Product Management
User Onboarding
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The Practica AI Coach helps you improve in User Onboarding by using your current work challenges as opportunities to improve. The AI Coach will ask you questions, instruct you on concepts and tactics, and give you feedback as you make progress.Intro to User Onboarding
User onboarding refers to the process of guiding new users to understand and use your product or service effectively. It is a critical step in the user experience that can make or break your Customer Retention rates. Effective onboarding involves creating a seamless experience that addresses user needs and expectations, and helps them achieve their goals quickly and easily. It requires a deep understanding of user behavior and preferences, as well as a commitment to continuous improvement and optimization.
Why Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth StrategyCasey explains what is needed to define successful onboarding for your product: understanding your target frequency and your key action. He then provides 3 principles around how to provide value to users: 1. Get to product value as fast as possible — but not faster 2. Remove all friction that distracts the user from experiencing product value 3. Don’t be afraid to educate contextually
What SaaS Startups Miss in User OnboardingTomasz provides a nice intro to onboarding with a key premise: "the onboarding process must create some value for the user during that sign-up session, in order to keep the user coming back."
What is the goal of user onboarding?
The goals of user onboarding are to deliver value to them quickly and motivate them to take further action.
The “Value First” onboarding framework that’s helped activate hundreds of thousands of usersAndrew's "value-first" framework has 6 steps: 1. Define value 2. Deliver value, quickly 3. Motivate users to take action 4. Customize the experience 5. Start in the middle 6. Build momentum pre-signup
How do I onboard a user?
There are several user onboarding frameworks that can help you design and implement an effective onboarding process. These frameworks provide a structured approach to onboarding that focuses on key elements such as user motivation, user goals, user education, and user feedback.
Psych’d: A new user psychology framework for increasing funnel conversionDarius provides a framework for how to look at onboarding flows from a user's point of view. As they they go through each step, it either adds or subtracts emotional energy, and you can sum up the total by the time they get to a major conversion point such as a form.
Inside the 6 Hypotheses that Doubled Patreon’s Activation SuccessTal provides a framework for how to identify a North Star metric for onboarding that takes into account qualities of conversions, not just absolute conversion. He then provides six examples of how the team at Patreon were able to improve this metric: • Patreon defined "financially successful creators" (FSCs) who earn a life-changing income as their north star metric. FSCs drive further creator Virality and patron growth. • They used category-based examples and comparables to inspire creators and help them overcome fears around asking for money. • Patreon provided emotional support and reassurance to creators who lacked Confidence in their campaigns' success. • Counterintuitively, Patreon found that their highest earning creators wanted a more complex campaign editor to build trust. They preferred friction over simplicity. • Getting insights from frontline teams and rejecting "best practices" in favor of customized solutions helped Patreon double their onboarding success. Patreon's solutions included a new explore page, campaign editor, examples, help links, and inspirational videos.
User Onboarding Examples
Looking at successful user onboarding examples (also known as teardowns or case studies) can provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn't. Examples can help you understand how different companies have tackled onboarding challenges, and what strategies and tactics they have used to achieve success.
>50 User Onboarding Tear-down PresentationsSamuel provides an outsider’s perspective on more than 50 websites you’ve probably heard of, including Asana, Gmail, Meetup, and PayPal. Consuming some of these teardowns will get you up to Speed quickly on accepted onboarding design patterns.
PagerDuty's Stack for Optimizing OnboardingDavid walks through how PagerDuty improved onboarding to boost trial conversion rates and help new users set up their accounts properly. • They used Segment to integrate Mixpanel and Kissmetrics to analyze user behavior data and identify issues in the onboarding flow. • After testing both tools, they chose Kissmetrics due to its better funnel calculations. • The data from Kissmetrics revealed issues where users were ending trials without seeing all features or setting up accounts properly. • They redesigned the onboarding flow based on the data and qualitative feedback, including a full-page takeover and nurture bar. • After implementing the new onboarding, they saw a 25% boost in trial engagement and fewer users ending up in fail states. • They learned that choosing what to track is important and too many events can be noisy. Having separate environments for development and production is also key. • User privacy and a strong vendor privacy policy are important considerations when choosing Analytics tools. • Qualitative feedback from customers, sales, and support teams provided important context beyond the quantitative data.
Unifying Mobile Onboarding Experiences at UberUber’s team learned that multi-step onboarding - asking for and validating info one step at a time - not only converted better, but also made experimentation and Internationalization easier. The article also goes into the technical architecture behind their onboarding.