Half-Baked Onboarding With A Side Of Empty States
Issue 5
Your mother was right when she told you that first impressions matter. We spend a lot of time perfecting our ideas and pushing them out into the world, building, testing, and iterating. But that first experience that customers have with us — the user onboarding — is often overlooked and undercooked. Onboarding is successful when it draws customers into a relationship with the product and gently guides them along the customer journey we’ve envisioned.
If customers don’t experience the inherent value a product claims to offer, they leave. It’s as simple as that.
1. Mom! Someone Needs To Own The Onboarding
Most teams are moving at a rapid pace and dealing with immediate priorities to meet their deadlines. They may be working diligently to identify and prioritize tasks, flesh out and test features. Onboarding is often the very last thing on their minds. If you are developing a product that meets the needs of your client and intended audience, the value to the customer will be apparent, right?
And yet, when we see data that shows us how users are bypassing tool task screens and efforts we’ve made to onboard them to the experience, abandoning or underutilizing products, we scratch our heads and go back to the drawing board.
Onboarding considers the relationship that customers will have with our products: how they will find the experiences we believe they want, and how we can engage them in the process.
Small teams may feel they don’t have the resources to address onboarding from the onset of the project, but Pulkit Agrawal explains in his blog post that onboarding should be addressed throughout the design process. It’s critical for teams to designate an owner of onboarding who will understand the experience of new and returning visitors. Depending on the size of your team, one person, or a group of people, may carry that responsibility.
“Without ownership, your product’s onboarding will be an uninspired afterthought,” says Pulkit.
In addition to owning the experience, Pulkit shares four other techniques that teams can use to improve their user onboarding:
- Understand user behaviors
- Define the “Aha!” moment of your product and the steps that customers must take to reach it–and then test that hypothesis
- Take advantage of different channels to reach and engage customers: emails, in-app messages, in-product prompts and tours
- Analyze data and iterate
READ: “5 Key Lessons For Successful User Onboarding” by Pulkit Agrawal.
2. Evaluate: Beware the Churn!
There’s a lot of data out there — so much data, so little time.
You can drive yourself into a kind of madness measuring user movements and extrapolating theories from them: click-through, signup, how long users stuck around in a setup wizard.
Designer Krystal Higgins wants you to step back from the nitty-gritty and focus on the patterns and behavior of customers within the journey you have defined. When we focus too much on specific moments, we don’t get a sense of the full picture, and we need to understand the full story to evaluate the success and failures of the product experience.
If you want to avoid churn and abandonment of your products, begin by defining what it means for users to be engaged and successful. What does that look like? This is a key point that both Krystal Higgins and UX Designer and Product Manager Laura Klein emphasize in their respective commentary on assessing user onboarding. Does engagement mean your customers are sharing social posts about your product? Or have they purchased something? Signed up for a service? Teams need to define what engagement and retention look like and translate those ideas into user goals.
A successful relationship doesn’t bloom overnight. It is a process that takes time to develop from those first impressions to interactions, engagement, and retention. Find that time frame for your product and measure customer progress along the journey. Did your product get over the hurdle of Days 1–7, or did you lose more customers to churn?
Krystal recommends looking at retention curves that graph the frequency of customers returning to your product after their first experience. Retention curves visualize those drop-off points in the experience. Laura Klein also recommends visualizing data by using a simple funnel to map the drop-off points.
Both Laura and Krystal recommend looking at your most and least successful users and comparing their experiences, behavior, and patterns. Where are the least successful users dropping off along the journey? What experiences do the most successful have that the least miss?
READ: “Evaluating Onboarding Experiences” a blog post by Krystal Higgins.
WATCH: “Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Research” a virtual seminar with Laura Klein.
3. Empty States: Staring Into The Middle Distance
You know when you download an app or launch a new product and you are met with a blank screen that is waiting, apparently, for you to fill it with some form of brilliance? It might look a little sad and boring. Sometimes, the language is vaguely insulting: “You have no friends!” You’re a busy person: Is this empty space worth your time? It requires effort for you to interact with it, or add content. Maybe you’ll get to that later…
The empty space in question is known as an “empty state,” and while nihilists the world over believe in nothing, the Dude knows that emptiness is a form of liberation of the spirit and thus has the potential to be profound.
Which is to say, that these empty states can be infused with your brand’s voice and personality. When done well, they encourage and teach users how to engage with a product. Empty states turn out to be a fertile opportunity for brands to introduce delight into an experience.
In his article on the topic, Nick Babich shows us how designers can use empty states to encourage the first interactions necessary for successful user onboarding. Babich shares examples of successful empty states, and the creative potential they hold for designers and writers to teach customers the ropes and set the tone of the experience, whether witty, welcoming, engaging, or informative.
“While your app should be functional (it should solve a problem for your users) and usable (it should be easy to learn and easy to use), it should also be pleasurable” says Babich.
Empty states can also be used to congratulate and add positive reinforcement to users who have moved forward in the experience or completed something. Nick breaks it all down to show us how empty can be full of opportunities.
READ: “The Role of Empty States in User Onboarding” by Nick Babich.
Would you like to receive this newsletter directly in your inbox? Sign up to receive twice a month email delivery of Adventures in UX Design.
