User Onboarding Best Practices
http://www.appcues.com/blog/user-onboarding-best-practices
User Onboarding starts with knowing your customers.
Onboarding needs to be all about the customer, not just exclusively about the product (logistics, how-tos, nitty gritty details).
Start by creating a seamless user experience centered around personas and jobs-to-be-done to align the promise of your product with the onboarding experience.
Personas: Who is signing up for your product
Jobs to be done: Why are they signing up for your product
Need to understand what success looks like for each of the personas and the jobs => frame onboarding around achieving that success.
Examples of onboarding
- Persona-based onboarding
Canva, for example, offers three options for users to select who they are and why they’re on the app. This makes the onboarding process feel personalized to the user, it also allows PMs to segment the experience to the persona.
If a user selects that they’re using Canva for work, it triggers a specific onboarding experience with templates for work-based design projects, like presentations or pamphlets. If they’re using the app for personal reasons, Canva’s onboarding experience might list sample projects like birthday invitations. - Job stories to train users
Basecamp doesn’t have users start with a blank slate. They start with really specific job stories. Basecamp quite literally asks users what jobs they need done, and then takes them to a specific template for that job. If the job-to-be-done is a check-in, you can use this sample. If your job-to-be-done is messaging, go to the other. All new users play around with a sample Basecamp to learn the ins and outs, and then go on to make their own.
Identify your aha! moment
Beyond just outlining what they can get out of the app, users need to get a feel for it during onboarding. When the lightbulb goes off, users can start getting value from the product. This is called the aha! moment. Jobs-to-be-done is strategic. Aha! moments are tactical.
The way to get users to stick around is to get them to an aha! moment — fast. As Samuel Hulick says in Elements of User Onboarding, you need to give users “a small win that provides them with a positive outcome to their first excursion, and one that can be used as a springboard for future efforts.”
Two best ways to identify
- Work backwards from your product data.
Onboarding is about finding your best customers, then working backwards to figure out what actions they took early on.
You can’t plan a great onboarding experience if you don’t know what your Aha! moments are. Once you’ve pinned those down, you can map out the entire user journey — onboarding and beyond.
Equally important in onboarding is identifying your red flag metrics. What are the behavioral cohorts that don’t lead to stickiness. - Take a dive into user feedback
Map out and benchmark the user journey
There are 3 stages of retention that you need to plan for in your user journey:
- Week 1 retention (inpsiring the aha! moment)
- Mid-term retention (habit building)
- Long-term retention (keeping the spark alive)
It’s really important to map user journeys for every stage of the user lifecycle. You need to design a path guiding them through the features that help them achieve their goal, no matter what stage they’re in. That means:
- Defining the stages
- Defining goals for each stage
- Setting the right prompts to help users achieve each goal
Once you have those, it’s time to plot your ap. For every stage, you need to keep users on track in your journey by mapping it out, and continuing to help them stay on the planned path.
Stage 1: Clear the path for the aha! moment
It’s important to generate early value for the user, and that means clearing the path. Your job is to remove snags and make sure users stay on course and shorten the time to aha!
Best practices include:
- Avoid email confirmation steps, since it takes users out of the app
- Answer questions right as they arise, use a chat app like Olark as a strategy formaking users feel special.
A lot of this involves removing barriers, which first requires identifying them. One way to do this is through user testing, which can reveal friction points you didn’t even know were there. By getting an unbiased third party to narrate as they go through your onboarding experience, you might learn about barriers you didn’t think were a problem.
Stage 2: Build the habit
Sean Ellis stated that Twitter discovered something really powerful in cohort analysis about habit building: “once a user follows 30 people, they’re more or less active forever.” Analytics tools can help you uncover what your app’s version of this is, but the goal is to turn the product from a “once in a while” tool into an “everyday” tool. That’s going to take some nudging from you.
Here’s an example straight from Twitter — they email new users whenever they have a new follower, and send additional emails with suggestions of who they should follow to get to that magical number of 30.
In addition to emails, you can use Tooltips or push notifications to give users a nudge. The end goal is to just keep users coming back and making a habit out of the app. Sometimes this requires incentivizing using an app every single day, for instance, through a reward for using an app regularly.
Stage 3: Re-engage to get back on track
Long-term retention involves looking at the retention curve well past the first couple days. Instead, your job is to make sure that your old users — the ones who completed the first couple phases of your onboarding, are still there, still using the product, and continue to use whatever new features you release.
There are a ton of strategies to bring your inactive users back — it’s just a matter of testing out different strategies to see what works. If someone is straying from the path, try sending an email to prompt activity (or further activity). This re-engagement email from Earbits takes the “break-up” strategy to heart, but is really effective.
Test out your UX patterns
There’s on question you need to ask yourself when evaluating which UI onboarding workflow pattern to use”
How can users get the most value out of this workflow while investing the least amount of time?
Strategies to get users to complete onboarding workflow
- Assign some homework with active walkthroughs
If you’re going to do an active product tour, it can’t feel like you’re leading users by the ear through an introductory activity. They have to want to complete it. Here’s how to create easy-to-use walkthroughs.
The app Robin Hood has users complete a “fake” purchase in their app tutorial. It allows them to get to the Aha! moment (even though it’s a simulated one) really quickly. It ends with a clear call to action to sign up, which removes friction.
Watch out for: Never ending product tours. More than 5 steps in your product tour? You might want to cut some. - Use tooltips
Tooltips are a minimally interruptive way to get your point across. Since they’re triggered one at a time, it doesn’t feel like information overload — they just come up naturally as a new user moves through your app.
Action-driven Tooltips can also be really effective, especially in the early stages of onboarding. Instead of having an opt-out feature, action-driven tooltips require users to check a box or fill out a form before they can move on to the next stage. So if you’re looking for a way to capture information, or there’s a feature you really need users to understand, that might be the way to go.
Watch out for: Overcomplicating the UI. Tooltips are all about simplicity. If you get too many in there at one point, it confuses the user and totally defeats the purpose. - Progress bars and checklists
When users know exactly what’s expected of them in an onboarding workflow (and especially, how close they are to finishing it), they’re likely to keep their eye on the finish line and actually complete the workflow.
Watch out for: An impossible to-do list. If you have a laundry list and that progress bar just barely inches forward as the user moves through your workflow, they’re likely to just give up. It’s far better to just set benchmarks, and encourage movement, than to overwhelm and see users drop off. - Coach Marks
It’s a fullscreen takeover that can have really sudden effects on how users engage with your interface. Because they’re full-screen, they can explain a complicated UI with just a few tips.
They’re especially great for minimal design interfaces, like this one from StumbleUpon. If icons don’t have labels, users need to learn what they are early on in their lifecycle.
Watch out for: Too many coach marks in one screen. If the full-screen takeover gets too cluttered with arrows and text, it’s hard for users to know what to pay attention to. Try limiting coach marks to three per page. - Modals and Sliders
Modals have a lot of different use cases, but they combine aspects we love of coach marks and progress bars. They’re great for new features later in the user lifecycle, or during onboarding when a user is exploring a new feature of the app.
Never Stop Onboarding
Onboarding is a progressive process. Your real job is to never stop onboarding — to continue helping existing customers, but also to review the data, iterate, and create an even more seamless experience for your future users.
Whether you’re getting to the first aha! moment, encouraging habit-building, or engaging long-standing users, it’s all about experimenting. You need to customize your experience, and that means playing around with the different tools at your disposal.
