4 Best Practices For User Onboarding

How to turn users into product experts

People tend to confuse the goal of onboarding; they think the goal is to ‘get the user set up’, when it is actually to ‘convert users to power users’. This is especially true when operating in the SaaS space — where users may not start using the product extensively right away, rather expanding their use over time — because it is harder to pinpoint to an exact moment in time when a customer has truly ‘come onboard’. It is more gradual as compared to, say, mobile application users who may instantly take to an application.

A great concierge can make all the difference in hospitality, by instantly making a guest feel comfortable. They let the guest relax just enough without letting them drift towards boredom and still have enough surprises ready, should the guest demand it — user onboarding works along those lines.

User onboarding allows us to turn amateur users into experts. What the concierge won’t say is that, onboarding provides enterprises with the golden opportunity to make users so comfortable that they feel entirely at home and the product is so much more a part of their routine than they could have realised before. Users need to move from the nascent stage to the ‘power up’ stage, and that is where the onboarding experience comes into play. It has to guide them, nurture them, and still not be intrusive to their experience in using the product.

So what changes an onboarding process from a simple ‘get to know the product’ into a power user training program? Here are four key elements:

Immediate value

Let’s call it the ‘Aha!’ moment. The moment when the user has successfully used the product to accomplish a task, and has seen the fruits of their labors. For example, scheduling that first social media post via Buffer or Hootsuite. Or the first email when starting out with MailChimp.

Get to the ‘Aha’ moment as soon as possible. Don’t make the user go through cumbersome tutorials or have them take time out for reading long text explanations. They have signed up for a service, not the tutorial.

Reduce friction as much as possible.

The main aim is to get the user to a state of productivity. Similarly, remove requests for sharing on social media after the user signs up. If there’s a “special offer” while onboarding or the chance for the customer to opt-in to some “special email update”, save it for an email 2 weeks later. The first step to expertise is feeling confident in basic competence.

The steps in Apple Music onboarding. Credit: www.useronboard.com

Consider the example of Apple Music

In the context of value being delivered as soon as possible, one would expect that, as a music service, Apple Music will take the user to maybe a music discovery page or song suggestion page. The onboarding process is not very smooth in accomplishing this. The application’s first screen asks users about ‘Audiobooks’ (about which the users have no context or background). The other cue is for ‘iBooks’ which is, again, not related to music. It is only after going through the steps of activating a trial period, choosing a plan, agreeing to terms & conditions, and then going through a screen that says ‘Buy’ — even though the user may have selected the free trial — that the user arrives at a page for streaming music. The user interface at this point is fairly intuitive and friendly.

Let’s look at a different example: Instagram

Instagram has a nice touch of both, drawing interest towards the product and, also showcasing the user what is the expected use case. First time users are greeted with a prompt to sign up via Facebook or email, or login, in case they already have an account. When going through the process of signing up, there are images that show people capturing moments, which is what the USP is for Instagram. This is smart placement because it intuitively shows the user how they can harness the power of Instagram. It’s learning by osmosis.

While both Apple Music and Instagram have about three screens between first opening the application and reaching the main page, it’s what those three screens do and how they are laid out that makes the difference between an uncertain onboarding process (for the former) and a more smooth introduction to the app (as in the latter case).

Basecamp’s onboarding is another smooth process. The initial page to get the user started, after sign up, is straight and simple. Beyond the signup page and after a few questions to setup the profile, users see templates for sample projects.

Basecamp is a good onboarding example in the SaaS domain

Specific folders have been set up, like sales, marketing etc., directly related to the questions that were answered in the initial onboarding process. The sample project is populated with demos of to-do lists, message boards and a hub for files. It’s again giving an example to users — clearly saying “Hey! This is what can be done with Basecamp”.

Consider also the different approach needed when onboarding the user on a mobile platform as compared to a desktop or laptop. As screen space becomes a constraint on mobile platforms, the route to get to the ‘Aha’ moment could get broken down further into more steps because onboarding steps and text cannot be displayed in the same way. Consequently, this delays value delivery to the user and hence, it is not ideal to have the same onboarding steps for mobile and desktop.

One good practice on mobile is to reach the ‘Aha’ moment before asking the user for signing up or registering. Doing so gives more incentive to the user to complete the signup process. Modifying the text in the mobile onboarding process so that it communicates precise information and does so in the least number of steps is also recommended.

Guidance

OK. So the customer has signed up.

And they have started using the service.

It’s time to follow up with them.

This can be the time during onboarding when the user gets an in-app tutorial, or is onboarded via email. Consider this — users could go through the onboarding experience using their own sensibility also so why use tutorials?

Providing guidance is not only a way to ease the users into the product, but it also provides a golden opportunity to add value to their experience, and enhance their perspective of the service.

But what should be the trigger for giving feedback to users? The answer to that would be context.

Contextual feedback means putting in place behavior-based triggers for feedback rather than time-based triggers. Suppose the user stops using the product abruptly after signing up. Feedback should address this context rather than follow a set timeline that may or may not work for the user later. The need in the given context would be do a follow up mail asking if the user is experiencing any difficulty that they need help with, rather than a mail asking them to rate the product because a certain amount of time has elapsed since they signed up. Feedback should address this context rather than follow a set timeline that may or may not adhere to the user’s behavior. The need in the given context would be to do a follow up mail asking if the user is experiencing any difficulty that they need help with, rather than a mail asking them to rate the product because a certain amount of time has elapsed since they signed up.

Feedback is how the user can be shown great use cases for the product that may match the user’s needs. This could be prompts that keep the user engaged and demonstrate features not visible to the user right away. For example:

This mail above from Buffer is a welcome mail and initiates the user brilliantly into the service. It has crisp wording for starters. It also has just the right amount of explanation of Buffer’s features and how the user may enjoy it best if they used the browser extension.

Bots or plugins for live help chats could be good ideas for immediate help that users may need when going through a product. They stay out of the way if a user has no need but are a great tool for immediate guidance, should the user have a query.

The timing and bandwidth of feedback is also important to watch. Feedback should not be overly elaborate, otherwise it can make the user feel overwhelmed. The volume of emails sent out should not border on spam either. It should be to the point and not feel like noise to the customer.

Low Touch vs High Touch

From John Naisbitt’s book Megatrends came the idea of High Tech/High Touch. This concept essentially states that the complexity of technology should be matched by corresponding human interaction to balance the complexity. The value of human touch is always significant. It is for this reason that it is better for the user to receive an email from a human account rather than an automatic reply bot. A small enterprise may have the capability to monitor user specific data distinctly, and it may be possible to interact with the user 1:1 while addressing specific needs. However, most of time this is not possible, such as when a lot of Saas enterprises have customers running into the thousands.

So let’s put down some specifics. Low touch means having minimal guiding feedback for the user. But pay attention that minimal does not mean lacking. Slackbot, here, is a great example of low touch onboarding.

It can answer questions for the user, if any, while using the product and it’s a great addition to the interface. Simply delightful.

On the other side of the spectrum is high touch, which may also be called ‘concierge onboarding’. This is a more proactive approach when reaching out to clients. But of course, it requires a lot more resources and effort. Needless to say, not every company can service the clients with such care and devotion.

Every company must decide what suits their product or service, what suits their customers, and what is most effective. A lack of a coherent feedback process can severely damage an onboarding system. The product must also consider how it optimizes tutorials in mobile onboarding as compared to desktop. Having too many prompts on screen is not possible on mobile platforms as this limits visibility and restricts the user’s ability to exercise their intuitive judgement to explore the application.

Some products may be better suited to tutorial screens while others may be served better by using interactive tutorials. Tutorial screens are generally not the right solution if it means having too many of them. The user will want to get to the service rather than spend time reading and following the tutorial. Asana is a service that could do well with some in-app tutorials. For someone discovering the product via the mobile app (thought I understand that this will not be the case for a majority of Asana users), there is very little context provided.

Metrics

The goal should be to set up metrics for measuring the onboarding process from the outset. Make the process as clear as possible. One metric to consider is the number of queries/emails asking for instructions. This indicates lack of clarity and intuitiveness for the customer during the onboarding process. Another metric is low life for users. This could indicate that the users could not find value in the service or product soon enough.

Evaluating specific parts of the onboarding process can be challenging without clearly defined metrics. In this very insightful post about choosing the right UX metrics for a product, Kerry Roden — a quantitative UX researcher at Google, talks about the HEART framework used at Google. HEART stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success. Three of these — Engagement, Adoption and Task Success — are broad metrics that can be used to judge the onboarding process.

Engagement will encompass statistics such as frequency of using the product, intensity of use and depth of interaction. On a practical level, this will give an indication about how many times the users tried certain features of the product — further indicating what they perceive as being the most valuable aspect of the product. These metrics will tell how aggressively and quickly users were able to complete the onboarding process, which will show how long users took to get to an introductory level of familiarity with the product.

The end point has to be how quickly users get to the ‘Aha’ moment and these metrics will help determine that. Determining within engagement, adoption and task success, what the goals are for the specific use case of your product and then focusing the metrics around that will benefit the onboarding process.

This post by ProdPad discusses how they measured their time-to-conversion rate for customers, and were able to get an idea for how effective their onboarding process was. By taking a call to gamify their onboarding process, ProdPad was able to turn their onboarding experience into a reward system; the user getting an extension on the trial period every time they completed a task for onboarding such as entering a product name or setting up certain information. In this way, ProdPad was able to effectively get their users to exploit all the features of their product, turning them into power users. But the basis to their revision of the onboarding system was that they had certain metrics to judge how well onboarding was working.

Checking for bounce rate at specific points in the onboarding process is another metric to consider. It could be that getting to a certain point, the user leaves the product. There are a number of user testing tools to collect information about how the customers see a site. Tools such as Google Analytics, HotJar or CrazyEgg can help with this. They provide features such as heat maps, scroll maps and statistics on in-app behavior of users to draw incisive conclusions about the user experience. UsabilityTools can replay user sessions and also provides the corresponding statistics.

These metrics can provide invaluable insights on how efficient the onboarding process is shaping up to be.

Things to remember

When collecting data from users on how onboarding can be done better, power users will suggest changes specific to their needs but this may not always be relevant to the average user. When making changes to the onboarding process, or the UI for that matter, it is necessary to leave room for user feedback and incorporate that into the final process. Conducting user testing during development stage is standard practice and works well.

zipBoard allows annotation to live projects so feedback can be collected easily

Tools, such as zipBoard, can help gather feedback from internal testing and how the onboarding process is rated by the internal review.

A/B Testing is another solution to decide between what works best for the majority of users. Launching the changes in phases can also be done, as is the case with services like Uber, which is rolling out widespread changes to its interface.

Also consider that onboarding affects a core part of business, conversions. An uncertainty that companies deal with is ‘how long should the trial period last’ so as to achieve optimum conversion levels. Keep in mind that converting customers can vary during a trial period. If the user onboards well and like the value provided by a product then of course, conversions may be seen even within the first few days. But there are also cases where conversion happened up to 6 months after the user signed up. Starting the process with a good onboarding experience can help generate good will in the long term and directly benefit conversion decisions in such cases.

Understanding onboarding better

UserOnboard has an entire repository of how a user may perceive the setup process on different services and applications. Check out MadKudu’s SaaS sales post related to behavior-based conversions for some great insights into the conversion process with companies. Another insightful resource is Lincoln Murphy’s blog. There are a lot of services that help with user onboarding as well. Intercom is a service that helps companies communicate with customers better. Without the right communication, even the most useful of products can get lost in all the noise that users are used to tuning out. Communicating effectively to them through guidance and tutorials is a key part of refining the onboarding experience. HubSpot is another that helps set up onboarding services for enterprises.

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that it’s not simply about getting users setup. What matters most is turning them into experts in using the platform. Getting users to understand the value proposition of the product as soon as possible is what will help retain them. Structuring onboarding so that they understand the benefits of the product is how this can be achieved best.