will be shown.
However, if the purchase page pops up out of nowhere when trying to save a second mission, it could come as a massive surprise to a user who didn't expect that "starting from the second mission, it's a premium feature." Therefore, before the purchase page is exposed, we decided to act like a speed bump by showing a cushioning modal in advance with the message "Starting from the second mission, it's a premium feature."
So, Multiple Missions was introduced with the following flow:
Did the users go to the water?
Nope. If you look at the entire funnel of users who converted to a free trial through the Multiple Missions entry, it looks like this:
Honestly, this was a somewhat expected result (though not to this extent). A cushioning modal acts as a bumper, but it also becomes a hurdle by adding an extra step to the free trial journey. However, the fact that about 82% of users dropped off at the cushioning modal—and especially about 92% of users in the US and Korea—was a metric that definitely needed improvement.
How can we send them to the water?
The goals of the cushioning modal at initial launch were as follows:
1. Let them know they need a free trial to use Multiple Missions.
2. Let them know they can always use single missions.
In trying to eliminate user surprise, we ended up with UX writing that focused only on the "free trial," and the results weren't great. Then what should we have done to bring users to the next step, the purchase page (= the water)? Shouldn't we have pitched it as "Drinking water is good for you (= trying the free trial is good for you)" rather than "There's water over there (= go over there to get a free trial)"? To test this hypothesis, we decided to run an experiment with UX writing that conveyed the "value of Multiple Missions" rather than just a "free trial." The goal of the cushioning modal in this experiment was as follows:
"Appeal to the transformational value of using Multiple Missions."
To elaborate a bit more, through the copy of each experimental group,
Simply stating "2 or more" vs. customizing it based on the missions the user selected
Amplifying a positive situation vs. reducing a negative situation
Quantitative effects vs. qualitative effects
we wanted to find out which approach worked best.
Drumroll... the results!
It was a success! Every experimental group showed a higher free trial conversion rate than the control group, and Group B, which pitched the "time-saving wake-up effect," showed the best results with an improvement of about 36%.
What was interesting was that there were slightly different variances by country. Among the four countries where the experiment was conducted—Korea, China, Japan, and the US—Group B showed the best results in three countries except China, where there was no significant difference.
So what's next?
We learned that the results can vary dramatically depending on what information is delivered to new users, and among them, "saving wake-up time" was the value that persuaded Alarmy users the most. So with this clue, we can apply it to the direction subscription features should take, as well as future experiments and improvements.
And one more thing: we already knew from the very beginning that the cushion dialog could be a hurdle to the final journey. We also learned through the experiment which value works best on users in the cushion dialog. So what if we removed the cushion dialog and instead showed its content directly on the purchase page? As you can see, an experiment lesson spawns another hypothesis, leading to the next experiment. There is a purchase page experiment currently underway right after this, so if we get interesting results, I'll share them again.
Well, that's all for this post — The End!