How Iteratively gives users an awesome first-time experience

In pursuit of product-led user activation

Franciska Dethlefsen and the Iteratively team want to give their users an awesome first-time experience with their product to ensure user activation and adoption. In the early life of their product, calls and demos were a key part of their sales process, but they wanted to move to a more product-led approach. To avoid having to spend expensive developer time to solve this challenge they started looking for a no/low-code solution to build in-app product tours.

Initially they decided on one vendor they used for other purposes and built out a simple tour that they planned to use for a big launch. Unfortunately, just before the launch, they had to disable it, due to a bug with the vendors’ system. The launch still went well, but due to the bug and general lack of features, they started looking for a more advanced solution.

Evaluated several vendors and chose Userflow

After the experience with their other vendor, Franciska and Iteratively went looking for other vendors. They tried at all the major players before finally deciding on Userflow. Franciska especially liked the feature set of Userflow as well as the powerful flow builder, which gave a better user experience, than the screen-by-screen editors she had seen at other vendors.

“Userflow checked all the boxes. It had all the advanced functionality we needed, as well as a strong UX - It was easy to use from the beginning.”

- Franciska Dethlefsen, Iteratively

Franciska and the Iteratively team also liked the abilities to better customize flows, such as inserting tooltips in dropdowns and branching flows via if this, then that rules. They were also impressed by the strong environment and version control, which allowed them to easily do iterative testing while keeping track of versions in different environments. With other vendors, they had to duplicate the content for each environment.

Finally, they enjoyed that Userflow was eating their own dog food and was using Userflow own in-app onboarding tools to onboard users. This also gave inspiration for how Iteratively could build out their onboarding flows.

“Userflow gave us an awesome first-time experience with their platform, exactly like what we want to provide to our own users - And since then they have only kept impressing us”

- Franciska Dethlefsen, Iteratively

Iteratively building out onboarding for activation and adoption.

Franciska and Iteratively built a general onboarding flow for their trial to ensure activation. With Userflow they have not experienced any blocking bugs breaking the tours similar to what they experienced with their first vendor and they are seeing a very high completion rate of the flows.

Now they are looking to iteratively enhance their flows to include Userflow’s onboarding checklist and integrate with Segment. They will be able to use the data they store in Iteratively to better trigger flows based on user actions and attributes. Over time they will also explore using launchers and surveys to ensure retention. The ability to explore and iterate without involving developers has shown to be very powerful and it means they can test and improve faster.

"Taking ownership of product onboarding has been a game-changer for us. I no longer have to bug engineering and wait for availability – I can move fast and experiment as I go.”

- Franciska Dethlefsen, Iteratively