Onboarding Your Users: Story is Everything!

Onboarding is the process of helping new users understand and experience how your product is going to help them achieve their goal.

Welcome aboard! (Image)

Jory MacKay asserts that onboarding is all about proving to your users that your product is the solution to the problem they are looking for. That’s why they found you in the first place, right? But if you can’t do that quickly, users are going to leave. And how to avoid that?

Tell a story.

Every killer onboarding starts with a story.

It is tremendously helpful to think of onboarding not in terms of activating features, but in terms of how our product makes its users successful. We earn their engagement by making them better people, not simply by making a better product.

People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.

Samuel Hulick showing how customers use products to design a “new me”, from his Designing for Delight Workshop.

For that reason, the onboarding experience shouldn’t be defined by the touchpoints the product/service creates, but instead by the improvement we provide. It’s not about getting people from point A to point B in our platform; it’s about getting them from point A to point B in their lives (cheesy, but true): better marketers, better CRO managers, better entrepreneurs. That’s the recipe for loyal, ongoing engagement.

The lifecycle

We have to make sure we know what progress looks like in our user’s life and not just on their screen. According to Len Markidan, for most businesses there are two key milestones that need to be reached before the user can reach their full value potential:

1. The moment they sign up for your product (acquisition)
2. The moment they achieve their “first success” with the product

User’s lifecycle by groovehq.com

Therefore, a smart onboarding strategy should focus not only on the acquisition part (sign up & registration) but also on helping the new users to go from (1) — >(2), from acquisition to the “first success”. This can be described as an activation point, a first big milestone that helps new users understand the value of using your product or service. This process is extremely important and it should be as fast and smooth as possible.

However, on the way to the “first success” you can still provoke different “AHA! moments” in your users, so that they are engaged in the platform. Along with those, there are also milestones your users might achieve while experiencing your product. The timeline should look a bit like this:

This is a similar approach to gamification, as shown by David Teodorescu in his article “Gamification: A guide for designers to a misunderstood concept”.

Gamification is basically a strategy to add elements from games to non-games products or services in order to promote user engagement by setting rules, goals, feedback, rewards and motivation to the overall experience.

But what is an “AHA! moment”?

This is a phenomenon in the software business, the point “where the clouds suddenly part for the user and the high-level benefits and abstract notions you’ve been preaching immediately become startlingly, excitingly clear”. It is the must-have experience that keeps people coming back, and make sure new users experience it.

Sadly, this “AHA! moment” usually comes way too late.

That moment.

If your “AHA! moment” comes deep inside your product, you’ve already lost. The key is to get them to understand your product in the context of their own lives, such as:

“Wait, I can rent movies without going to the video store?”

“Hold on, I just drag my files into this one folder and they’re automatically on all my devices?”

“Whoa, I can have super strong passwords without having to remember any of them?”

Another a-ha moment — but not exactly what we’re talking about 😁

Remember: Onboarding is not only in the beginning!

The user’s lifecycle does not stop on the first contact with the product. The onboarding should be a never ending process, taking care of all touch points in terms of new features and product updates, for example. Some of the areas to have in mind when building a top-notch onboarding strategy for your product are:

• Welcome message: to welcome the user in the platform, to give them the credentials to log in and to move them from the inbox to the app or platform as efficiently as possible.
• Getting Started guide: to introduce the first steps inside the product. The sooner users take action, the sooner they’ll garner value from your product.
• First Success & Milestones rewards: at this point in the lifecycle, users have taken action and have reached their first success or a milestone that deserves recognition. This action merits not only an award, but also a conversation. It is important to help users envision their improvement.
• New feature & Product Updates heads-up and explanation: to announce our new releases, small or big, and to give users constant feedback whenever a new update is launched. Always offer them documentation!
• Retention: Educate users on specific tasks and features, on a step-by-step approach, and to be more benefit-focused. to highlight the results they can get with your product.
• Upsell: at this point, users have been using your product for some time. You can weave an upsell opportunity by offering a producrt upgrade or showing off a paid feature and its benefits, for example.

All of these topics can be approached via different means of communication such as an emailing lifecycle, communication in-app and contextual help.

First impressions are rough. Thus it’s a good idea to invest time and research into crafting the appropriate onboarding strategy because it is not about just that first moment, it’s a journey that establishes and maintains trust with your users.

“A great onboarding experience will help your users use your product to build habits that rely on its features as an important part of their lives” — Bree Chapin @ Toptal

Thanks for stopping by 🙂