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Defining The User Life Cycle: A Team Exercise

May 13, 2016
by Adam Churchill

This exercise will help teams develop a shared understanding of their product’s purpose, and the phases of the user life cycle.

Ask everyone on the team to answer each of the following six questions—quietly— on individual sticky notes. If they don’t know the answers, challenge them to get creative.

  1. Awareness​: How will people hear about your product?
  2. Education​: How will people learn what your product does?
  3. Engagement​: How will you predict a visitor will become active?
  4. Conversion​: How will you get contact data from visitors?
  5. Revenue​: How will you make money?
  6. Recurrence​: What makes someone a repeated user?

When they are finished, have the team place their notes on the whiteboard under each category. Arrange the order of the categories as they relate to the user journeys of your target audience groups. While all of your users won’t make it through the life cycle as you’ve defined it, quantitative metrics will help you identify where they are getting stuck.

adapted from “Planning Your User’s Path Together,” a virtual seminar by Laura Klein.