Product tours are winning The industry is maturing and some preliminary results are in. Back in 2013–2014 the topic of user onboarding was not well covered. SaaS market wasn’t as big as it is today. These were the days before Samuel Hulick’s teardowns, before Intercom. What happened As voices began to emerge…

This is an added benefit we often overlook. By design, a good user onboarding experience will nudge newcomers to functionality that is core to the your product’s value. Great products stand out by being best in solving specific problems for one or few specific customer types. …

Timeliness Let’s look at a typical user journey. It all begins with a promise. A promise of value your product will deliver to your user. This usually comes in the form of an ad, search engine query or a content piece. …

Each user's path to your product is unique. It may take multiple touchpoints to convince them to try your product. But when it comes to user onboarding, we're looking at a fairly linear process. Let's compare the process to that of a video game. Your product makes promises of value…

Samuel Hulick recently wrote an excellent post Product People, Mind the Gap! where he recalls an elementary school teacher once giving him an assignment that seemed simple on the surface, but turned out to be surprisingly complex: The assignment’s simple-seeming description was this: “Write out each of the steps involved in making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich.” However, its hidden complexity was hinted at with the following warning: “And make sure you write down every… single… step.”

I know, I know… This sounds like a clickbait title, but hear me out. Let me lay it on you: Setup wizards! Yes, they work! Remember how installing a Windows app looked like (still does)? …

They’re a features page — If you go on Dribbble right now and enter user onboarding in the search field this is what you’ll get… These were literally top three results on the page, all with user onboarding in the name.

Visualizing the user onboarding process User onboarding is a type of a managed learning experience. Like all learning the onboarding process typically follows the same universal 2-stage pattern in a continuous looping cycle. During the first stage, as you first introduce the product to your new users, the focus is…

Tooltips get a bad rap these days, mostly due to misuse (see Why tutorials don’t work for user onboarding), but they are a great tool for customer success (if used right). There are two types of tooltips — tooltips and hotspots (question marks). …