Marco Polo: A User Onboarding Masterclass
A big part of the so-called online experience is starting to pivot.
5 years ago there was a collective obsession with expanding your network via as many platforms as possible, amassing hundreds and thousands of followers to whom you could blast your every waking thought. Over time, the average person’s audience became quite large, and the level of noise in their feed obtrusive. The content of the largest social media platforms became more commercialized and impersonal.
As a result, online social circles are contracting. People are retreating to more intimate mediums. Group texts and DMs are replacing tweets and posts as the way that friends engage with one another. Internet power users now seek platforms for group interaction that can combine the casual privacy of a friend's basement with the mobility of the web.
Enter Marco Polo, a social app where users swap video chats in a real-time walkie-talkie interaction style. It’s like Snapchat, but for people with credit scores! It’s a private means of communication with friends and family that leans less on the feed-based engagement style of apps like Snapchat but is still more interactive than texting. I’m convinced that part of its success is predicated on a truly impressive approach to user onboarding.
After signing up for Marco Polo, you’re greeted by an instructional video called “Getting Started with Marco Polo”. This one video is the centerpiece of Marco Polo’s entire user onboarding strategy. It encapsulates everything right with their approach to teaching a user about their app and motivating them to use it.
This onboarding video contains tactics that should act as a lesson to any product team whose aim is to convert new users into power users.
Let’s break down the top 3 tricks that are at play here:
1. Efficiency
The video itself is 63 seconds long. A single minute is all it takes to teach a user how to make the most of their Marco Polo product experience, while simultaneously showing off the UI of the app itself, so you’re not left without the context of what’s being explained.
Speed is important. Why?
- Because users are increasingly more impatient or attention-deficit.
- Because single sign-on and integrations with Google, Apple, Facebook, and other sites that manage your online identity have set a precedent for faster account creation.
But mostly…
- Because part of the objective of a great user onboarding experience is to shorten the time between a user's first interaction with a product, and their first success with that product.
This success could be defined by the user contributing to a product’s pre-defined success metric, perhaps the North Star metric.
Even better, this success could be defined by the user spending “goal time” within the product, i.e. performing an action that brings them real value, like sending a text within a messaging app or making a deposit within a banking app. The time spent creating an account, configuring settings, and learning how to use the product itself could be considered “tool time” which, as UX thought leader Jared Spool puts it, “when extended doesn’t add to the quality of the result.”
To maximize goal time or the completion of a north star metric, we need to maximize efficiency in the onboarding process (minimize “tool time”). Marco Polo asks for 1 minute of your time upfront to understand how to get the most out of their product, and it works. In 63 seconds, you’re off to the races, equipped to fire off a perfectly inane video message (carefully obscuring your lack of pants) to your closest friends.
2. Social Proof
The term “Social Proof” was first coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book Influence. The Neilson Norman Group defines it as “a psychological phenomenon where people reference the behavior of others to guide their own behavior.” It’s used relentlessly in modern marketing and product development, often in the form of product reviews of varying types.
Social proof is on full display in Marco Polo’s onboarding.
It’s got real users, (or at least a casting director doing a great job selecting what looks like real users) describing how to use the product in their own words, while actively using the product.
Some other key nuances to their approach — they have a lot of users, with great diversity, showing the product. This is social proofing at it’s finest. An entire community of people welcoming you into the fold, establishing behavioral patterns for you to mirror, and spelling out their use cases for the product that could match your own. It’s a recipe for great motivation to use the app.
3. The How and the Why
Two crucial functions of user onboarding are to teach the user how the product functions and reinforce the value proposition that drove them to the product in the first place.
In the onboarding video, real users are shown using the real product, interacting with the actual UI. It’s not an abstract illustration, and it’s not a mockup you’re seeing, it’s real footage of real people really using the app. Plus, the video takes the format of a Marco Polo user experience, where you see clip after clip of selfie videos of varying length, whether in real-time or stored for later. They get you as close to the product experience as you can be without touching it yourself. This is a great way of teaching the users “how” (perhaps the most boring part of onboarding) in an engaging manner. To be clear, this video is optional. The UI has enough contextual guidance to teach a user as they interact, but why not also offer a product crash course that potentially shortens a user's path to success?
What’s more, the people you’re seeing use the product are pitching you the product. They’re telling you about it from their experience. They’re making points about keeping in touch with friends, how easy the app is to use, and how it’s just like “having a conversation in real life.” Surely Marco Polo has aligned the statements made in this video with the marketing messaging that motivated any first-time user to reach the platform from their website, an online ad, the app store, or word of mouth. In so doing, they effectively close the loop on the customer activation journey.
The Take-Away
At Weave, we deliver an incredibly robust product that acts as a true utility for our customers. It’s something our users interact with every day to help run their business and achieve great relationships with their customers. It requires a lot of upfront integration and configuration work to provide the right experience. The costs of failing to create a great user onboarding experience are huge. From a business perspective, it means customer churn. From the user perspective, it means taking time away from their business to adapt to a new tool. Our customers could even lose business should our tool fail to perform as expected.
We’re continually learning how to improve a dense onboarding process that involves both a hardware and a software installation. We’ve discovered that a truly great onboarding experience will transform the future of our product and help our industry-leading customer retention stay strong.
Not every product is the same. Weave is worlds apart from Marco Polo, but our product team, and every other product team, can benefit from the same lesson: give your users the tools to succeed upfront. The faster and more completely you can teach your users the how and the why of your product, the better they’ll be at using your product to achieve their own goals. Everybody wins.
