Validate your Value before building your Onboarding
I am a Product Manager for a mobile app that helps people with learning disabilities learn to communicate.
Last week I helped a lady called Olive, who wanted to download our app to use with her son. Olive was 91, had very little experience with technology and I attempted to help her over the phone, without any kind of shared visual.
“Can you please tap on the address bar for me?”
“Where is that?”
“At the top of the page, just under the clock”
“I don’t have a clock”
“What do you see in the middle at the very top of the screen?”
“It says 1, 5, 3, 2”
“Okay, great, that is the clock. Can you look just below that for me, where it says Search or Enter Website Name?”
“No, I can’t see that”
“What can you see?”
“I can see h, t, t, p…, some dots, a line, w, no another line, then a w, w….”
“Great! That’s the address bar, we just need to clear it”
“How do I do that?”
“You can tap on the little x at the right hand side of the bar”
“No, I can’t see that”
It was slow going, taking almost three hours over two days but we got there in the end. It was challenging for me but I’ve no doubt that it was worse for Olive and I couldn’t have been more impressed with her for making it through what was obviously a hugely uncomfortable task.
If you work very closely with technology, it can be hard to understand the level of discomfort that it can create for those people that are not familiar with it. I have always been conscious of this fact but the phone call with Olive made me realise that however “user friendly” I make our product, it’s always going to be uncomfortable for some.
On the plus side, Olive was prepared to persevere because of the value our product offers.
I place a great deal of value on user Onboarding (and am currently obsessed with it as I’m redesigning ours) but as long as a customer wants to use your product, I mean REALLY wants to use your product, then you are already halfway there.
Obviously, do everything you can to make it as easy as possible for new users, but your efforts will be better placed and far better received once your messaging is correctly tuned to your audience.
The job of onboarding is not just to show a new user how to use your product but to reinforce why they should use it. It should reiterate the value proposition you make in your messaging (the benefit that brought them to your product) and then show how your product delivers it to them, as quickly and as clearly as possible. Revisiting your Onboarding once you’ve validated your messaging will undoubtedly lead to it being more effective.
If you’re a startup searching for market fit, then your messaging is probably changing slightly over time, as you explore different opportunities. There’s never a shortage of things to do in a startup, but before you revisit your Onboarding, make sure that your messaging is up to date, clearly communicated and that you’ve been speaking to your users as much as possible to validate it.
My phone call with Olive came at a perfect time. I am currently overhauling our product’s Onboarding and I am designing it with Olive in mind.
Once Olive has tested it, I will share it here.
Title picture used with the concent of Samuel from www.useronboard.com — The perfect place to start if you want to find out more about user Onboarding.
