The Truth About User Onboarding
It isn’t a metric, feature or content, it’s an outcome — successful users.
A lot of online tools suck! And they also suck our time!
We are constantly looking for a better way of doing things because we recognize there’s a need to grow or adapt, and a need to make a change.
And yet, after searching for a solution and finding an interesting product, signing up and clicking around a little bit, we tend to churn after a few minutes. Forever. Even if it’s free.
Why do we do this?
It’s because we didn’t understand the product or we didn’t experience enough value to believe that this product will impact our lives for the better.
And if it’s not making us better — it’s not worth our time.
There are millions of other solutions to try out.
We have developed a highly efficient ‘time wasting’ and ‘not going to help me’ filter in our brain that is helping us evaluate tools and information really fast.
The websites that we leave for good are the ones that didn’t grab our attention at first, educate us through the process and make us experience value of the product quickly.
These are the sites that have a bad user onboarding process.
What is user onboarding really?
When it comes to user onboarding, a lot of people think it is a tour, tooltip or a demo data in their products.
They are partially right, but at the same time very wrong.
Tour, tooltip, demo data and a lot of other things could be parts of user onboarding, but onboarding is a much bigger concept.
User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.
It isn’t a metric, feature or content, it’s an outcome — successful users.
Onboarding is also the number one (silent) growth problem for software companies.
The bad thing is that it’s often the last thing to get implemented when building a product and usually ends up being a few simple screens to explain the product or useless tool-tips which slow down and disengage users.
On the contrary, onboarding should be designed as a part of the core product, since it is the only feature that every user will experience.
Product teams should start thinking about onboarding while they are still in the UX wireframing phase and define how they will give value to new users and make them more successful even after the first usage and as quickly as possible.
You can look at onboarding as a phase a customer goes through while making the decision whether or not they want to use your product.
That is why it’s so important to make it right.
What is successful user onboarding?
Great user onboarding feels effortless, demonstrates value, and bridges the gap between users’ expectations and what the product can help them achieve.
The best onboarding is the kind that pays less attention to getting users to complete steps the business cares about and more about getting them to those “successful moments”.
Onboarding your customers for success is hard since it requires you to focus on user goals and put your business goals in second place.
That means that you should focus on understanding why users hire your product and what goals they want to achieve with it, rather than focusing on making them fill out a profile, have a 100% on a progress bar or some other business/product metric.
Successful onboarding starts when the users start believing they are closer to achieving their goals with your product and ends up with them actually achieving the goals for which they ‘hired’ your product in the first place.
In order to successfully onboard users, you have to understand who they REALLY are and what goals they REALLY want to achieve with your product.
If you think you know the answer and it comes from your opinion alone, without a bunch of data to support it, you are probably wrong. Luckily, it really isn’t so hard to find out.
Ask them!
If you truly want to make your customers successful, ask them: “Who are you and what can we do to make you successful with our product as fast as possible?”
Have in mind that different people will have different needs, but with this approach, you can collect data about user demographics, industries and understand how your product can help different user segments.
Accept the change, align your product onboarding with feedback and you’ll end up with successful customers.
Making your customers successful will ensure that you achieve all other business goals like revenue, growth, and conversion.
Remember, you’ll probably only get one chance from one user, and it’s important to nail the onboarding process.
Summary
- A lot of online businesses are failing because of a bad user onboarding process.
- People think user onboarding is a tour, tooltip or a demo data in their products, but it’s more important than that.
- User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.
- It isn’t a metric, feature or content, it’s an outcome — successful users.
- It is also a phase a customer goes through while deciding whether they want to use your product or not.
- User onboarding should be designed as a part of the core product since it is the only feature that every user will experience.
- Great user onboarding feels effortless, demonstrates value, and bridges the gap between users’ expectations and what the product can help them achieve.
- Focus on understanding why users hire your product and what goals they want to achieve with it.
- Ask your users: “Who are you and what can we do to make you successful with our product?”
- Align your product onboarding with user feedback and you’ll end up with a lot of successful customers.
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