How to approach user onboarding for products
In each entry in this “conversation” series I talk to a designer/product manager/engineer on a topic. I want to make basic practical skills education transparent and free.
Today I’m talking to Samuel Hulick, a user onboarding specialist and a user experience designer. He also made user onboarding reviews of different products called User Teardowns which you can find here.
How did you get interested in onboarding and what’s the story behind starting the user teardowns?
I started my career as an engineer and then got into user experience design after I found myself consistently advocating on the users behalf. When I was contracting as a user experience designer I noticed there was one part of the process that was getting overlooked repeatedly which was the onboarding. That’s how I got really interested in the onboarding aspect.
As for the user teardowns I wrote a book which took three months and I needed a way to build awareness about the book so I could have someone to sell it to when I finished! The user teardowns started as a way to build an audience and I was exceedingly lucky for them to take off the way it did.
In most startups people approach onboarding as more of an afterthought. How do you suggest people think about onboarding?
I was very surprised to the extent of that myself. People work so hard to market and create the product and if you look at how many people actually get to experience the core value of the product it’s very sobering. For me there are a few things that are as motivating as identifying a big gap between how effective something is and how effective it could be. We put so much effort into creating a product and then have so many people sign up for it and bounce out. There are statistics that roughly 50% of the signups never come back a second time. So for those half what could have been different is the question.
As for how to approach that from a product design standpoint for every user who signs up for the product if they don’t get to a point where they don’t get to experience the value of the product the product might as well not exist for them. If you can’t get someone through the first five minutes of your product all the advanced features that you are working on, all the power user features are invisible to them. My suggestion is to focus on what is the absolute minimum that needs to happen for someone to get any value in your product and how can you put that front and center. I would much rather have 75% of the users who sign up for the product and experience some value sign back in to experience the full value of the product. Rather than a small percentage of people making it all the way but the majority of them never experiencing the core value of the product at all. Onboarding is the highest leverage opportunities and one of the best ways to increase lifetime value (LTV) .
Onboarding is typically thought as tool tips or intro screens, what do you define as onboarding for a product?
Onboarding is looking at what is the core value you provide and how can you help your users guide themselves to that value. It’s not telling them about certain features but guiding them to make meaningful accomplishments. The other myth about onboarding is that it’s not the first few seconds or minutes when they interact with the product but for some of them to make those meaningful accomplishments it may take even weeks or months. It’s a long term game.
Slapping a tool tip tour or intro screens is not onboarding. Giving them a couple of quick pointers when they are trying to make heads or tails of the product is not the best strategy for onboarding. There is very little evidence that intro tours work. Intro tours actually make the company feel like they have solved the problem rather than actually solving it.
Tool tip tours seem very appealing to put them in when you are working on the product but when you think of times you’ve experienced them firsthand as a user in the past, it’s rarely the case they have been beneficial. I can’t think of a single time when it was personally super helpful. The three main concerns I have with them are:
1. They are distracting: They interrupt you when you are trying to explore the product yourself, they aren’t immersive and superficial from the rest of the product.
2. They are controlling: They take the control out of your hands and are relegating you to be a button clicker rather than someone who has agency within the product.
3. They are temporary: You login and click, click, click and they are gone forever. So if there was super important information in there hopefully you have retained it otherwise it’s gone.
I have written an article about this in detail here for anyone who wants to read more.
How do you think through onboarding for feature rich applications like salesforce ?
I like to think about it as what I call situation driven design. Someone is in a situation they don’t want to be in and they are hoping that your product will get them in a situation they would rather be in. The purpose of a product is to help you transition from one situation to the other. For example, let’s say that I want to manage projects better and more effectively and I think Basecamp will help me be in that situation. It starts with credibly being able to promise that you can transition them from one situation to another. But the onboarding is not the promise it’s following through on that promise of a better situation. The onboarding is not over till you have gotten them to experience some degree of the success that you promised that led them to find your product to begin with.
Onboarding is not clicking around and looking at features, it has to help them make the meaningful accomplishments which they were hoping for and I like to align my design my efforts around that. When you get people to click around and “activate features”, it’s not so much about getting from point a to point b in your app but it’s about getting from point a to point b in their lives.
What are some good questions/ ux principles to keep in mind when designing an onboarding for your product?
There are three principles I like to keep in mind:
1. It should be integrated and embedded within the product themselves, rather than being distracting — An example design pattern are blank or empty states — for instance if you log into a project management software there is a create a project button which shows where your projects go. It is integrated in the product and part of it as opposed to adding something to it.
2. It should be self guiding as opposed to controlling — For example a tool tip which says “create a project” is just clearing confusion on an interface level rather than helping to take action. People are willing to act only when they get the value out of the product. Design your onboarding around why someone is using it to begin with. Slack is a great example of this, when you are signing up and creating your account there is very little info they ask upfront but they ask that info through slackbot where you can experience part of the product yourself.
3. It should be steadfast and persistent — The last thing you want to do is throw a ton of information at someone and then disappear. If you take someone on this brief feature tour and then hope that they remember it when it becomes relevant to them in a couple of weeks that’s a bad bet. Instead fold them into empty states or progression systems or lifecycle emails. If you reframe the onboarding question — how do we guide people most reliably to be most successful when they are trying to adopt the product into their lives then you can look at it from the perspective of a long game and a timeframe of weeks or months.
Progression systems can take a couple of different forms. Some products provide a to-do list which are achievable pieces and show them the progress you are making as you finish them. For instance Linkedin’s profiles completion percentages as you set up your profile is an example. Any way you can demonstrate to people how far along the road they are and what explicit steps they can take to make further progress is a great way to onboard them.
What gaps do you typically see in onboarding in various products?
As a general caveat, if you are paying attention to your conversion metrics and it’s working for you I’m not dismissive of any design pattern in a vacuum.
The biggest gap is how people think of onboarding which is more of a way to give a lot of information initially and then forget about the user. Things which I think are not of great impact are tool tip tours, intro screens or if you download a new app there are sometimes a series of screens you swipe through with cute illustrations. One good rule of thumb is to assume if it’s skippable assume it’s skipped.
Intro videos and videos are all telling people things rather than guiding them to take action which is what onboarding should be. You don’t want to be the boring teacher who just tells them things and then leaves them to figure it out later you want them to be accomplishment oriented.
What are your fav onboarding examples?
1. Slack
2. Duolingo — this is one of best onboarding examples I’ve ever reviewed.
3. Quartz — what they do really well is they integrate it so deeply that it’s hard to distinguish which part is onboarding and which part is the product which is what I aspire to do in onboarding.
On a last note what tools do you use to make teardowns?
I record my screen using screenflow and when I go through the onboarding I talk through it aloud. Then i go back through the recording and then pull individual screen into Keynote and then turn the commentary into annotations within keynote and then post those images. I have written more about my process here is anyone wants to read about it in detail!
