Trying out a new software product can feel awesome, like taking on a new superpower. The real magic happens when it’s easy to use from the start. This sets you and the business up for success. Onboarding is like a personal guide to show you the best parts of the product. It’s not just about the first screens, it’s about helping you have successful moments with the product, beyond your first visit.
This article is a summary of the Onboarding whitepaper, which you download here.
“You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
It all begins with the customer. What do we already know about the customer? Are there any personas available? In an assumptions workshop we identify assumptions we often make about what problem exists for different kinds of people. We use these assumptions to formulate user interview questions in the future for validation. Because you cannot build a successful product that is only based on assumptions.
If a user is likely to use your product, then a situation must arise in which they don’t want to be in anymore. For example, someone may encounter an “I need to unwind” situation after a long day at work, and “hire” Netflix to help relieve some stress.
A way to discover situations and motivations of customers is to create narratives. An overview of great and bad narratives you can find in the Onboarding whitepaper.
To understand your customers even better, interview people who have just crossed the finish line to become highly engaged users. When conducting your interviews, try to keep participants focused on their actual actions and feelings when making the switch. Asking for specifics also helps transport people back into the actual moment, which brings up valuable additional details. In the end you want to have answers to these questions:
What’s the context of their needs that brought them to your product?
The journey from signup to realising the value of a product can be challenging and may result in losing users along the way.
New users who drop off during onboarding believe that the value of a product isn’t worth the cost of continuing. There are four forces that affect a user’s decision to choose and stick to a particular product:
“A product design that reduces anxiety provides a user with more insight into the action they are about to take.”
This begins with continually asking newly signed up customers what they are hoping to achieve with your product. You will learn:
We use the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework to understand the value our customers seek to get out of a product.
[Link to other blog] Read more about the Jobs-to-be-Done framework
To create more manageable tasks for onboarding, an overview of all product functionalities and tasks a user can do in the product is necessary.
Caution: don’t ask too much of your users right from the start. We call this ‘onboarding overwhelm’. In order to avoid this you can break down the tasks they need to do into the smallest possible pieces and ask them to take one step at a time.
For example, let’s look at Dropbox. Rather than asking their users to sync folders and add all their files at once, they simply say upload one file. That’s it. In terms of Eyal’s Hook method, that is by far the simplest action you can ask someone to take in order to see a ‘wow moment’.
We have a funny cognitive bias called the Ikea effect, which says that we place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. In the context of onboarding, this means you can create a stronger connection with users by letting them discover some features rather than spoon feeding them each and every one.
User journeys help in scoping out a project and help us take a customer focused design approach. They refer to the map of scenarios in which the user interacts with the end to end system (both product and services). Normally the scenarios consist of between 4 and 12 steps. User journeys uncover the key user pain points, motivations, goals, different touch points, emotions and highs and lows of experiences while users are engaged with products/services.
Products we design need to mirror the state of mind of our users. When we consider a user’s emotional state, this knowledge will help us to connect with users on a human level. That’s why it’s important to add an emotional lane to the user journey map.
[Link to other blog] Read more about creating user journeys
A major onboarding mistake is assuming users have unlimited time to solely focus on learning to use your tool. But, if you can show a user what success looks like in practice, you’ve got them. Behavioural designer Nir Eyal calls this creating ‘hooks’ [Link to blog about this book] actions that, the more your user takes them, the more likely they’ll become habits.
No matter the approach, all of the onboarding flows have six elements in common. Besides these elements, you also have important UI components to integrate in your product. You can find the key elements and components in an easy-to-read list in the Onboarding whitepaper.