How many of us have procured fancy, (expensive) new tools at work, only to play around with them a few times and then largely abandon them? I know I have. Enterprise products must strike a delicate balance between power and learnability, enabling users to meet their goals while not overwhelming them.

Enter templates. Recently I’ve seen templates introduced strategically to guide, support, and inspire users. Templates show users what’s possible, provide optional structure, and offer inspiration to get the creative juices flowing because sometimes there’s nothing more intimidating than a blank canvas.

By reducing cognitive load and lowering the barrier to entry, templates empower users to be more engaged and productive, which can in turn increase customer loyalty, retention, and overall revenue. Templates truly are a win-win.

Templates increase user engagement and productivity

• Templates can reduce the barrier to entry. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and tempted to procrastinate, templates offer users a light weight way to get started. You don’t have to generate great ideas out of thin air, you can simply build on what already exists.
• Templates allow you to stop reinventing the wheel. Templates can function as a blueprint, allowing users to adapt, refine, and alter them based on their specific needs and use cases. Templates offer a basic structure that saves you time and allows you to focus your energy and attention on the parts that really matter.
• Templates can reduce errors and rework. Sharing learnings, guidance, and best practices allows users to reduce basic mistakes and wasted effort. Instead of having every individual try to dream up an effective meeting exercise, you can draw upon tried and true activities that others in your field recommend.
• Browsing templates can seed and spark new ideas. Instead of having to generate ideas from scratch, templates offer users inspiration. You can build, combine, and refactor what others have created.

Templates can increase customer loyalty, retention, and revenue

• When your product is easier to understand and use, people trying it out will be more likely to see value in it and become paying customers.
• When customers feel supported and productive, they’ll likely be more satisfied and loyal.
• When customers are satisfied, they’re more likely to remain loyal and recommend you to colleagues and friends.

How can you use templates in your product?

• Build out core use cases. Identify your core user personas. Who are they and what do they care about? What motivates them? What are they trying to accomplish? Identify their primary use cases and build out a set of templates to meet their core needs.

• Enable easy search, filtering, and sorting. Make it easy to quickly find templates by use case, industry, or topic. Allow users to quickly search if they have something specific in mind, or browse if they’re looking for new ideas and inspiration.

• Make it easy to preview and explore templates before committing to them. To make the browsing experience more seamless and efficient, allow users to easily click in and preview templates before committing to them. This lets them quickly and easily zoom in and out to get the detail and inspiration they need.

• Create a community. As you build out high quality templates to support and enable your users, invite your community members to share templates they’ve created as well. This allows people to share their ideas and learnings directly with each other, creating a valuable learning community. For example, Miro has their own set of templates integrated within their product, as well as Miroverse, a gallery of community generated templates.

• Explore case studies if templates don’t fit with your product. A relevant, detailed, and high quality case study can guide and inspire users similar to templates. Airtable does a good job of providing detailed case studies to support new customers and increase engagement, product usage, and value.

Templates are gaining steam lately, and for good reason. With some thought, strategy, and planning, templates can really unlock users’ creativity, productivity, and potential. Instead of dropping users into an intimidating blank canvas, providing templates can scaffold and inspire users. This is turn increases engagement, usage, and value, which ultimately benefits both user and business. How might you incorporate templates and enable your users?

Like this article? Join my email list.