Guide to make user onboarding sustainable
Concentrating on user onboarding as a mid-funnel activity and making it more sustainable could prove to be a BIG WIN for all! Here’s a stepwise procedure on how you can go about achieving that.
Background
Alright! Picture this!
You’ve had an idea for a product and you’ve happened to traverse the length and breadth of the domain via conducting exploratory, primary & descriptive research leading to some worthy discoveries which resulted in a good product built over a few iterative cycles.
What’s next?
Launch…, it is obvious isn’t it?
And, what after that?
Well! Here’s a poll question in that regard.
Close options, making it look ambiguous?
Fine, let’s use elimination & go bottom-up.
OPTION 4 - Upcoming feature build
A big product launch is a load off the chest alright. But how many times do you see product teams / managers put everything behind them from the previous release & straightaway jump into the upcoming feature build?
Rarely does that happen, even if there are enough team members assigned specific responsibilities over clearly demarcated roles. As a PM post that big release most of us are fighting feelings bordering anxiety and restlessness as that’s the moment of ultimate truth.
When this CHOICE is important given where you figure in a product backlog, would you jump right into this post a big launch? Moreover, coming to feature building does a PM even play an active role there over his 40 hours of work per week? Not really, no
OPTION 3 - User onboarding strategy
Name a world-class product and you’d be able to find alternatives screaming aloud as contenders. Having a strategy oriented towards providing the best user onboarding experience across product, across market, across geographies does make a lot of sense. Unless you don’t make users feel comfortable over their usage of the product, you may have to face Churn and it could all go out of hand within no time at all.
So, this is right up there if you ask me. Unless you put some serious thought and chart out detailed plans of how your onboarding strategy is going to contribute to offering the best experience to your users, the whole effort that’s gone in right up to build cycle could be rendered futile
OPTION 2 - Sort out marketing
Having poured in a lot of time into building the product, it’s only but natural for PMs to drift their focus deep onto marketing activities, some may even get their hands dirty with altering / fine tuning pitches so as to send out the right message ensuring that it generates the right amount of traction / impact as suited to the targeted user groups.
But, one of the harshest truths also is that, when marketing can generate interest and get people to visit your landing page it can’t assure retention which is crucial driver of metrics.
So, this is very crucial and important alright but given the way product teams function, there is no need to keep this waiting until post launch
OPTION 1 - Closely monitor analytics
Very important, no doubt whatsoever for there is no other way for a PM to know what’s happening on the field, how the product is doing, how it is being received, what the numbers suggest, are they stacked in our favor or against?
If anything, we have to realize the amount of control we have and can exercise over moving and impacting those numbers driving them in our favor.
So, this is important no doubt, as it could offer direction & enable proper decision making, but PMs could be largely preoccupied over what follows
Results:
Poll results are skewed towards “Monitoring Analytics”
No doubt, it is imperative that one gets down to analyzing those adoption numbers closely to reveal patterns & logically tying them down to the driving factors influencing that direction, but the one thing that seems totally left out is User Onboarding which could be just as important
User Onboarding
Here’s a very common graph depicting one of the most dreaded parameters – the “drop-off rate” generically applicable to any product across the world.
“Only if we’d be able to retain / lock those numbers high up in the 90s bracket”, which happens to be every product person’s dream that could sadly remain unsatisfied all throughout
When one can’t do anything much about the drop-off rate, a lot can still be done to keep that curve parallel to the X-axis and see that the distance from that horizontal line retains & stabilizes itself without dipping further down, like in case of the first 2 products (Product1 & Product2).
Ever thought about the main reason why those further dips happen?
Why do users churn after getting attracted to the product in the first go?
Why aren’t users continuing towards paying to use the product and dropping off at the trial itself?
When the reasons may be subjective varying based on the case, a prominent one could be the lack of proper user onboarding initiatives.
What is user onboarding?
To put it bluntly, it is the manner in which an org guides its users towards using the product in the best manner possible, so as to effectively derive maximum value out of it, not only over the first instance but continually over each and every usage and instance thereof.
What does user onboarding entail?
Here are a few pointers.
1. Pain points
Quite logically, user onboarding ought to start with and can’t progress without an acute understanding of the user’s pain points and their immediate goals.
For instance: if a user is struggling with English grammar while typing an e-mail, would you think of dropping a link to Marriam-Webster’s Grammar Guide or a link to a YouTube course? Remember, the user’s goal was to clear up his grammar instantly & right there
2. Design a smooth workflow
Once the understanding of those goals is built, you’d use it to design and build an impeccably smooth workflow to help users achieve them over a minimal interface, with the least possible amount of effort totally devoid of any friction.
You’d simply give him a CTA that can run the check and report errors along with all the corrections alongside the alternate versions / variants thereof
3. Communicate value clearly
What’s the fun in building a product and expecting the users to uncover the value they are getting out of it over something like a treasure hunt. The value offered by the product ought to be communicated clearly & precisely, also at a very early stage.
As soon as the user begins typing, at that very first grammatical mistake, the entire section could change color so as to highlight the error & then suggestions could pop-up on mouse hover
4. Identify & remove friction
Most products suffer from a very low adoption rate because they tend to embed limitless data collection modules, it seems to mirror some of those government and financial sites where people drop-off right at the sign-up stage itself. If anything, you ought to make signing-up super fun and simple whilst not discounting security protocols.
Data collection ought to be entirely separated from the process of sign-up, if anything I strongly advocate the use of the “Sign in with Google” link
5. Offer personalized experiences
The data collected from our users all along the user’s lifecycle for various purposes could be employed to offer them a better experience. After all no one deserves it better than them. If ever you have used an iPhone you might have noticed how the fingerprint sensor can be effectively employed to enforce control.
If the user is repeatedly making grammatical mistakes in such time that he has typed a paragraph, you can safely consider a “Would you like to turn on autocorrect so as to clear up all your grammatical errors as they are encountered:“? pop-up with an “YES” “NO” prompt against it
6. Learn continuously
Great products today may not end up staying like that forever, but that life can be prolonged if the learnings from the market are factored in continuously leading to improved experiences. You need to constantly keep up and keep pace with the happenings in the space & the Tech scene over understanding what’s hot & whether it can be employed to better the experiences of the users.
A classic example here today would be the use of AI tools like ChatGPT to help out people form paragraphs with a few inputs and an outline, all that just within a few minimal clicks
When these are usually the steps teams tend to follow, they are still quite a distance away from achieving growth that could be perceived sustainable.
User onboarding tools
Given the timeline of 2023 a user onboarding tool ought to help quickly build personalized & relevant in-app experiences for every stage of the customer journey, which includes and is not limited to: -
interactive walkthroughs
guided product tours
detailed flows
context-sensitive help
prompts
tooltips
questionnaires
surveys
and all of this offered with a large degree of automation, to escape the pangs of having to spend days / weeks over designing & coding it.
One such tool that is prominently etched in my memory is Userpilot.
It allows you to build all of these things listed above providing you with an easy way to improve your overall user onboarding process.
Making onboarding sustainable
Sustainable growth is possible when an organization has built a product and bundled it with such strategies oriented towards exactly identifying problems / friction / blockers that users may have over the usage / adoption of the product
For instance: you can build an amazing Crypto dashboard supporting all kinds of coins and currencies, but it’d be much better if there’s an interactive channel prompting users with right inputs analyzing their live usage & footprints.
Now! Here’s a stepwise guide to making adoption more sustainable:
1. Spend ample time on UX Research
There is nothing in the world that can act as a worthy substitute to this.
UX Research is about getting into the depths over 2 phases:
initially the user’s workflow as to they go about their jobs currently & how things get done there as of today be it manually / via some other App
then on, factoring all that understanding into designing what could be a great experience for the users helping them encounter a Wow-factor almost every time they land on the App and use it to get their jobs done
2. Eliminate Guesswork from Design & UX
If you are targeting & looking to provide a smooth onboarding experience, you ought to eliminate guesswork totally, as it often impedes and is not at all good for Design & UX.
It doesn’t hurt talking to the users directly and being able to gather their inputs over the experiences they have had with the App’s usage, and of course moderating random user sessions could also be another way around this. Encourage teams to get into experimenting more and collecting feedback from the field, brainstorming over it to arrive at what is worthy of a consideration.
3. Establish proper communication channels
There may be problems so unique and non-categorized stemming from really unimaginable places in the workflow and some of them could be ephemeral and that momentary experience could lead to users turning averse to the product entirely.
It is crucial to make it absolutely ridiculously easy for users to raise their concerns / complaints over any channel they like.
That’s not all. Once the friction points get removed and UX is improved, the effective changes in the product offering ought to be communicated to the users, via channels - emails, in-app notifications, info-visuals, AVs et. al.
4. Prune the backlog & prioritize regularly
With descriptive UX research opening up tons of insights about the users & workflows, they ought to be queued up separately alongside the relevant pain points post checking their alignment to the interim goals, prune them continuously and prioritize them over a regular cadence.
Else, you’d be led to think that you are offering a great UX when the user’s pain is still prevalent and unsolved for. In this case, even if you offer the moon to them you’re most certainly going to face CHURN.
Remember, users, markets, pain points could all change so dynamically and it’s important to cross check them against things that internal teams are working on so that you get your priorities sorted and in order.
5. Encourage & pave way smoother referrals
You’ve done all that hard work right from establishing the right areas of friction and building great experiences on the App whilst giving the users something to cheer about over solving their problems as well. What’s next?
How many times have you got on to trying a new product totally convinced by the feedback a dear friend had about a product he was using (or still in doubt to some extent, if not totally convinced)?
as opposed to…
The no. of times you got convinced that you ought to try a product based on some promotional content you saw / forced to see given the way it interrupted a program / video you were watching
You ought to pave the way for your users to get the word out freely and unabashedly go out and tell people and the one thing that could encourage them to do so is a healthily incentivized referral program. After all good things ought to be shared.
Remember:
Your user onboarding strategy is just as crucial and important as all the other stuff you and your teams have worked on over each of those phases of the PLC right up from vision, strategy, to the product build & analytics, KPIs for it could prove to be the difference that goes in towards defining the magnitude of your product’s growth & success.