How to Improve User Experience with INP

Yesterday, a 15-minute user call saved us weeks of wrong assumptions. We've been tracking usage on one of our core features, and the data looked great. High adoption, consistent engagement, and users seemed to love it. But watching this customer navigate the interface in real-time told a completely different story. They clicked everywhere except where we expected. Asked questions that revealed our "intuitive" design was anything but. What we thought was a seamless user flow was actually a series of lucky guesses on their part. This happens more than we'd like to admit. When you're in the early stages, every sales call is a product discovery session by necessity. Prospects push back, ask hard questions, and force you to defend every feature choice. The friction is painful but incredibly valuable. As your product matures and sales conversations get smoother, you lose that natural feedback loop. Deals close faster, but you start flying blind on user experience. The mistake? Assuming smooth sales equals a perfect product. We've made it a rule: regardless of our revenue or product maturity, the founder in charge of product joins customer calls every week. Not to sell, but to watch and listen. Yesterday's call led to three UX improvements we're shipping this week. Small changes that will likely impact activation rates more than the major feature we spent last month building. The most successful founders I know never outgrow customer discovery calls. They understand that building the perfect feature is hard, but nailing intuitive UX is infinitely harder. You can have the most sophisticated product in the world, but if users can't figure out how to get value from it, your retention metrics will tell the real story. How often are you still talking directly to your users?

Rethinking "Frictionless" Experiences Recently, Nick Paladino and Chuck Moxley asked about building frictionless customer experiences. As someone focused on conversion for over a decade, my perspective has evolved. Spoiler alert: Customers' life problems are the real friction. In my experience, an extra click isn't an issue if it brings clarity, builds confidence, and makes navigating your app easier on future visits. Rather than obsessing over removing every minor hurdle, we should thoughtfully design experiences that: 1. Provide Context: Give customers the "why" behind actions to ease decision-making. 2. Build Trust: Use social proof, reviews, and transparency to instill confidence. 3. Guide the Journey: Offer helpful nudges and pathways aligned with customer goals. 4. Focus on Enabling Net New Capability: Introduce functionality that unlocks valuable new possibilities for customers. 5. Smoothen Current Capabilities: Ensure existing features operate glitch-free to develop user confidence. The true "friction" is confusion, uncertainty, and misalignment with what customers actually need. I explore this mindset shift in-depth in this video: https://lnkd.in/eWAexNXV Let me know your thoughts! How else can we reframe "frictionless" for better customer experiences? #CustomerExperience #ProductDesign #UserExperience

We talk a lot about Customer Experience. But what is CX, really? Customer Experience refers to the overall perception and feelings that customers have about their interactions with a company throughout their entire journey with that brand. Thats a mouthful. Here’s how I think of it: The layers and layers of experiences that a customer has throughout their journey, positive or negative, that form their opinions and decisions. The CX includes everything from interactions with marketing content, sales experience, onboarding, automated emails, webinars, meetings, product, support issues…. You get it. But how do we take all of these layers of experiences and actually make an impact? How do we ensure we are creating positive moments when it matters most? Brad Davis spoke at Pulse about a psychological premise referred to as “the peak-end rule”. 🏔️ Here’s the gist: - People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (the most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. So in theory, creating peak moments throughout the customer experience can impact a customer’s feelings towards the collective experience. Here’s some examples to try: 🍪 Personalized Gifting: Customer achieved something big? Send cookies with a personalized note from Grove Cookie Company (they do the notes for you!) to celebrate a milestone or accomplishment. 📝Thoughtful Message: Perhaps a customer mentions that their son is graduating college. If you don’t have gifting budget, send a simple nice note without any agenda or ask. “Hey Sara, Hope you had a great weekend celebrating your sons graduation!” Stick out by showing up in a more human way. 🎥 Send a Video: Have an important Exec Business Review coming up? Send a video ahead of the call with the agenda and some highlights so you can get their input and make the best use of your time. Video has a ton of applications, I love when CSMs use video to answer questions instead of assuming a call is best. 🤩 Give Them The Spotlight: Invite your customer to be on a Customer Advisory Board, an upcoming customer panel, or to share their experience and business impact during an internal all-hands. Including them drives advocacy by allowing them to feel like they are part of what you are building. Taking the extra effort in a proactive, intentional, or even a just-for-fun way can help create peak moments that leave a lasting impression. Brad helped create a peak moment for me last week. During his presentation, he unexpectedly invited me to join him on stage to share my insights and experiences. This surprise gesture not only made me feel incredibly valued, but also showed a real-time example of creating memorable, impactful experiences. What cool examples of peak moments have you experienced or created?????

So in the last post I was complaining about user stories. And also, hopefully, offering some helpful ways to make those stories worth writing and — more importantly — worth doing. On a related note, here's my other big issue with user stories: The ironclad fact that task completion does NOT equal success. Traditional user stories operate at a very tactical level; the focus is strictly on task completion, but I have a problem with that. THe problem, as I said a second ago, is that task completion doesn;t automatically constitute value or worth; it isn't the same as success. If you want better UX, you have to focus on SUCCESS, which is where the value I keep harping on about lives. You have to uncover and incorporate how users feel about the interaction, along with their intended goal, the reason they’re doing it in the first place. You need to capture why a particular interaction or behavior provides somethign users, customers — along with that business who pays your salary — cares about. All of which necessitates a shift in how you write user stories, from task-focused to success-focused. TASK-FOCUSED USER STORY: “As Jane the Bank Teller, I want a preset shortcut list of one-touch transactions so that I can complete more transactions.” SUCCESS-FOCUSED USER STORY: “Jane the Bank Teller wants a preset shortcut list of one-touch transactions, to achieve the goal of getting customers through the line faster to minimize their frustration and automate lengthy transaction sequences. The current inability to do this is causing a significant percentage of customers to leave our bank for a competitor.” For Jane, getting customers through the line and completing their transactions is task completion; she’s already doing that now. Doing this same task better — in a way that is more accurate, efficient, and makes customers feel like the process was pleasant and really fast — is SUCCESS. And when people feel like they’re being taken care of, when their needs are met and expectations are exceeded, they remain loyal. When you shift your focus from what people do to WHY IT MATTERS, both your head and your feet are firmly on the path to creating powerful experiences. To delivering success. #UX #ProductDesign #ProductManagement