6 Principles for Effective User Onboarding
Here are the 6 principles for effective onboarding as the initial impression of your software determines its long-term retention. The first impression is the last impression.
The First impression is the last impression
One of the most important aspects of your software experience is onboarding. It serves as a link between a user discovering genuine value and registering or logging in for the first time. When done well, it creates the conditions for sustained interest, contentment, and loyalty.
However, successful user onboarding is not a coincidence. Contextual delivery, careful design, and a dedication to ongoing development are necessary. Uncertain about where to begin? With the aid of these six guidelines, you can create an onboarding plan that guarantees each person succeeds right away and has a significant commercial impact.
Meet users where they are.
Delivering onboarding where your users are already—inside your software—is more successful than forcing them to look for onboarding materials or holding sporadic training sessions.
As users navigate the product, teams may give them relevant information through in-app onboarding, assisting them with account setup, important first steps, and quickly recognizing the value of your program. Additionally, it's best to use a range of forms, such as a comprehensive interactive tutorial, a one-page onboarding welcome message, and tooltips that offer more continuous information.
Respecting users' time and skill level also entails meeting them where they are. You could, for instance, provide more thorough onboarding assistance for novices and allow more experienced users to go ahead.
Prioritize value above features.
Instead of helping consumers find value, onboarding all too frequently turns into a feature tour that overwhelms them with possibilities. A successful in-app onboarding process moves the emphasis from the capabilities of your product to how it can assist users achieve their goals. This could entail guiding customers through a particular process that is essential to using your program, such as writing their first report or setting up their profile.
Users are more likely to remain interested and continue exploring if they can immediately see the value your product offers. Focus your onboarding experience on the actions and features that will accelerate time to value rather than highlighting every feature.
By analyzing which features are utilized by consumers with high retention rates, for instance, a product analytics tool can assist you in discovering these features.
Use data to drive strategy
It's crucial to use data to monitor onboarding performance in addition to using it to guide the content of your onboarding experience. This aids in determining which experiences result in long-term success, what material resonates, and where users are getting stuck. For instance, usage data may indicate that onboarding is too complicated if the majority of customers skip a certain stage or give up midway through.
You can learn more about how users are interacting with your onboarding content by looking at these metrics:
- Views of your guides: Check how many people saw your in-app onboarding instructions compared to how many you had in mind.
- Guide step completion: Check your guide step completion if you have onboarding walkthroughs to see whether users are finishing all the steps or if there is a drop-off after a predetermined number of steps.
- Time in guide: An effective way to determine whether or not users are finding value in an in-app guide is to look at how much time they spend using it.
Additionally, you should find out if onboarding is improving consumers' long-term product usage. The features and workflows you offered to new users should ideally have shown a rise in utilization over time and continue to do so.
Customize whenever you can.
Since no two of your users are the same, their onboarding experiences should also be unique. By making onboarding feel relevant and customized, personalization helps to boost engagement and shorten time to value.
Asking consumers what they hope to achieve from your product when they first log in and modifying the onboarding process accordingly can be a straightforward solution. Additionally, it may entail dynamically serving various onboarding checklists or instructions using known metadata, such as user role, firm size, or industry.
By eliminating extraneous content, personalization not only enhances the user experience for each individual but also minimizes needless confusion and friction.
Repeat over time.
Onboarding necessitates ongoing testing and iteration, much like other product development domains. To give new users the greatest experience possible, teams should continuously assess onboarding success and experiment with various processes, messages, and formats. This could entail revising an onboarding checklist to better match user goals, introducing a new tooltip where users frequently get lost, or condensing an underperforming tutorial.
As your product changes, so should your onboarding process; in-app onboarding processes need to be adjusted to accommodate new features, updated user interfaces, or changes in customer behavior.
Offer assistance as needed.
Some people will bypass your onboarding, forget certain aspects of it, or have questions later, regardless of how well-designed it is. For this reason, it is essential to include persistent, on-demand training materials within your program.
This eliminates the need for customers to exit the product and interrupt their workflow in order to access useful content (such as tutorials, manuals, or FAQs). Your onboarding experience will last longer if you have a help center, resource hub, or contextual tooltips that users can access, which also lessens the need for your support staff.