8 Mission-Critical User Onboarding Lessons from 8 Top Product People (2)
Then we would repeat the observed trials with a new cohort of people, taking note of which difficulties had disappeared as a result of the last set of changes.
Then—and only then —did we set about building a formal onboarding system. This allowed us to build a compact and fast onboarding experience, despite the fact that ScribblePost is highly sophisticated and feature-rich.”
By conducting bare-bones user testing, ScribblePost is able to get to how users organically experience and dive into an app, without any user onboarding whatsoever. Through rigorously testing various cohorts of “trial subjects” with a blank slate the product team at ScribblePost was able to get behind users intuitively explore the app, and build an onboarding flow around these behaviors.
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8. Look to the Long Game Product people need to be able to isolate the stickiest features of an app, and then quickly drive users towards them during the user onboarding. But what we often forget is that real user engagement isn't just about metrics—it comes from the actual users behind those metrics. Jackson Noel, Co-Founder here at Appcues says:
“The single most important thing we've done for onboarding is planning past the first session. Let's say you have a SaaS application and know that new users who take actions X, Y, and Z end up being really successful. It's tempting to build a linear new user flow that encourages them to take these 3 actions then call it a day. But that's just not how humans evaluate software - most of them will hardly complete one of the three actions in their first session. So what happens when they come back 5 days later and they have completed Y but not X or Z?
Planning past the first session matches your funnel to your buyer's decision making process. It means aligning your in-product experiences, email campaigns and sales/customer success outreach to reinforce the user's success path.” There's far more to user onboarding than just driving users through a series of predetermined key actions, and it's something we've learned well at Appcues. All your various business goals need to align and culminate during user onboarding.
Hit Jackson up on Twitter, and sign up for the Appcues Blog's mailing list to get fresh, weekly insights on user onboarding. There's No Silver Bullet to User Onboarding Conducting user onboarding is always challenging. The stakes are high, and it's easy to slip up. The real secret to an airtight user onboarding flow is that there's no secret. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, no silver bullet that will pave the way for long-term retention and customer success. What the most successful product managers realize is that user onboarding is a continually ongoing process, that needs to be constantly measured, tweaked, and iterated upon. Understanding that will allow you to implement these critical learnings into your own user onboarding procedure, and turn new users into paying customers who will actually stick around.
