What does a new user think that your product, or any product, promises to do for them? On a recent multi-state drive I had the opportunity to listen to hours of radio advertisements (thanks to my 6th grader’s insistence on top-40 stations only) and got to hear many “promises.” “We’ll give you cash back on gas purchases,” “We will protect your privacy when you go online,” and “Find the lowest prices on a new car.” However, what the marketing team thinks is the promise is often not what I, the consumer, understand it to be. In buying our mini-van we didn’t need features or lowest prices, we needed reliability, confidence in the safety of the vehicle (precious cargo onboard!), and enough inner capacity to easily pack everything we could need for a weekend trip to the relatives or camping. We ended up paying more for the vehicle that satisfied, and delivered on, the promises that we were looking for.
Product Usage: Discovering Habits, Part 1
Habit loops can be understood as patterns of usage that emerge when users come back to our app over and over again and find value in the solution it provides. I dig into understanding and measuring habits, and explain an analytical model that uncovers “habit signals” in product usage data. Being able to measure the habits from the product perspective (“which parts of the product deliver the most value to users?”) as well as the user perspective (“which users have developed the strongest habits?”) is immensely valuable in growing a SaaS product.