How to Identify Your Product’s “Aha!” Moment (+Examples)

“Aha! So that’s how this helps me!”

Do you remember the last time you had a similar thought when using a new app or software? That moment of clarity, when users finally see a product’s full potential, is called the “aha!” moment. Whether or not it’s a conscious thought, it’s a critical milestone in user onboarding.

It can take only 50 milliseconds for website visitors to form an opinion of your website and decide whether to stay or leave. 73% of mobile app users will delete an app or become inactive within three months of downloading it. There are 1.86 million abandoned apps in app stores.

What does all of this mean for you, the product professional?

It means that one of your primary goals should be to get the user to their “aha!” moment as quickly as possible and that you can expect to reap the benefits with your key KPIs, such as revenue and retention.

Let’s dive deep into the “aha!” moment and learn more about optimizing for an ideal first impression for new users.

The Importance of Identifying Your Product’s “Aha!” Moment

Finding your product’s “aha!” moment opens a whole new world. With this knowledge, your product management team can:

• Benchmark the time-to-value in your platform – a key metric for most product teams to work towards reducing as a north-star initiative.
• Create product initiatives that support user adoption by continuously optimizing and testing your user onboarding flow.
• Understand user flows that bring users to their “aha!” moment and begin to improve on crucial product adoption metrics.

Optimize the onboarding UX for new users and the overall customer journey, which will ultimately drive user conversions, prevent churn, improve upsells, and increase product usage.

11 Examples of “Aha!” Moments from Popular Apps

To help you get a better sense of what an “aha!” moment looks and feels like, here are a few “aha!” moment examples.

These examples will help you better understand the meaning of “aha!” moments and create them for your users:

• For Uber, it’s finding a ride within minutes. When Uber users first download the app, they first realize the convenience and value of the app when they hail their first rideshare and they get a driver quickly.
• For Netflix, it’s finding something to watch within 30 to 90 seconds. Netflix users find their “aha!” moment in the app when they watch their first show.
• For Airbnb, it’s making a booking for the first time. Users of Airbnb achieve their “aha!” moment when they book their first stay – until then, users are unable to understand the potential it has vs. staying in a typical hotel.
• For Zoom, it’s setting up, scheduling, and holding your first video meeting. Before the first call, a user cannot experience what makes Zoom different from other web conferencing tools.
• For Slack, it’s exchanging up to 2,000 messages with your team members. By sending 2,000 messages in Slack, a user has fully realized the value of being able to send, receive, and search for internal conversations seamlessly.
• For Grammarly, it’s when they see how much time and effort they’ve saved by syncing the Grammarly extension with their writing editors and seeing how many errors it catches.
• For Canva, it’s when users create their first professional-looking design and realize how easy it was to create it without its simple editor, even without design experience.

For more complex products, the “aha!” moment typically takes longer to experience because these platforms are more complex, require additional onboarding and training, and solve more niche problems than consumer products.  An effective SaaS customer onboarding strategy is crucial to help new customers find their “aha!” moment.

• For Mailchimp, it’s when a user creates and sends their first email to their entire mailing list – and it looks great!
• For G2, it’s when they receive their first user review. At this moment, companies realize the benefit of having a public-facing review profile where they can solicit reviews and use this testimonial across their marketing channels.
• For Hootsuite, it’s when a user schedules their first social share.
• For Wishpond, it’s when a user designs their first campaign.

Note:“Aha!” moments are when a user sees value in a product –  and it could be that your platform has multiple opportunities for different user segments to experience their “aha!” moments at different points in the customer journey. For example, some Slack users may experience an “aha!” moment when they start a huddle.

The Science Behind the “Aha!” Moment

So why is the “aha!” moment so impactful? It turns out that there is a lot of hard evidence to back it up, and once you delve into it, it all makes sense. Let’s do that!

As a product professional and human being, you already know that emotions play a key role in people’s judgments and decisions.

When appropriately done, the “aha!” moment triggers a positive emotional response to the experience of using your platform. The brain releases chemicals that make users feel good, such as dopamine. When that happens, users become far more likely to keep using your product as their brains seek more positive reinforcement of their actions.

If you’re a designer, you’ve probably heard about the concept of Emotional Design. Emotional Design is a way of approaching UX/UI that harnesses the power of human emotions in decision making that we just learned about. When you guide users toward their “aha!” moments with their feelings in mind, you increase the chances that they’ll get there – and that you’ll see your success in your business KPIs.

How to Find Your Product’s “Aha!” Moment

While user behavior is easy to monitor and track, finding your “aha!” moment can prove difficult for product teams because they’re actually looking for the positive emotions behind the metrics. But with our three-step process, “aha!” moments can be identified, tracked, and measured.

1. Analyze your platform’s event data

Start by diving right into your product analytics. Essentially, you’re looking for the events that positively influence business KPIs like retention and conversion – and the events that seem to work against those metrics.

You can record event data by creating a spreadsheet or using a visualization tool like Tableau. Product teams should invest in a product analytics platform such as Whatfix Analytics or Mixpanel to capture and analyze custom events and user behavior – as seen below:

Once you combine all of these data points within your analytics platform, the data begins to make it clear which actions are fueling retention and conversion—these are all potential “aha!” moments in the user journey.

2. Gather user feedback

Reach out and talk to your users to gather qualitative product feedback. This will supplement and validate what you’ve already learned and initially hypothesized from the quantitative data.

If the numbers from your product data show a correlation between specific user behaviors and retention, your users can help explain the “why” in more detail.  Talk to retained and churned users for a complete picture of the user experience, enabling you to identify “aha!” moments and the user journey that leads to them.

Reaching out to users and speaking with them is often outside the comfort zone of even the most seasoned product pros. Below, we’ll break it down into 2 steps to help you get started.

Step 1. Gather feedback from retained customers and users

To better understand what your retained users value most about your product, send them an email or survey with some of the following customer feedback questions:

• What do you like the most about our product?
• Which feature or features do you find the most valuable?
• What was the turning point for you?
• What made you decide to go from a free trial to purchasing?
• Did you find the user onboarding helpful and did it provide a comprehensive training experience?
• Is there anything that you found confusing to use or difficult to grasp?
• Did you experience any friction when first using the product?
• When did you ultimately realize the value of the product?
• What single feature was the most important to you in your app review phase?
• Walk me through your last session. What did you do? What was helpful? Did you experience any challenges?

This data and feedback will reveal a successful user experience for your best customers and bring your product team closer to identifying your product’s “aha!” moment.

Step 2. Gather feedback from churned customers and users

Talking to churned users is important because they didn’t find the value they expected from your product. Finding out why this is will clarify what went wrong and help you avoid the same mistake in the future by tweaking your user onboarding. You can email them or use an exit survey (“Sorry to see you go”) to capture their responses.

Here are some questions you can ask them:

• What were you hoping to get out of the product?
• What was the problem you were trying to solve with the product?
• Why did the product not meet your expectations?
• Is there anything you need clarification on using the product?
• What could we have done to keep you?
• Do you use a different platform instead? If yes, tell us more about what you value about this platform.

Once you’ve collected all the feedback from your deactivated users, analyze the answers and look at what your retained customers did differently from those who churned.

Map this information with what you learned from your user analytics to get a complete picture of your product’s user journey. At this stage, you should have an idea of the behavioral patterns that you believe impact your user retention rates and which “aha!” moment(s) start users on the right (and wrong) paths.

You’ll know because in the analytics, you’ll see a positive correlation between those actions and your business KPIs. When talking to users, they’ll have substantiated this by describing in detail why those actions gave them value.

3. Test your hypotheses with A/B testing

At this point, you’ve likely identified potential “aha!” moments with reasonable certainty based on quantitative and qualitative data. The next step in your journey is optimizing the user experience based on what you’ve learned.

In this step, you’ll conduct A/B tests by dividing your users into segments and presenting them with different in-app guidance and user path assistance to help them experience their “aha!” moment, defined based on what you’ve learned so far.

Say you uncover instances of user friction as users progress toward their “aha!” moment, like rage-clicking. You can create two product journeys to try and remedy the problem and observe how people behave during the sign-up and onboarding.

Product operations teams can use a tool like FullStory to identify rage clicks and show relevant content to users to prevent user frustration. If you’re just starting A/B testing, you can test only one change at a time.  If you’re a bit more advanced, you can run multivariate tests instead with the help of an experimentation platform like Convert, Optimizely, or VWO.

If the user onboarding metric you’re testing (user retention, onboarding completion rate, etc.) improved within the test group, then you’re on the path to confirming and optimizing the journey toward your product’s “aha!” moment.

How to Guide Users to Their “Aha!” Moment

Now that you have identified your “aha!” moments and run some tests to validate your hypotheses, it’s time to work toward getting your users to these moments of clarity and value even faster.  Here are some tips for doing just that.

1. Personalize the customer journey for different types of users

Different customer personas need personalized user journeys maps. Drive your customers to their “aha!” moments faster by personalizing their journey. Let’s look at Netflix to see how this works in action:

When new users sign up for Netflix, they’re prompted to select which shows and movies they like. This helps create and personalize a unique data set for each user based on their tastes and preferences.

Netflix then uses its algorithm to offer personal recommendations to its users based on these selections. Then, it aggregates this data over time based on a user’s viewing habits and what’s currently popular and trending on the platform.

This algorithm allows Netflix to instantly create a personalized offering for every user right after signing up. Users see the instant value of the streaming platform as they’re presented with a catalog of shows they’re interested in and related content. Their “aha!” moment—watching their first show or movie—happens faster because the Netflix suggestions are tailored to their interests.

You can create personalized user experiences by grouping different types of users into segments based on their demographics, location, age, industry, job title, etc. If you know this information from the start, you can create different user journey paths based on the product data you already have from existing users through a cohort analysis.

In addition to automatically personalized journeys based on demographics, you can also consider letting your users select their path, like in the Netflix example. This puts them in the driver’s seat, and they can choose how to interact with your product and what journey they want to take.

Another excellent example of letting users create their journey is Flipboard, which prompts users to select a few topics of their interest during their initial onboarding.

Either way, personalizing your users’ journey is a significant first step in guiding them to their “aha!” moment. It decreases friction by serving users exactly what they want and need.

2. Reduce friction in the user experience

Friction occurs when obstacles slow down a user’s journey, often affecting time-to-value and the speed at which a user can reach their “aha!” moment.

A typical example is when a new user is asked to fill out a contact form or sign up using an email address in the middle of a critical flow. You can reduce user friction by removing unnecessary barriers that impede your customers from finding their “aha!” moment faster. You’ll improve your overall product adoption success rate and see the results in your key business metrics.

Let’s look at Airbnb as an example of a frictionless user experience. Airbnb removes friction for its users by allowing them to browse through listings even without being logged into the platform.

Users can plug in their destination and travel dates and access all their available listings within seconds. And by the time you find your dream vacation spot on airbnb, you’re ready to throw your money at them and give them the necessary information they need to secure your spot!

One way to identify friction areas in your user journey is through mapping exercises such as wireframing a user flow map before launching your product. This process allows your product team to understand your users’ different paths and journeys to accomplish a goal – in this case, finding their “ aha!” moment.

With no-code product analytics software, product teams can measure and analyze how users navigate and engage with their product or service, allowing them to identify friction areas and build user cohorts so that you can remove specific barriers for specific groups of users. Always try to help your users arrive at their “ aha!” moment first and then ask for their information. The fewer hoops they have to jump through when first engaging with your product, the better.

3. Create an intuitive onboarding experience

When your users interact with your product for the first time, it can be an overwhelming experience – especially with B2B platforms that have complex, advanced features.

To help new users set up their accounts and get work toward their “aha!” moment quickly, create interactive walkthroughs, user onboarding checklists, and product tours. These fundamental elements guide them through their initial onboarding. This decreases user dropoff and frustration, which are barriers to having an “aha!” moment.

Slack is a great example of a product with a simple, intuitive onboarding flow.

When new users log into Slack for the first time, they are greeted by a chatbot that takes them through an interactive walkthrough of their first experience. The onboarding flow helps users learn how to use the product and find their “aha!” moment — usually, starting to send messages — as fast as possible.

Use in-app guidance or interactive tutorials to handhold your users and walk them through their product onboarding – or to support a new feature launch. These tools help users resolve minor issues immediately and learn the essential functions of your product, which may be necessary to reach their “aha!” moment.

4. Reinforce your “aha!” moment throughout the user lifecycle

For more complex platforms, providing one “aha!” moment may be powerful enough to retain and engage users.  However, more likely than not, you’ll need to reinforce your product’s value over time via multiple “aha!” moments.

Let’s look at Duolingo, the language learning app, which uses a lot of creative strategies to reinforce its value with multiple “aha!” moments throughout the user journey. Here are some examples:

• Every time a user completes a lesson, they receive a little fire or flame icon to congratulate them and encourage them to start or continue a learning streak
• Crowns are given to users every time they level up a skill, and each subsequent exercise gets more challenging
• Users are always shown a timeline of their progress and achievements

Duolingo creates a fun and engaging way for users to learn a new language and motivates them to continue using the app. The “aha!” moment, which is generally succeeding with a lesson, is reinforced repeatedly.

You can do this for your product by creating a longer user journey that slowly introduces more and more advanced features. You can guide users to find and enjoy these advanced features by:

• Congratulating users for solving a problem and then unlocking a new feature or challenge for them
• Providing users with a progress bar or timeline of what they still need to achieve
• By showing users rewards, they can expect to receive in the future if they keep coming back and doing specific actions within your platform

5. Remind users of new features

Over time, your users will benefit from additional features and continue to find value in your product. This is why your product team is constantly iterating and generating new ideas to support specific KPIs.

However, simply ideating and delivering new features is only part of the journey toward success. Users must be aware of new features and know how to use them to get value from them and have new “aha!” moments in their user journey.

So, how do you create awareness and give necessary guidance?  Leverage in-app content, such as tooltips or UX hotspots, to highlight new features to your users. This helps draw attention to new product launches.

Once a user interacts with a new feature and you can be sure they’re aware of it, you can present them with an entirely new tutorial flow or step-by-step tutorial on what it is, how to use it, and its benefits.

With Whatfix, you can create beacons to highlight and promote new features or updates without needing development resources. Post-launch, product teams can track and analyze feature engagement, usage, and adoption with its no-code event tracking.

Aha! moments Click Better With Whatfix

A digital adoption platform allows product design, marketing, and customer success teams to create in-app content to onboard and educate users – without involving their development team, ensuring quick implementation and analysis.

With Whatfix’s DAP, you can guide your users to find their “aha!” moment faster – while continuously refining that journey – by creating in-app content using  tools such as:

• Product tours and interactive walkthroughs to onboard and educate both new and existing users
• In-app knowledge base to provide instant user support
• Beacons to highlight new updates or product features
• Tooltips to suggest underutilized features of a product
• Feedback surveys that allow you to collect user data in real-time

With Whatfix, you can create intuitive user flows and help content quickly guide your users to their “aha!” moment, improve their proficiency with your platform, and announce new product launches. It all offers complete user behavior tracking to understand how your app is used, allowing your product team to benchmark and improve these flows over time.

Are you ready to drive users to their “aha!” moments quickly, with Whatfix? Schedule your demo today!