5 real-life product experience examples and how to emulate them

Product experience insights help you understand how your customers feel while using your product. The real value, of course, comes from implementing those learnings in your product roadmap. This can be as small as fixing bugs quickly, and as big as revamping or launching a product feature based on customer behavior and feedback.

Not just that: great PX starts even before someone becomes your customer, and has the power to turn a user into an advocate for your product.

But what does excellent PX look like in practice, and how can you apply its principles to your own product? Dive into these five product experience examples to find out.

1. Intercom

Intercom is a customer communications platform. It helps businesses manage customer relationships throughout their entire journey, including conversion, activation, engagement, and customer support.

How Intercom offers a great product experience

When a potential customer considers a product like Intercom, they have to adopt certain processes, strategies, and tools for Intercom to work with—processes like collaboration on customer issues, marketing and engagement tactics, and personalization strategies. And if the customer struggles to begin with these opportunities, they’re likely to struggle to implement Intercom’s software.

That’s why Intercom goes all-in on educational resources that serve people before they become customers. A great example of this is their Onboarding Starter Kit. To download it, only basic information is required (name, surname, and email address)—a rarity when it comes to enterprise-oriented products.

The kit itself is a 20-page PDF document with highly actionable tips about onboarding strategies and messages, including what to focus on in each onboarding step, message and filter examples, and measuring success.

The PDF wraps up with a customer story, including the company’s exact onboarding flow, examples of messages they send, and results they’ve achieved thanks to onboarding.

Back on the signup page for the kit, Intercom also links to their most relevant demo videos about features like onboarding, product tours, and ongoing messages.

Understanding the value of onboarding is a huge step in being a successful Intercom customer. That’s Intercom’s goal with resources like this one. Other examples include The Beginner's Guide to Real-time Sales and The Nurture Starter Kit.

Benefits of this product experience

Intercom’s educational PX sets the user up for success even before they’ve become a customer. Once they learn about the value of behavior-based onboarding messages, and the habit-forming responsibility they have, they’re much more open to paying for a tool that will help them learn and implement it quickly and easily.

How you can create a similar experience

To implement Intercom's approach with your own product experience, look at qualitative PX metrics, like feedback from:

• Customers with high vs low NPS® or CSAT scores

• Churned customers

• Customers who completed a task quickly vs those that abandoned it

This will reveal the difference between your successful customers and those who haven’t seen success with your product. You’re looking for an answer to the question: are successful customers equipped with knowledge and strategies that help them make the most of your product compared to unsuccessful ones?

If the answer is yes, that’s your sign to build educational resources to set customers up for success.

2. Hotjar

Hotjar (that’s us!) provides product experience insights to teams at small and mid-sized companies. Our Observe and Ask tools help product managers, researchers, and designers understand user needs, insights, and behavior so you can make the right product improvements.

How Hotjar offers a great product experience

Hotjar makes a big promise: our platform helps you understand how users experience your website or product, so you canprioritize product changes based on real user needs. 

'Observe' tools like Recordings and Heatmaps, and 'Ask' tools like Surveys and our Feedback widget let you collect and analyze user behavior data and contextual feedback that gives quantitative and qualitative PX insights—something traditional metrics like pageviews, conversion rates, or session duration won’t reveal.

While the concept might sound attractive to Hotjar’s potential customers, no one wants to invest days or weeks to get those insights—which is where Hotjar nails PX: new users can get Hotjar up and running on their website in as little as 10 minutes.

First, sign up for a free account—all you need is a name, email address, company name, and role. No credit card required. Once you're signed up, the onboarding flow helps you install Hotjar on your website.

You can grab the code and add it to your site yourself, email it to a team member, or follow step-by-step instructions for specific platforms like WordPress, Shopify, HubSpot, Wix, and Webflow.

From there, Hotjar’s onboarding helps you curate custom data views based on user flows or teams, and you can invite team members—all plans include unlimited seats.

If your site sees even as few as 50 visits per day, Hotjar becomes a source of user insights within a few hours. Within a week, an entire product team can dive into details like scroll maps, survey responses, and recordings of real user behavior on your website, and easily share insights and data with other teams and stakeholders.

Benefits of this product experience

Hotjar’s customer onboarding flow is smooth and stripped down to its essentials. It doesn't waste time on noise or potential distractions, in an effort to quickly lead new users to your ‘aha’ moment—the moment that proves Hotjar's value by solving a problem for you or helping you accomplish your job-to-be-done (JTBD).

Thanks to these simple but powerful first steps in the product, Hotjar gives value to new users fast. You can also access the Business plan for 14 days, to help you decide which plan is right for your team.

How you can create a similar experience

Think about these questions:

• Where do people get stuck after signing up?

• What makes them abandon the process?

• Is there confusion? Lack of information? Bugs? UX issues?

To find answers to these questions, dive into quantitative insights (like drop-off points after signing up) and layer them with qualitative insights like session recordings and feedback.

This will allow you to map out your customer journey from signup to seeing value with your product—and where in the process users get interrupted. What’s standing in the way of users experiencing your product's value? What’s distracting them or making it hard for them to progress?

Use these learnings to remove obstacles and build a seamless user experience.

3. Webflow

Webflow is a no-code website builder. It works as a visual canvas for creating all types of websites, like ecommerce, blogs, and memberships.

How Webflow offers a great product experience

In a way, Webflow is a unique product: it serves small businesses, individuals, and freelancers with the same product as it does ecommerce sites or large companies that run high-traffic marketing.

Here’s just one example of a type of page you can build with Webflow, courtesy of Attentive’s conversational commerce report:

Webflow’s website builder is powerful and complex, but it comes with a steep learning curve; the builder isn’t intuitive. In fact, when you create a fresh project, here’s what you’ll see:

It’s not as easy as dragging an element and dropping it where you want it to be—yet more than three million designers and teams use Webflow to run their businesses and serve their clients. 

There are three elements that make building in Webflow a fantastic experience:

1. Prebuilt layouts like menus, galleries, hero sections, and footers you can add to a blank project

2. Free and premium templates that make it easy to start from a structure instead of from scratch

3. Webflow University, a library of free lessons covering every aspect of using Webflow

And these three elements are exactly what the first onboarding email from Webflow points its new users to:

Within as little as two hours—the length of the Webflow 101 crash course—new users can feel confident navigating the Webflow interface and start building their website with templates and layouts.

Then, when users are ready to work with more complex website elements, Webflow University supports them in that process, too.

Benefits of this product experience

Webflow University, along with its layouts and templates, gives new users the tools they need to see what’s possible with Webflow. This product experience is crucial for freemium users to trust the paid product is worth it. Webflow is free until you need to publish a website on your own domain, which means users can play around with the builder until they’re happy with their website—and happy to pay.

How you can create a similar experience

If your user was sitting next to you and trying to use your product for the first time, what would make their head turn to you to ask for help or clarification? What in your product would make them think “I don’t know where to go from here”?

That’s where you should start when mapping out your educational content, like demo videos or written articles with screenshots and screencasts.

Of course, you don’t have to guess, and your users don’t need to sit next to you to ask you questions: implement a live chat function or a feedback widget within your product to let them voice their concerns and struggles, which you can use to improve the user experience and build your library of product guides and lessons.

4. Hussle

Hussle is a network of gyms, pools, spas, and fitness apps. It connects people with the best gyms in their area through various types of passes, like one-off visits or multi-gym access.

Hussle’s goal is to give people flexible access to thousands of gyms across the UK without complicated contracts and memberships.

How Hussle offers a great product experience

There are only a few things you can do once you land on Hussle’s website: enter a location to search for gyms, explore different types of passes, or fill out a 90-second quiz to find the right pass for you. Everything else is a variation of one of these three options.

Hussle’s product experience prioritizes taking action quickly. It’s smooth and minimal, and created to show customers they’re a priority, helping them choose the best gym pass and know what’s included with their purchase.

The way Hussle’s product team makes this happen? They regularly look for signs of user frustration: hitting the back button at checkout, rage clicking, or abandoning the session halfway through.

Luke Calton, Hussle’s Product Lead, reviews session recordings of Hussle’s in-app experience every day. That allows him to find points of friction, confusion, and frustration—and almost instantly fix issues that would otherwise take weeks to track down.

On top of that, Luke reviews direct customer feedback (from Hotjar’s Feedback widget), along with the context he needs to understand any bugs or bottlenecks.

Another thing Hussle’s product team does well is what many businesses lack the courage to do: they survey every customer that cancels their account.

“We’re really sorry to see you go, can we ask why you canceled your pass today?” is a short but powerful question that can reveal issues from small bugs to larger issues in UX (user experience) or PX (product experience). Their follow-up question is “What could Hussle be doing differently for you to consider staying?” and reveals opportunities for product improvement.

The answers are an opportunity to learn about the invisible context of churn (“Not using the pass enough due to COVID”), as well as potential product ideas (“I bought a contract directly with the gym").

Benefits of this product experience

Hussle learns about its product experience on a daily basis. It’s what creates deep empathy for unique motivations and the environments their customers are in. And when a company puts user needs first, users can see and feel that through product improvements.

Without their focus on PX insights, Hussle’s product team wouldn’t know why users churn, or why they fail to sign up in the first place. The team might be tempted to launch new features and tweak existing ones—and spend months on it without a guarantee it will work.

With qualitative data like survey responses and session recordings, Hussle can prioritize improvements that match what customers crave—and delight users with every change.

How you can create a similar experience

If, like Hussle, you want to put your user's needs, feelings, and experiences first, here’s what you can implement as a product manager:

• Dive into product analytics to find common friction points, like pages with high exit rates, low-converting pages, and features with low usage

• Review session recordings that include those friction points and analyze how users navigate them, taking note of signs of frustration (rage clicks) or confusion (u-turns, i.e. quickly hitting the back button)

• Collect direct customer feedback using surveys and feedback widgets, especially on high-value pages like checkout, or pages users get stuck on

Make these activities part of your regular schedule—even an hour per week can help you make a significant impact on your product experience. If you need to collect data to make a compelling case for product changes with your team and stakeholders, this is the way to do it.

5. Peepers

Peepers is a family-owned digital retailer selling reading glasses, reading sunglasses, and blue light glasses with a focus on unique and colorful styles.

How Peepers offers a great product experience

You’ll probably agree: buying glasses of any kind is hard, even when you’re doing it in person. You may try dozens of styles before finding what you like, or leaving, frustrated and empty-handed.

Which makes shopping for glasses online quite a mission.

Peepers found a way to sell to online customers that’s quite the opposite of frustrating. All throughout the website, visitors can jump into the Perfect Pair Finder, a quiz that helps them find the styles that suit them best.

After answering questions about preferred shapes, colors, width, and strength, results show a best-match pair and a few extra recommended options. For each, there’s a list of reasons for suggesting that exact pair, and a button to launch a virtual try-on experience.

This launches the camera and positions the pair of glasses on the user’s face, even as they turn their head around. Peepers's virtual try-on experience replaces the in-person experience and lets users explore different glasses colors and shapes to match their face.

Benefits of this product experience

The virtual try-on is an option for every pair of glasses Peepers sells, and is an excellent PX example on its own. But paired with the personalized quiz results, this feature makes it a seamless shopping experience—one that many customers might prefer over an in-store one.

For example, users can virtually try on different pairs of glasses in different lighting, or with different hairstyles, makeup, and outfits. They can try more pairs than they’d be comfortable with in an in-person setting. For some, there’s also the bonus of zero pressure from a sales associate hovering over them to make a decision or share an opinion.

How you can create a similar experience

This PX example focuses on exceeding customer expectations and creating customer delight by giving customers confidence that the product they picked is right for them.

You can create a similar experience by helping customers see themselves using your product, like:

• Plugging their own text or images into a website template to see what it would look like

• Using their camera to try on an item of clothing, jewelry, or footwear

• Viewing a sample report of their marketing channels

Of course, this won’t necessarily work with all industries and product types. But even then, you can offer demos and resources to help customers feel like they’re making the right decision—for example: 

• Creating unique resources tailored to different user personas or jobs-to-be-done

• Providing detailed case studies, including metrics, screenshots, demos, and real users telling their stories 

Potential customers with similar ‘before’ scenarios will recognize themselves in these resources and case studies, and desire similar outcomes.

Build customer-centric product experiences

There’s something Intercom, Hotjar, Webflow, Hussle, and Peepers have in common: we prioritize customer needs, experiences, and behavior when planning product improvements, features, and launches.

Use these product experience examples to get inspired to educate your customers and empathize with them throughout their customer journey. The result—loyal customers, happy customers, more customers—will be worth it.