How vital is User Onboarding for digital products?

Have you ever felt lost when using a product for the first time?

And how many times you thought: “I'm not sure what am I supposed to do”?

Yeap, I know the feeling, bro…

One of the most critical parts of our job as PMs is to make sure people understand how to use and how to get value from our products. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this depends a lot on the quality of our onboarding process.

I confess I didn’t even know that user onboarding even existed when I started to work full-time as a PM. Sadly, I started as everyone else, building ineffective onboarding process like this one:

Are there people who actually read this? I can’t honestly remember if I ever did.

Or worst, like this one:

I think this app is trying to teach me a football formation @MattMiklic

Deep down I knew that what I was doing was completely shity. I was basically grabbing all my product’s inefficiency and throwing it at my customer’s face.

It took me time and several failed experiments to realize that user onboarding it's not just building overlays, pop-ups or a cool wizard. It’s not even a matter of getting the user painless setup his account. It’s all about making our product as fast and smooth to understand as possible.

User onboarding can get really complex, but, after a few more successful experiments, I believe it comes down to just two simple concepts:

• Showing how your product can solve his problems by actually solving it;

After just a few seconds, I'm already writing in Swedish! How cool is that?

• Well-designed learning curves so the user doesn’t have to read a manual before hand or get interrupted all the time while trying to using the damn thing.

This video is pure AWESOMENESS. If you're a PM you must watch it now.

If you help them, they will help you

When you offer a proper first-time experience to your customer it helps them to achieve their goals, but it also help your company’s metrics if you play it well.

For example, Facebook knows that a new user is more likely to become active if they add at least 20 friends on its first day of use.

Well played, Facebook!

Conclusion

Onboarding quickly became a must-have for digital products, but still only a fraction of the tech companies are doing it as it should. On the other hand, tools such as Intercom make it easy to track and build better onboarding process. I believe now it's just a matter of time until we see more products being successful because of it.

This week I'll analyze the onboarding process of Canva for Work, so make sure to follow me here on Medium to be the first to see it!