Designing Onboarding Experiences: 8 Tips for You to Read in Your PJs
During this quarantine, along with Flux IT’s XD team, we decided to collect a number of tips that are useful to guide our daily work. Let’s take a look!
100% digital experiences have made their way into our everyday lives: they allow us to open a bank account, hire our car’s insurance or have a medical assistant without touching a piece of paper or setting foot in an office.
These ways, unforeseen years ago, are becoming more and more common, driven not only by the evolving technological possibilities but also, symbiotically, by a generation that promotes new patterns of interaction and behavior; a generation that demands them. That is to say: there’s no turning back.
When it comes to designing the onboarding experience for a digital product, we should take into account several aspects that take part in its development, many of which we face in our daily work, which I want to share with you as 8 tips.
- Make users feel supported and safe. We must provide a reliable experience, especially if the digital product will contain sensitive data (for example, by adding biometrics, which also saves time).
2. Anticipate constraints. Many times, the processes we design are complex and demand certain paperwork or requirements to proceed. Getting ahead of them will allow the user to have more control over the situation.
3. Moreover, it’s advisable to divide the interaction into steps or instances, with the purpose of reducing each task’s cognitive workload (especially for the most complex ones). Either way, to help users understand in what part of the process they are, we can use progress bars, so that they don’t feel lost.
4. Another control we must hand over to the users has to do with being able to resume the process whenever they feel like it. Designing the possibility of leaving and resuming at some other time is key.
5. We must always take all the instances outside the application into account and design the interactions that it may have with other products or services. Time and again, onboarding processes require validations that take place outside the app: often in the same device (such as validating an e-mail or a mobile phone number) and even in another physical location (like an ATM).
6. Consulting with external services (National Population Registry, Federal Tax Bureau, etc) is another frequent aspect. In these cases, it is important to show the users that our system is checking or validating information and that it can take a moment. Being honest will help us build trust. We can also include resources such as microinteractions to entertain the users in the meantime.
7. Creating a functional and attractive visual experience, through illustrations and animations aimed at helping users perform their tasks in an intuitive and fun way, but which also build an emotional connection.
8. Despite the complexity of the processes, we must convey a simple experience. This is when the narrative (along with the visual aspect) gains importance. The process must be narrated as a story in which the users are the main characters and move forward until they successfully reach the end.
As a bonus track, we must also take into account that although we started talking about 100% digital experiences without leaving the couch, these must also consider giving the users an option to pause them or resume them in another channel (for example, moving from the laptop to the mobile phone). Hence, we must also design different paths to avoid any kind of friction (for example, so that the operator won’t ask for the data that was already entered).
Thus, we’ll achieve an enjoyable and unhindered experience because, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is our clients’ satisfaction and they will be the ones to recommend (or not) their products and services to their family and friends.
Feel free to share any other tips in this article’s comments section!
