“You never forget your first time.” A truer innuendo has never been made in conjecture with user experience. Probably why LinkedIn chose the quote for the t-shirts for their New User Experience Team — a team that most likely didn’t exist in any company before 2005. However, with UI and UX playing a major role in every company nowadays, the major tech players have heeded the importance of new user experience. If viral growth is a main focus for you and your company, it might be time to reexamine your new user experience and start from scratch. There are several questions to ask when evaluating new user experience:

• Where do I begin?
• What should I focus on?
• How do I know what good new user experience is?

This shouldn’t be the job of one person. Although I do believe a Product Marketer should take the reins. A dedicated company should form a committee, similar to the Lord of the Rings, composed of a head designer, engineer, product manager, and marketer to examine the current new user experience. Unfortunately, every company’s needs are drastically different. Although, there are a few key takeaways any company can use to improve their new user experience. The first step is to scrutinize your current state. Try to cut out all the excess while still keeping the core intact. If you’re dealing with a registration form, what can you take out? Think: minimalist. After hefty loads of customer research, prototyping, A/B testing, and going back to the drawing board several times, you should have a vastly improved experience. But why is it so important? Because first impressions count*. If a user has a negative first experience they’re not likely to come back or share your site with their network. Word of Mouth still remains one of the most powerful marketing tools out there. However, it’s nearly impossible to harness. All you can do is help facilitate the viral and WOM growth by catering to your customers. If you have a consumer-centric product, make sure the social sharing settings are widely available and intuitive. Viral growth only happens when a current user shares the site with a non-user.   *Just ask the “sex sells” loaded Axe commercial. This article originally appeared on Business 2 Community here as a guest post from me