We suspected that this cognitive burden, influenced by the user's initial intent and motivation, introduced an element of friction that was challenging to quantify. We held the belief that there was untapped potential for a substantial boost in activation rates.

We believed this because users are both able to focus on the question at hand (increased attention ratio) and they will also have the assurance that an array of exceptional website templates awaits them, ensuring their path to success.

Emotion is the first step of every single decision and it’s important to think about the emotional reason a user would do something before we think about the second step, which is logic. However, user emotion and psychology can be tough to think about in a tangible way.

For example, the decision to not ask for business name added friction later, requiring users to update it in the editor to customize other systems and caused downstream issues in provisioning other services.

This, coupled with learnings from 2nd iteration below, opened the door for building a conversational onboarding in the future - highlighted that gathering user intent and goals during onboarding may allow for personalized product experiences, potentially benefiting high-value users.

Satheesh Kumar 

This was a hackathon experiment aimed at improving onboarding and activation using the psych framework from Darius Contractor and Reforge.

Onboarding Experiment With Psych Framework (2019)

This was on Websites and Marketing product at Godaddy, where users who are onboarding are creating their new website for their small business venture.

While our onboarding process appeared seamless, especially for users who already had a clear understanding of their objective, it was evident that many users were required to exert significant cognitive effort during website creation process.

However, what if there existed a systematic approach to help customers by enhancing user motivation? What if we could effectively motivate and simultaneously align with the emotional journey users embark upon when starting their new venture? This is where the Psych Framework came into play!

By leveraging the Psych framework to motivate out users during onboarding, we can increase activation rates.

Darius’s Psych Framework helps us think about every UX interaction as an emotional event and assign user psych scores.

Every element on the page adds or subtracts emotional energy

Inspiring users is as important as reducing friction

This helped us evaluate user interactions during onboarding and turn into positive psych experience.

https://program.reforge.com/c/growth-series-eg/user-psychology/psych-framework/psych-framework-introduction

The first iteration above did not win in term of increasing publish rates and activation, but a lot more users completed onboarding and this gave us valuable learnings to iterate upon to get that win.

 A lot more users picked business category for their new venture in the psych version, demonstrating increased engagement due to positive psych users experienced.

. We learned that we could apply Psych Framework to the full activation journey, not only onboarding.

. We discovered that requesting the business name during onboarding is a trade-off between adding friction by gathering additional information and onboarding completion rates.

We got the win in next iteration. We built upon these learnings for the next iteration where we asked for the business name in a two step onboarding, as associating a business name was important for customers and forms the website name. This helped our customers by reducing friction later in the website editor and enabled supplementary services to be provisioned with ease. These changes along with the 1st iterations improvements helped our customers create websites with confidence and gave us a substantial lift in website publish rates, which is a big wow moment in the user activation journey.

Improving Onboarding and Activation with the Psych Framework at GoDaddy

Onboarding Experiment With Psych Framework (2019)

Hypothesis 💭

Experiment 🧪

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