Live online training with Laura Klein

Tuesday, September 15, 2015 | 10:00am – 3:30pm PDT

Designing Products for Conversion and RetentionAcquire customers and grow your user base

This live event will start at 10:00am PDT on Tuesday, September 15, 2015. At that time, please use the “Join Event” button from your account to attend.

Customer acquisition is often seen as “marketing’s job,” but product growth should belong to everybody on the team—especially product managers and UX designers. It’s not enough to simply design the product experience. Product teams need to understand where users come from and how to get more of the right ones.

Laura Klein

Sure, you have a great product. So why is nobody using it? — Laura Klein

In this online, interactive training workshop, Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups, will teach you to design for product growth.

Program

This day-long training workshop, taught by Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups, will give you the skills you need to design products that convert and retain users. Whether you're building a viral, social, or mobile app, or a SaaS enterprise platform, you’ll learn how to design for growth by creating an effective UX that increases user acquisition, decreases churn, and builds a healthy user base.

This interactive training workshop is for

  • UX designers
  • Product managers
  • Startup founders
  • Anybody who wants to learn how to build a product that can grow naturally

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Introduction

Remember when acquiring new users was marketing’s problem? Those days are long gone. Whether it’s designing for more effective acquisition, increased conversion, or lower churn, growing the user base is now a big part of the job of designers, product managers, and engineers.

Drivers of growth

In this section, we’ll look at three drivers of growth, as defined in Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup. We’ll talk about the difference between synthetic and organic growth, and look at how this can affect your product and design strategy.

Identifying your ideal customer

Personas are a common tool in user-centered design. In this section we’ll talk about predictive versus descriptive personas, and we’ll also look at how to make an aspirational persona to help you envision your ideal customer’s goals.

Measuring growth with funnels

While many UX designers are comfortable with qualitative research, it can sometimes be hard to understand how to incorporate quantitative metrics into the design process. In this section, I’ll show you a simple funnel technique to measure the steps in your user’s journey.

Lunch break

Designing for acquisition

It’s definitely easier to acquire users when you have a great product, but these days a great product simply isn’t enough. Even the most beautifully designed product can fail if nobody sees it. In this section, we’ll talk about where our users come from, how they find our products, and how to encourage more of them to visit.

Converting visitors into users

Stop pouring people into a leaky funnel! In this section, you’ll learn the three reasons that visitors don’t turn into engaged, recurring users, and how to change that.

Planning the user’s next visit

Users are busy and distracted, and they’re probably not thinking about our products as much as we would like them to. In this section, we’ll look at some tips for reminding users to come back to the product in a natural, non-annoying way. Hint: It does not include spamming them with email reminders to please come back.

Experimenting and iterating

Of course, there’s no way to consistently improve growth if you can’t measure and experiment. In this section we’ll discuss designing the test first and planning for iteration.

Wrap up

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Preparation

Participation requires a small amount of preparation; you’ll benefit most if you come prepared by doing a bit of homework in advance.

If you already have a product with real users, make sure you’ve talked to at least five of them and can answer questions such as:

  • What made you decide to use this product?
  • What problem, if any, do you think this product solves?
  • Where did you hear about this product?
  • How do you feel about the product?
  • If you were telling somebody about the product, what would you say?

If you don’t have users yet, please have an idea of who you think your user will be and speak with at least five people like that. You should be able to answer questions such as:

  • How do you currently solve [the problem you think that your product solves]?
  • Where do you get information about new products that you buy?

If you or someone in your organization has done any user research in the past six months, please try to gather and review as much of that as possible.

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About the instructor

Laura Klein

The author of UX for Lean Startups, Laura Klein (@lauraklein) has spent 15 years as an engineer and designer. Her goal is to help lean startups learn more about their customers so that they can build better products faster. Her popular design blog, Users Know, teaches product owners exactly what they need to know to do just enough research and design. View Laura Klein’s full profile page.

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