A magician never reveals his secrets.
Although your app should be a magical experience for users, it should be no secret what your product or service does.
When users recognize the value being offered, they experience an “Aha Moment.”
It’s a magical moment for us as mobile marketers because our ideas and efforts are validated. How then can we make these occurrences faster and more frequent?
If you are experiencing churn because users don’t understand what your product does, continue reading or jump to our infographic for strategies to help your users find their aha moment.
What is The Aha Moment?
The Aha Moment is the exact point in time when a user understands the value proposition of a product or service.
When users come to understand something they previously didn’t recognize or know, they have a moment of epiphany, referred to interchangeably as the aha moment or eureka effect.
what is the aha moment visual with magician pulling a rabbit from the top hat with a playing card in brim?
Many times when someone visits a new storefront, website, or mobile app, the intended purpose of the product isn’t immediately apparent: “So, what are they selling?” More often, we browse through some shelves, navigate a website, or investigate an app store listing to get a better understanding of what the product is.
Sometimes it takes users experiencing multiple aha micro-moments before they finally get it. Users analyze each element presented by the company — and while they might not be clear individually, the bigger picture can become visible when taken as a whole.
You might even have users saying, “Ah, ah, oh…Aha!” as the chain reaction of micro-moments build to the aha moment.
The Aha Moments Your Business Depends On
Aha moments may not occur during a user’s first encounter with a product.
Sometimes, it can take days, weeks, or even years to fully understand all the subtleties and nuances of a product. The goal, however, is that each subsequent aha moment after a user’s initial encounter comes from their discovery of an auxiliary feature — not the core value proposition.
For example: if an Uber user loved the ability to schedule a ride a day in advance, they’d understand a single feature — which is great. If that same user later discovered, in amazement, that they could order a ride in minutes, this would be an aha moment for a key feature that should have been clear initially.
If Uber recognized that some users only ever scheduled rides in advance, they could segment these riders and send them informative push notifications about how to order a ride in minutes.
Make Aha Happen Before “Huh?”
Any hesitancy before a download or purchase must be replaced with the confidence of a loud momentous Aha!
Otherwise, if a potential customer takes their hand off the screen to scratch their head, this lack of understanding could be enough friction for them to abandon their cart or decide to uninstall your app.
Achieving aha moments quickly is a goal every marketer aspires to. But all users (and marketers, for that matter) bring their individual backgrounds, unique experiences, and cognitive biases into the experience.
We might assume our Colombia Phone Numbers List products are intuitive and easy to use, but we have to assume the opposite in order to succeed. The curse of knowledge, for example, is a cognitive bias that deceives many product managers and marketers into believing everyone understands how the product works, just as they do.1
This could open the door for an abundance of “huh?” moments instead of aha moments. To counteract this bias, you should approach every feature, interface, and message objectively, as if you were coming to the product with no background knowledge.
curse of knowledge cognitive bias hindering aha moments with a skull on fire and light bulb on the forehead
Turn Aha Moments To Long-Term Engagements
How do we turn a single aha moment into, well, more of them?
Guiding users to aha moments for new features— or even established, albeit underutilized ones— is challenging.
Many apps with a large set of features experience feature creep, meaning the product becomes bloated and overwhelming, making it unlikely that many users will explore its full potential.
There are strategies to keep feature creep contained. One such strategy is to bundle rarely used features into a single page or hidden behind a single button. This will remove clutter and keep the core functionality as the focal point for users.
If we use a mobile banking app as an example, most users have aha moments when they check account balances and transaction history, but never fully leverage the depth of features such as mobile check deposits, QR code payments, or fingerprint authorization.
One strategy to keep aha moments coming for users is to maintain a consistent user experience while slowly introducing them to helpful and relevant functionality triggered throughout the customer journey