USER ON-BOARDING AND BEST PRACTICES.
An AMA Session with Mariam Braimah on the Figma Africa slack group.
Mariam Braimah — Hi Figma Africa community! 👋🏾 Is this thing on? Super excited to be here, I’ve been really interested in learning more about the design community in the continent and have found this community to be a great introduction to that. So I’m honored that you all have invited me to this discussion.
So to introduce myself, my name is Mariam, I’m of Nigerian descent #naija and was born and raised in New York. I currently live in San Francisco, have been for here for the past 5 years. I took the leap of faith and moved here immediately after graduating college because I wanted to be in the hub of all things UI/UX design and technology.In college, I studied the history of Art and Architecture. I thought I wanted to be an Architect, until I took Physics and realized it was definitely not for me lol. Like a lot of designers, I stumbled into this field unknowingly. Randomly heard of Graphical User Interfaces in an introductory computer science course, and began teaching myself photoshop, illustrator etc.
Currently, I’m a product designer at Netflix helping shape the global non member user experience to drive customer growth & acquisition. I handle our mobile & desktop sign up and onboarding efforts. Prior to this role, I headed a cross functional research and design team at a public data tech startup called Inflection.
When I’m not designing, I’m usually discovering new music to introduce in my DJ sets. Always open to new music so don’t hesitate to share some of your faves with me after this talk! I’m also launching the Kimoyo Fellowship, which aims to connect Silicon Valley tech professionals with like minded tech companies and professionals across the African Diaspora so they can share knowledge, talent and experiences with one another.
Outside of the above, I try to find sleep when I can 😛
So we’re here to talk about user onboarding! Described succinctly, user onboarding is the first time experience a user has with your product. Think of it as the first impression a user has to your service and if done correctly, it can set a new user up for success by helping them become more familiar with your service.
Q — Thank you so much mariam, so a lot of us are currently still trying to learn how to design professionally, so what will you say is User On-boarding?
Mariam Braimah — Yes, so user onboarding can be anything between the moment a user lands on your site or downloads your app, into the first few times they interact with your service.If done correctly, it can set a new user up for success by helping them become more familiar with your service.
Q — do you need to be a better copywriter to pass across the right message in User Onboarding?
Mariam Braimah — Great question! In general I think a good designer should strive to be a better copywriter. The message you convey to a user will help set the right first impression, remember user on-boarding is the process of welcoming a user to your service. So the tone and voice you use to do that is extremely important.
Q — Ideally how many steps in User On-boarding is ideal not to “bore” the new user?
Mariam Braimah — As with most things design, I don’t think there is a one size fits all model, it really depends on your product and the goals of your onboarding flow.Some forms of onboarding happen directly after sign up and have a set number of steps (Netflix takes this approach),others may happen more contextually, and in response to a user’s behavior. Google uses this a lot within their apps, ie: youtube and gmail.
Q — Does it also extend beyond the sign up process?
Mariam Braimah — Yes, often times it does! But can manifest itself in different ways. Sometimes people can think of sign up and onboarding separately, Netflix does this today.
But there’s another school of thought, where sign up and onboarding are treated as a cohesive unit, and happen simultaneously. Something called gradual engagement. In thinking about it in this manner, it can shift the mindset of sign up from strictly being about increasing conversion and more about increasing member satisfaction.
Q — Also how can one design onboarding for SAAS whereby the ideal scenario is a demo first before they fully interact with the product
Mariam Braimah — Regardless of how you decide to onboard — user demo, tutorial, contextual onboarding, etc. I think all of these methods starts with understanding what features to highlight/callout to less familiar members and working backwards. Start with your power users. Data is your friend, especially at Netflix. Identify people who are regular/active users of your product or have retained for a long period of time, and try to find similarities in their behaviors and/or features that they commonly interact with.
Q — So for a new product, identifying regular users come after a sometime, right?
Mariam Braimah — Yea, that one is hard. In the case of a newer product, I would suggest focusing on the core product functionalities and highlight those features first. Also, would suggest doing some customer surveys to get a sense of what features users may need to be onboarded on.
Q — Does a video count as onboarding?
Mariam Braimah — hmm good question, I think a video is a form of onboarding. But in my opinion, there are stronger and more interactive ways to onboard a user. Since videos can be watched in passing, it can be hard for new users to fully retain all the information covered in a video.
I like to always think doing>showing>telling. Of course, this all depends on your user base and what they gravitate to best.
Q —what’s the ideal time frame for a product tour in User Onboarding?more like can a video be 3 mins max or more due to attention span. What would you suggest it be?
Mariam Braimah — If you’re looking to create an on-boarding video, I’d suggest following the approach of marketing trailers to get a better sense of how long a video should be. YouTube marketing videos will probably be a good source to discover. However, I really would advise against creating a video to on-board a user. I touched on that more in the answer to the previous question.
Q — Hey mariam, at Netflix, do you consider how long it takes for a user to be fully onboarded? Regardless of the product, what would you say would be too long a time to have a user onboarded and ready to use?
Mariam Braimah — I would say timing here is more applied to how long it takes before you onboard a user, rather than how long it takes to onboard a user.
To make a gross generalization, you usually see onboarding happening within the first few interactions with a product. But for some users that can happen within hours, others that can take weeks.
At Netflix, we have 3 onboarding steps directly after a user signs up. But we also send a series of email messages during their first month to callout other features/functionalities they may not be aware of. So in this scenario onboarding is technically happening for 30 days. We tested into, and still are testing the timing in which we send emails. Currently some are triggered by a user action and others are timing based. I’d look at how many messages you’d like to send, and then determine when to share those within the users first few weeks on the service.
Q — Hi mariam, thank you for taking out time to chat with us about User Onboarding. While onboarding users, what is the ideal number of “tool tips” to give users? Or is it best to aid them with as many information as possible?
Mariam Braimah — You hit the nail on the head with your latter point. I like to challenge myself to use as few tool-tips as possible when creating a product. I really believe if you have to create a tool-tip for something, that means it can be better designed to be more intuitive. Of course, there are some things that are simply difficult to understand without further explanation and therefore tool-tips are necessary
Q — Hello mariam, so does the user on-boarding process end? and in use cases where new features are rolled do we still need to on-board users?
Mariam Braimah — Yes to your second question! If there are new features it’s always helpful to make users familiar with them. Your first question gets at what I’ve commented above, in that there isn’t a go to time limit for onboarding. As you continue to build and change your product, you’ll need to onboard your existing and new users. So in a sense, you can always be onboarding
We had to do this within the Netflix service when we first introduced the ability to download and changed our rating system from stars to thumbs up 😆
Q — Due to nature of Netflix as a product, what will an ideal win scenario of User Onboarding?
Mariam Braimah — At Netflix, we try to tie our onboarding to new user retention. The goal of our onboarding experience today, is largely to set our new members up for success in their membership.
We have 3 different steps that do this. The first is a survey for members to tell us what devices they will likely being using Netflix on, the second is additional profile setup, so adding profiles for other family members or friends and/or kids. The third and final step, is taste profile generation. This is where users can select a few titles they like from a sample of our catalogue to help us better personalize their Netflix.
Q — So, what are the onboarding checklists you use at Netflix/your projects? Like, what does your internal team refers to when designing the experience. ‘Boxes’ you tick to ensure the onboarding experience is at its best.
Mariam Braimah — ahh, so the metrics of success. Essentially we look at how introducing or removing onboarding steps impacts overall retention.
You can also try to track how it impacts overall interaction with the features you call out during on-boarding
Q — It’s me again, mariam 😊, What’s your take on having a Progress Bar while onboarding users? Do you think it’s really essential or it’s just an added feature?
Mariam Braimah — haha hello again! We’ve found that indicating some form of progress has been successful in our sign up and onboarding flow. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a progress bar, it can be a step counter or even copy ie: “you have one more step to go!”
Anything that indicates progress to the user has been successful for us.
Q — Is it safe to say that onboarding can and should also happen on other channels (e.g email) apart from the app or website?
Mariam Braimah — yes! I think messaging (notifications, email, sms, etc) are often overlooked in onboarding process. There comes a point where if you try to describe all functionalities in one sitting it can be really overwhelming. That’s where I think messaging channels can come in, and take some of the pressure off only educating within the product.
We use email to highlight additional features when a user first joins our service.
are there User Onboarding principles we should know of?
Q — Are there User Onboarding principles we should know of?
Mariam Braimah — There are lots of user onboarding principles and methodologies out there. I’d recommend checking out this free ebook called “Intercom On Onboarding” which provides a more in depth resource for how to think about onboarding. https://www.intercom.com/books/onboardin
Ooo and did I mention it’s free 😜
Q —Asides User Retention Rates, how else can the success of User Onboarding be measured?
Mariam Braimah — I think engagement with the onboarding method and or feature is a strong signal of success. If you see users aren’t interacting with a feature you highlight during onboarding, then that can be a good sign that it’s not being introduced appropriately. The same can be said about the inverse scenario. If users are highly engaged with a feature you’ve onboarding them on, then that’s a great sign it’s working!
Q — Do you think geographical locations is a major factor that designers should consider in user on-boarding?
Mariam Braimah — Yes, geography can be a factor to not only user onboarding but the overall design approach. Certain product features can be more valuable to certain regions than others.
However, I’ve found that it’s better to segment user populations by behaviors rather than geo. Often times, a power user in Ghana has less in common with a new user in Ghana, and more in common with with a power user in Nigeria
Q — Hello mariam, Can you talk a little about how you tell a coherent story to a user as you move them through the sign up funnel? How do you make sure the story stays coherent when other designers are working on features that come before or after yours?
Mariam Braimah — haha hello friend! This is something that you and I definitely have a lot of first hand experience with. I wish I had a good answer to this, but tbh I don’t really know the best approach outside of overly communicating with your design teammates and trying to remain aware of what they are doing. Open to any other suggestions!
Q — how are duplicate users handled in Netflix’s User On-boarding?
Mariam Braimah — As much as possible, we try to prevent users from going through our flow twice. usually by identifying if their email matches a member profile. You could also see if usernames or phone numbers match a user profile as well.
Q — At what point does it stop being an onboarding and start being considered a feature? Also, at Netflix, when someone is watching a seasonal movie and it shows `Skip recap`, does that count has onboarding?
Mariam Braimah — I’m going to need to think on this one more. But initial thoughts are, “skip recap” is definitely a feature. If it were to be called out during onboarding, I think it would look more like a tooltip explaining what skip recap does. But this goes back to an earlier question, where I mentioned if something requires a tool tip it probably can be designed more intuitively. Skip recap is a perfect example, where I think it’s fairly self explanatory what it does.Overall, I think if a user interacts with a feature once, there is little need to keep onboarding them about said feature. Their interaction could be viewed as a implied signal that they are aware of the feature
Q — Do you think on-boarding processes appeals differently to different OS users e.g Android and iOS. If so what are the major tips you consider for different OSes.
Mariam Braimah — I think WhatsApp does a good job of differentiating their app by platform. If I understand correctly, they try to mirror the relative platforms messaging mechanisms. This seems like a great approach b/c it is familiar to the users.
When possible I’d recommend, but in the case of Netflix there aren’t any iOS/android specific features I can think of that would require us to do this.
Q — One last one from me mariam 😅, So when creating on-boarding flows what is most important to focus on? the features of the product or the benefits/value it provides for the user. I have seen cases where certain features of a product has little or no benefit to the end user.
Mariam Braimah — Wow, amazing question. I have so many thoughts on this, but this is where being a designer and advocating for the end user is so important.
I think focusing on the benefit/value it provides the user is most important. But I’m sure some Product Managers may believe otherwise Ultimately, I think a good product creates features that are valuable and beneficial to their end users.
Thank you Namnso Ukpanah for the invitation, thank you to the Figma Africa community for this thoughtful and engaging conversation. It has been amazing!!! I have to run to a team offsite now, Please don’t hesitate to reach out or DM me if you have any further questions about on-boarding, sign up, or design in general! Oooh.. and I’ll leave with a few places/flows I’ve found inspiring:
One of my favorite resources is https://www.useronboard.com/ I don’t know him personally but Samuel Hulick is a god send for making it his full time occupation to walk-through the sign up/on-boarding experiences of different products. He gives detailed page by page tear downs of the sign up flows of some of the most popular products. Netflix’s older sign up flow is actually featured on there too!
I spend a lot of time signing up for products and screen shot or capture video of any that I may find inspiring. Here are a few I’ve enjoyed recently:
https://www.notion.so/ — does a good job of combining the sign up and onboarding process. Allowing users to interact with features and the product while simultaneously signing up for it. The gradual engagement process I touched on before.
*Spotify* — Has an amazing taste generator onboarding step, that does a great job of showcasing the breadth of artist and music within it’s catalogue.
https://www.nudgetext.com/ — I’m not sure if you can access this outside of the states, but if you can I’d highly recommend giving it a try. It’s a messaging service that recommends things to do throughout San Francisco. But it really takes this metaphor of onboarding being equivalent to welcoming someone to the extreme. It uses casual conversational copy/tone, and highly interactive steps to engage users while having them sign up to the service. It really feels like your friend is teaching you how to use the app, which is what I’d classify as the ultimate onboarding experience.
Okay friends, talk to you soon 👋😄.
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