Where do you start on user onboarding? 

How we solved our own usability problem

You know what really sucks? When you spend countless hours, weeks, months and years developing a product and then seeing how people don’t use it the right way.

That’s what happened to me in now deceased company that wanted to help talented creative people monetize their likes to go from hobby to pro. For us it was 90% — nine out of ten people who signed up never hit the mark. So here’s what we learned:

LESSON 1: Assume that your users are in a hurry

I wanted to add assume that they’re dumb and in a hurry, but that’s not exactly fair. What happens is we get bombarded with a ton of information on the web: ads, banners, popups, roll ups, you name it. The direct effect of that is we try to filter it out, develop blind spots. If you can’t understand something you move along.

If you’re on the sending end, make sure to make the value of your product as clear and short as possible. Larger fonts, bolds and color coding all work great here.

LESSON 2: Make it obvious

This follows directly from lesson 1 — make it obvious what is it they should do. Pick one action you want user to perform and point to it. This could be a great way to measure viability of your product. The best practice is to go for a key conversion metric here. If you see people struggle may be it’s back to the drawing board.

LESSON 3: Minimize choices

If you do #2 this should be less of a problem, but it’s still a good rule of thumb. The more choices users are presented, the higher is the probability of them wandering off in the wrong direction and leaving without ever hitting that A-ha! moment.

This is often what you see with rich in features web apps, like Salesforce. The secret here is to maintain a healthy balance between presenting the right amount of information or asking for input and making the process too long. Nobody likes long.