Thinking about Users: Think Connections, Touchpoints, and Distance
Who doesn't love user growth? Whether you are part of a start-up or a successful enterprise, you desire new users and retaining existing users. Cracking the code that enables user surge is puzzling.
Are there usable ways to help us solve this puzzle? I have come across three frameworks that help solve this problem in a structured way.
These three ways target different areas of strategy, branding, and communication. When glued together, they provide a robust way to acquire new users and retain existing ones.
The strategy of User Connections
The first way to solve the user is to follow the user connections approach. Bharat Anand, Harvard Professor, in his brilliant book "The Content Trap" explains the significance of thinking in terms of connections. Bharat Anand highlights this point in a lecture in a world with an ever-increasing digital presence, a product or service that facilitates user connections has higher chances of succeeding.
Branding around User touchpoints
Typically, when we think of branding, we think of persuasively communicating our product's practical values. Nader Tavassoli, Professor at London Business School, urges to prioritize a user's touchpoints. In his online course, he discusses the process of breaking down a user's journey into smaller steps and designing an experience around the individual steps. This unique way of thinking about branding yields consistent external communication for users. Importantly, it also leads to a company culture consistent with a brand's external communication.
Communication that considers user distance
Usually, talking about a product's unique features trumps other communication considerations. But, this approach neglects a user's resistance to change. Jonah Berger, Professor at Wharton Business School, details this approach in his insightful book "The Catalyst". In the book, he has shared a readily usable framework, REDUCE, that helps identify a user's resistance in terms of distance a user has to travel in order to adopt an idea and the ways to reduce that distance.
The above three frameworks give us a structured approach to think about increasing the number of users. Combining the three will be a good starting point to build a successful product that enjoys success.