You’ve launched a new feature, but adoption isn’t meeting expectations. Marketing might not be the issue—it could be poor in-app awareness or lack of user buy-in. Before things spiral out of control, let’s explore how surveys and feedback can turn this around
What is Feature Adoption?
Feature Adoption is a process that marks the start of users actively using a feature of a product in their routine. It’s a precursor to user engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
What is a Feature Adoption funnel?
Users may only sometimes use a linear path regarding the feature adoption funnel. It’s a four-step process that consists of:
1. Exposed
The users are introduced to the new feature through guided tours or pop-up alerts. This requires decent exposure without annoying them.
Other ways to make them aware are via emails, push notifications, or in-app notifications. To find the exposure rate, you might want to view the feature’s landing page visits and unique views.
Actions leading to exposure:
- Coming across the feature in the UI (e.g., a new button or menu item)
- Reading about the feature in release notes or documentation
2. Activated
Users feel activated when they realize the time-to-first value. The sooner the feature helps them solve the problems, the faster they will be able to actively use the feature.
In other words, this is where they attain their Aha moment. For this to happen, the first step is either setting up the feature or importing data.
Actions leading to activation:
- Clicking on the feature's icon or menu item
- Opening the feature's introductory tutorial
- Watching an onboarding video about the feature
- Interacting with a feature preview or demo
3. Used
Users who have used the feature will realize its value. In case they don’t, there could be a value gap if the expectations of the user aren’t met.
It could either be a lack of briefing or a problem of usability. You can either make it simple to use or educate your stories.
Actions lead to being used:
- Completing the full workflow of the feature for the first time
- Successfully achieving the intended outcome with the feature
- Spending a meaningful amount of time engaging with the feature
4. Used Again
The used again stage includes users who used the feature multiple times. The user feels empowered and sees the repetitive value that becomes a part of their workflow.
Actions lead to the feature being used again:
- Returning to use the feature after the initial use
- Embrace the feature into regular workflows
- Customizing or personalizing feature settings
- Using the feature across different projects or contexts
- Recommending or showcasing the feature to other users
Feature Adoption vs Feature Discovery
The terms feature adoption and feature discovery are used interchangeably. However, they aren’t the same thing.
Feature discovery is ensuring your users know that a particular feature exists. This is more about them finding a feature or better yet knowing that it exists.
Feature adoption is the practice of users regularly using a feature that becomes a part of their workflow. It leads them to their Aha moment and drives ROI for them.
Answering What’s in it for me for the user
Your feature adoption efforts revolve around answering What’s in it for me (WIIFM) from the user’s POV.
Here’s what your users look for while regulating the use of a feature:
- Problem-solving ability: When a feature helps users with a task by making it easier for them to rely on others, the feature adoption is going to increase. For instance, no code or drag-and-drop.
- Minimal learning curve: When a feature is hard to easy to learn without requiring technical support, feature adoption is proven to increase.
- Value proposition: If your product features can solve the problem while offering a distinct advantage, you’re a value-driven product
- ROI: If the pricing and the outcome match each other in terms of cost-to-benefit ratio
Survey Questions to Improve Feature Adoption
The average feature adoption rate is specific to every industry. However, the general benchmark is around 24.5%. If yours isn’t anywhere near, that means underlying problems are stopping your users from deriving value.
This is where surveys can help you find answers and implement those fixes. Here are survey questions for each stage with specific examples to help understand the intent behind each of them.
Enhance sign-up experience
The sign-up process is a critical process for user adoption and retention. Making it too easy or hard, will only make your sign-up rates tank. This comes at the cost of not collecting user’s info for personalization.
What you can do is evaluate what stops your customers from signing up and those problems into opportunities.
Picture this, you’re a product manager at a stock trading app. Unfortunately, you notice declining sign-up rates. On running on survey, you find the following problems:
- Complicated and lengthy KYC process
- Sea of Financial jargons in the Risk Financial Assessment Questionnaire
- Excessive payment options causing choice paralysis
And you fix this by:
- Adding a user-friendly verification system for quick document scanning and a biometric system
- Using a questionnaire with simple language with an info tip to explain financial terms
- Added only the popular payment options with an ‘Add more’ option
- Featuring a progress bar to keep users in the loop
This led to an increase in sign-ups as a result.
With timely surveys, you get to know your customers’ sign-up experience and expectations. This helps you create a feedback loop and make incremental improvements for a better user experience.
Here are questions to help product teams identify sign-up pain points and make targeted changes to your sign-up process.
1. How easy or difficult was it to set up your account?
Context: Overall user experience assessment
Trigger: Immediately after account creation
2. What was difficult about setting up your account?
Context: Identifying specific pain points
Trigger: If the user indicates difficulty in question 1
3. How well do you expect [product] to meet your needs?
Context: Gauging initial user expectations
Trigger: After account setup, before extensive product use
4. What questions or concerns do you have about using [product]?
Context: Uncovering potential barriers to adoption
Trigger: After account setup, before or during initial product use
Understand help documentation usefulness
If you have a blog or help documentation, it’s essential to know if they are doing a good job of educating your users. This can be done by asking users right after finishing engaging with them.
With these two survey questions, you get to quantify them on a scale of 1-5 and follow it up with an open-ended question that answers in detail. This can help you improve your resources while there’s time.
Imagine you’re a low-interest loan app that recently published an article on 5 Ways to Build an Emergency Fund. While you had high expectations, the user engagement was unsatisfactory. By running this survey, you find that many users found the content too general for their specific financial situations.
Based on this feedback, you create a follow-up resource: Building an Emergency Fund on a Tight Budget: Practical Steps for every situation. This contains advice for all situations like car repairs, unforeseen medical expenses, high-interest credit card debt, and savings habits.
This revamped targeted content sees higher engagement, demonstrating the value of user feedback in improving your financial education resources.
5. How useful is the content in this article?
Context: Content quality assessment
Trigger: After the user has read an article or piece of content
6. What would have made this article more useful?
Context: Gathering specific feedback for content improvement
Trigger: Follow-up to question 5, especially if the user rates the content as less than highly useful
Fix low engagement
Your feature adoption has one barrier to overcome which is low engagement. An in-app engagement survey could help uncover the reasons users are not using them and their fixes.
This could help be future-ready by building features that are easier to use, and add value to users while ensuring alignment with your product roadmap.
And all of this before it gets too late.
As a product manager at a cryptocurrency app with a decline in daily active users over the past quarter, By sending out this feature engagement survey, you find that:
- Connecting to decentralized exchanges is complicated
- Users insist on integrated yield farming features
- High demand for integrated yield farming features allowing passive income
- Need for educational content about cryptocurrencies and blockchain
With these insights, product teams can prioritize simplifying the DEX connection process, developing yield farming integration, and creating an educational content section within the app. These segmented improvements could help re-engage lapsed users and attract new ones.
7. What's the main reason why you haven't been back to [brand] recently?
Context: No interaction with the products or services for some time
Trigger: Show this question when a user hasn't logged in or used the product for a specified period
8. What was difficult about using [brand]?
Context: The company wants to identify specific pain points in the user experience.
Trigger: Trigger: Show this question if the user selects "Difficult to use" as their response to question 7
9. What are you using instead of [brand]?
Context: The company suspects that users might have switched to a competitor or alternative solution
Trigger: Display this question after the user selects an option indicating they've found a better alternative or switched to a different solution in question 7
10. How likely are you to use [product] in the next 30 days?
Context: The company is assessing the potential for re-engagement shortly
Trigger: Ask all the respondents to gauge the future intent of all users irrespective of the answers
Boost Trial-to-Subscription conversion
For a product with a PLG model, users must turn their free users into paid subscriptions. Or else, it means your product can’t grow organically leading to a high CAC.
While common reasons include no intrinsic value or high learning curve, a survey would just put your doubts to rest.
Assume that you're a key product team member at a running and fitness app. You find an alarming drop-off in users upgrading to a paid plan after their free trial period. To understand why, you deploy a survey asking users for feedback.
On analyzing the survey results, you come to know that the majority of respondents don't clearly understand the benefits of switching to the premium plan compared to the free trial version. With this insight, you can work with your team to better communicate the premium features and their associated benefits.
Some actions you might want to include, start by:
i. Creating product messaging to convey tracking performances, create custom plans, the time you exercise, plus integrations
ii. Creating 1 or 2-minute videos using an explainer video maker on how to capitalize on premium features
iii. Giving early access to the premium feature for a day or two
iv. Featuring case studies of premium users whom they can relate to
v. Developing case studies of users who have achieved their fitness goals using the premium version
Once you implement this survey, wait for some time, and resurvey your users. With the above changes, you will find that the subscription rate has increased.
11. What's the main reason why you haven't upgraded to a paid subscription?
MCQ: No time, Didn’t have preferred features, Wasn’t helpful, Difficult to set up or use, Other reason
Context: User completed the trial but didn’t upgrade
Trigger: Asked when the trial ends without conversion to identify key blockers
12. What was difficult about setting up or using [product]?
Context: When hard to use.
Trigger: Follow-up if "Difficult to set up or use" is selected in Q11
13: What made you feel [product] wouldn't be useful to you?"
Context: The user didn’t find value in the product
Trigger: Follow-up if "Wasn’t helpful" is selected in Q11
Improve Ease of Use
Feature adoption is often if not always determined by ease of use.
Start with a close-ended question. On a scale of 1-5, understand the ease of use. Anything lower than 3 means, asking an open-ended question, about what they find challenging. For 4 or 5, ask what could make it better and why they liked it.
This survey will help product teams, design teams, and customer support teams.
Case in point, you are a product manager at a landing page tool. While it is easy to use, you notice that the free-to-paid plan ratio is abysmal after a 7-day trial. When you launch this survey, you find these reasons:
- Drag-and-drop isn’t smooth
- Needs external code to make landing pages mobile-responsive
- The templates were generic
- The landing page integration needs the dev team's intervention
With this feedback, you make these improvements:
- Redesign the drag-and-drop interface to be more user-friendly and intuitive
- Implement an automatic mobile-responsive feature compatible with different screen sizes
- Expand the template library with a wider range of industry-specific and campaign-type options
- Develop better integration capabilities with popular website platforms and marketing tools
With these improvements, you witness more reactivation and reduced friction.
14. How easy or difficult is it to use [brand]?
Context: Assesses users' initial impressions and overall usability of the platform.
Trigger:
After First Use: Immediately after completing their first task.
After Key Actions: Following significant actions, such as creating a project or launching a survey.
15. What would make [brand] even easier to use?"
Context: This question encourages users to provide feedback on potential enhancements based on their experiences.
Trigger:
After Extended Use: After one week or after completing multiple tasks.
Post-Completion: After finishing a project or task.
16. What is difficult about using [brand]?
Context: To identify specific pain points and challenges users face while using the platform.
Trigger:
On Error Occurrence: After encountering an error message
After Multiple Attempts: If a user fails to complete an action multiple times
Final thoughts
As we near the end, your feature adoption rate will see an upward trend when you nurture your users. Be it new or existing, their product preparedness and knowledge will determine their interest in a feature.
That’s why it’s all the more important to ask the right questions after every critical action. Works best when you correlate the data with behavioral actions.
If that’s something you need help with, our survey plus feedback tool suite can help you. Sign up for a demo and our team will take this forward.
