Thoughts on User Onboarding.
Good First Impression is just a Chance to Get Started
We all know, even when we don’t like to recognize it. First impression matters, and also in the digital world.
But let’s get honest here, as much you can nail your first impression, does not mean the job is done. You still have to prove their assumptions.
— If you do? You’re on the right track.
— If you don’t? You lost your chance! But no need of drama. I guess there’re always second chances if you really mean it.
So, what I am saying here?
User onboarding is obviously crucial for any digital product and it’s product flow. When talking about onboarding it is not only about a product introduction to first-time users. I am also referring to all those first impressions users build while being presented a product, a new feature, new concept of interaction, etc.
User will assess the benefits of your product also after signing up. If you didn’t convey clearly your value proposition, forget about user wasting their priceless time to explore and understand your features. In fact, onboarding is just the beginning of any relationship.
Best definition I found:
Design an onboarding flow requires an understanding of your target audience and their behaviour. — Ideally, before diving among infinite collection of swipe-throughs, or “getting inspired” with that fancy screens you saw last week when downloading a new app. Think about the purpose of what you are about to do. Ideally, this process involves mapping personas to an experience, so we can quickly answer key initial questions, such as:
- What are the real motivations?
- What is their ability? What are their experience using similar tools?
- What they expect?
- When the “aha-moment” occurs? — that magical instant when your users understand the value of your product. So, they are willing to buy or deepen on your product.
- What about the pain-moments? Can we assess when failure is coming?
Know what we want to accomplish will help to create an intuitive and self-explanatory interface, coming naturally to choose which technique is most appropriate to do so. Let’s have a look at some common examples:
Passive walkthrough. It’s one of the most common. It can help to highlight a brand identity, and present key features. It’s good for products with common interaction patterns.
Interactive walkthrough. In this case is the same than the previous but more powerful because it is micro animated. The feature can be explained and experienced. At once users learn about the feature, understand the solution provided, and how to use it.
Custom first experience. Sometimes the best way to show how a product works is to quickly customize a first experience by gathering some basic information.
People don’t like to give up a lot of personal information. So we will want to reduce uncomfortability at this stage. Ideally, you can give some immediate reward or value before an endless list of questions, or even better that they answer some information without realising it.
New releases. When your product has new and even better ways to do something. Sometimes features are a fiasco because they never get used. In this case the best option is to showcase it when the user is trying to do something with a longer journey, or in inefficient way.
Premium accounts. Upgrading users to paid accounts is not easy. Of course you are providing additional features, otherwise why would them pay? But we have to consider that once one is paying the expectations increase dramatically.
The most common and simple method is the feature blocking, a barrier between features and paid content. User can see there is something else, but they cannot use it. There is another better version in case you have the opportunity. When there are different ways to get from A to B is the perfect scenario to show all your skills. Users tend to be lazy, or at least they value their time. So if by paying a bit more they can do it faster, or nicer, or better in any sense, you have a good chance that some of them get on board.
Thoughts
There are countless onboarding options. The central issue is to analyse what can emerge from analysing the needs of your product and your users.
Don’t forget to treat it as a relationship, we all want a win-win relation. Both for equal. We are both important, so together we can grow to something better.
Identify your goals, touch-points of engagement, test it and iterate it. Continual improvement is key to optimize user activation rate. To do it so, you can use Analytics to assess where you have succeed and where you have failed.
Ultimately, the best onboarding is to retain users over time by continuously show them how to get the most of your product. Sometimes you can not show all your cards at once, you could overwhelm them. But step by step, at every turn a piece of useful information can work. Sometimes people just have a crush, that’s awesome! But a lot of other times you just have to go slow, showing them what is your real value.
