User Onboarding

Casey 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

Tomasz 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."

Andrew'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

Darius 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.

Tal 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.

Samuel 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.

David 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.

Uber’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.