How pre-testing questions help uncover user motivations for adopting a product
Understanding user adoption is a critical part of making a successful product
Our Sales team lead turned into a User research advocate when I sent him a key finding about user adoption: Users tended to search for products like ours at three specific times of the year.
It was just some feedback I heard during user testing, but it was a critical piece of their Sales strategy that they were grateful I had passed on. The reason for this is that User Adoption of a product is often a tricky subject to tackle, and it involves more than a good UX: tons of products with great UX have been abandoned in the marketplace.
When designing onboarding tutorials or welcome screens, asking a few questions about user motivations and Adoption during testing can often lead to critical insights the rest of your team needs.
To understand why, let’s begin with the first step people take to find a new product: the 'Google search.'
User Adoption usually starts with a Google search.
I can't speak for all users, but in the B2B world, the user journey around Adoption usually begins with a Google search.
Essentially, the user is in the market for a new product or is looking for a product that solves their issue for a couple of reasons:
Time-sensitivity: A product contract is expiring, or the problem is critical and needs to be quickly resolved
Seasonality: There is a specific 'period' or timeframe where the organization has set aside a budget to buy new software/products
Frustration: While less likely in B2B products, many Google searches result from the emotion of frustration. The problem is so bad in these cases that someone turns to the internet for solutions. (i.e., “How do I turn off the usage alarm in X product?”)
Scaling: What once worked for a small userbase or system may no longer work for them now, as their needs have become large-scale.
Pricing: Often related to Scaling, the current pricing model of what the user uses may become prohibitively expensive, so the user is looking around for solutions.
In more B2B/SaaS settings, these users start this Google search as part of a more extensive Product Adoption Process.
With this process, the Google Search (Interest) is a critical part of this process. Users often follow a 4-step process:
Identify key competitors (usually 5–10) in the market that may offer potential software solutions (including direct and indirect competitors).
Set evaluation criteria (like what metrics or features are most important to them)
Gather data (User reviews, industry reports, trial versions of software, etc.)
Evaluate Product Fit and reach out if desired (for demo, pricing, etc.)
While Product or Sales teams are more focused on a lot of this process, such as figuring out Product-Market fit and the like, there’s one major part, especially when designing for Adoption, that Designers can offer a lot of help: making the user journey and its steps more visible.
Design helps by painting the picture of the customer journey
I've learned to live by the idea that a Designer's superpower is to visualize and bring things to life. Taking a set of requirements and turning it into a sketch or a prototype that shows how interactions take place is often a core responsibility.
Capturing the beginning of the user journey for Sales and Marketing is little different. While Market research and personas may exist, showcasing what actual users say about their work, why they did a Google search, and what caused them to stick around can help them understand their audience on a much deeper level.
Whether this exists as a User persona, a Day-in-the-life Customer Journey map, or a simple summary of user insights, sharing this user-centric view is often critical to truly understanding why users adopt a product.
Most of these can come from capturing these insights in pre-testing questions.
How pre-interview questions help teams understand user Adoption
Understanding a user's role and responsibilities helps with integration
We often start user interviews or testing by asking about a user's job title, roles, and responsibilities. Still, you may have yet to realize the importance of this from a Sales perspective.
If you're aiming to get users to adopt your product, one of the key goals you should be aiming for is integration. In other words, if the user's workflow is centered around checking the status of 30 different devices every day, and that's one of the features we can help with, there may be a higher chance that the user will integrate your product into their workflow.
So many of these first questions should be to understand better what your user typically does, their workflow, and use cases that the product can potentially cater to aid integration.
Questions to ask:
Can you please introduce yourself and describe your current role?
Can you tell me about your responsibilities and daily tasks?
How long have you been in this role or industry?
How do you currently manage [tasks relevant to the product]?
What tools or solutions are you currently using for these tasks?
What devices or websites do you use daily?
How comfortable are you with new technology?
Understanding the reasons for the Google search
The other significant questions we should ask about are around the Google search: What caused them to look online in the first place? Did they hear about your product from a friend or type a specific keyword into Google?
Were we on a list from a formal competitive analysis search or just something that was recommended casually? Figuring this out is crucial for teams to understand where most of their user traffic comes from and the underlying problem that caused a user to find it.
Questions to ask:
How did you first hear about our product?
What features or aspects of [your product] initially caught your attention?
What are you looking to achieve with [product/service]? Can you describe a scenario where you would use it?
What factors were most important to you when deciding to try our product?
Were there any specific features or capabilities that you were looking for?
What are some problems that you typically would search the internet for?
Have you used any similar products or solutions before? If yes, what was your experience like?
What prompted you to start or stop using these products?
After testing, ask about the value
Lastly, after the user has run through the tasks and seen your application, there are specific questions about the experience and value you want to ask.
While it can be great for users to like the product, what's more important to identify are those moments when users say, "This feature/application/etc. is valuable to me."
Part of this is rooted in seeing if there are any challenges or obstacles to using our product. For example, if our product is difficult to use, this is, of course, something we want to capture. However, we also want to touch upon one key question from the Sales side:
"Why would users want to use our product instead of our competitors?"
Questions to ask:
What features do you consider essential in[type of product/service]?
Have you used similar products/services before? What did you like or dislike about them?
How does our product compare with other solutions you have tried?
Are there features or benefits that are missing in our product?
Would you recommend using our product to others? Why or why not?
Is there anything that might cause you to continue (or not continue) using our product long-term?
Can you imagine a typical scenario of how you might use our product?
You might have valuable adoption insights hidden in your research
User adoption is a tricky thing that takes more work for teams to pin down. If people stop using your product, they often don't take the time to tell you why that's the case. This is why you often get e-mails that bug you when you have not used a product after signing up for it.
They sometimes tell you everything you need to know at the beginning of your user testing. From the start of your user testing, the feedback you gather is often exactly what your Sales teams are searching for to tackle these large-scale issues.
So, if you find yourself designing onboarding, welcome screens, and other experiences to aid user adoption, consider asking about these experiences in testing and passing the results on to the sales team.
You could be sitting on the critical user insights that the Sales team needs, which allows them to understand their users' needs and ensure that they can aid with user adoption.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.