Building something useful is the part I know how to get lost in. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time making the third step of a three-step process feel a little more obvious.
Then it’s ready, and there’s a different problem. Someone has to find it on a day when they actually need it.
The problem they arrive with
Someone looking for a freelance hourly rate probably has a quote to send. They might need invoicing software eventually, but today they’re trying to work out what to charge. I built Lufu’s free calculators as a way for those people to discover the product. They can get a number and go back to writing the quote, whether they ever need Lufu or not.
Penguino has a similar shape. If you need to shrink a PDF or resize a batch of images, you can land on the tool for that job, use it and leave. There’s no particular reason to learn what the whole toolkit does first.
I like that both approaches have to earn the next click. The small thing needs to be useful on its own, even if the visitor never sees the rest of the product.
A good visit can be a short one
If somebody compresses a PDF in thirty seconds and closes the tab, the product did its job. A longer visit might mean they were looking for the download button.
That makes the numbers more interesting. I’d like to know whether people finish what they came to do, where they get stuck and whether they come back when a similar problem turns up. Those are different questions from how many people saw the page or clicked a sign-up button.
There’s also a design question about what to offer next. Someone working out a freelance rate might need to put that rate into a quote. Someone resizing an image might want to compress it before sending it. A link to the next useful step makes sense when it follows the job they’re already doing.
Where my thinking is today
I’m treating these as experiments. With Lufu, I’m curious whether the free tools help people discover a product that can take some of the next steps off their hands. With Penguino, I’m curious whether one good experience is enough for someone to remember where to go the next time a file needs doing something to it.
Both feel like better questions than whether I can squeeze another call to action onto the page. The page can probably cope with one fewer button.