Overview
Why is increasing feature adoption important?
In today’s competitive software market, companies are constantly racing to develop innovative features that engage, delight, and retain their users. All kinds of organizational resources, from engineering manpower to marketing budget, get allocated to feature development and release.
However, this rush to build new things and get them out the door often causes older features to fall by the wayside. It becomes very easy to sacrifice long-term, strategic gains for short-term profit. Plus, the breakneck pace of new feature releases means teams don’t have time to evaluate how existing features are being used (if they’re being used at all).
By increasing feature adoption, you’re ensuring that the most important features in your application are being given the visibility and utilization that they deserve.
Feature Adoption:
% of features that generate 80% of click volume
What increasing feature adoption can do for you
Increasing feature adoption has a number of advantages, including driving these positive business outcomes:
- Increase general awareness and adoption of new key features
- Identify opportunities to better focus development resources
- Reach a target number of end users that have adopted the use of a new feature
- Uncover features that are rarely, if ever, utilized.
Ingredients
Identify your features in need of increased adoption
Start by forming a hypothesis to ask yourself the question “what am I trying to understand?”. There are a number of ways to approach this question, but here are a few examples to guide you:
- Is my newly-released feature being adopted by our end users? If so, what is the week-over-week gain in adoption?
- Feature X represents the culmination of many development hours. In order to justify the work, the feature needs to have Y amount of clicks or Z percentage of visitor or account interaction within the first month of release. Are we meeting that target threshold?
- What features are not being used by our end users? Are there other ways in the application to accomplish the same task? Do we have an opportunity to deprecate this feature?
- What existing features represent the majority of clicks by our end users?
How to Make It
Step by step instructions for deploying tooltip guide to highlight a feature
- Identify which feature in your application you’d like to increase adoption of
- Login to Pendo and navigate to Guides using the left nav bar
- Click “Create Guide” and select your application
- Note that this tutorial will focus on building a tooltip for a web-based application
- Select the Pendo default layout In-Context Helper Tooltip
- Other layouts can work fine for this purpose as well, but if this is your first tooltip guide, this is the recommended layout to use.
- Name your guide
- It can be helpful to include the name of the target feature within your guide name
- Check with your internal Pendo guide admins if you are unsure of any existing naming conventions
- Naming the guide temporarily is fine, as you can always change this later
- Manage the guide in-app, paying special attention to target the feature you’re interested in highlighting:
7. Save your progress and define (via segmentation) the intended audience to target with the new guide
- For an existing feature, it might make sense to only show the guide to users who haven’t interacted with the feature before
- You can also build segmentation to target individuals who haven’t been longtime users of the application by targeting those with a “first visit” of within last X days
Step by step instructions for utilizing the Resource Center to announce a feature
*Note: This feature is still currently in its Beta version
- Please visit our Announcements Module Help Article for detailed instructions on building an announcement using this module
Measuring Success
Setting specific goals
- Now that you’ve identified the feature that you’d like to increase adoption for, it’s time to set some specific goals about what success looks like for your business. To assist with this, you can set goals within Pendo to visually track your progress on meeting feature adoption.
- Ongoing goals give you flexibility to meet the target over any span of time, measured on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
- Timebound goals allow you to measure your adoption progress over a specific window of time
- Goals are configured on a per-feature basis, and can be viewed from a feature’s details page. Additionally, you can view your progress through the use of a Dashboard widget.
Building a report to measure progress
- Pendo’s powerful data visualization tool. Data Explorer, can be leveraged to monitor the efficacy of your campaign to increase feature adoption
- Navigate to Behavior > Data Explorer and build a report using the below as a template
The resulting report will show you the impact your guide has had on the adoption of this feature:
Utilizing the Feature Adoption Analysis Widget
- Pendo has a powerful pre-built dashboard widget that can give you insights into which areas of the product users find the most valuable.
- To add this widget to your dashboard, follow these steps:
- To start, navigate to your dashboard. Then, click on the “+ Add Widget” button in the upper right-hand corner:
- Next, choose “Feature Adoption”:
- Finally, customize your widget with your desired date range, segment, application (if applicable), and desired benchmark
- You can read more about this widget and how to interpret the results on the relevant help page
