How to Effectively Design User Onboarding: A 4-Step Guide
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Understanding the Importance of Onboarding
Onboarding represents a crucial user journey within your product. It serves as the initial point of interaction for users, playing a significant role in their likelihood to remain engaged.
As Adam Fishman aptly states, "Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are gonna even touch." Achieving universal engagement with any other aspect of your product can be quite challenging.
So, how can we craft an exceptional onboarding experience? What elements should we prioritize? While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution—since effective onboarding varies by product—there exists a repeatable framework to deliver an outstanding onboarding process that benefits both users and businesses.
Step 1: Identify Your Ideal Customer
The first step is to pinpoint your ideal customer persona—the segment of users who truly values your product. These customers typically:
- Purchase your product without needing persuasion.
- Refer others to your product spontaneously.
- Are frequent and enthusiastic users.
It's essential to tailor your onboarding experience to this primary persona rather than attempting to cater to every type of customer.
Step 2: Understand Their Retention Triggers
Once you've identified the type of customer you want to engage and retain, focus on what drives their loyalty.
What key indicators suggest that a specific customer type will continue using your product? For instance, on Twitter, it may involve following a certain number of users, while for Patreon, it could be reaching a specific income level within the first month.
Engage with your customers, analyze data, and identify trends to clarify the differences between users who stay and those who leave.
Step 3: Guide Them to Their "Aha!" Moments
With a clear understanding of your ideal customer and their retention triggers, your next task is to design onboarding that maximizes their chances of engagement.
If their retention indicator is following five or more users, clearly communicate the benefits and solutions they gain from doing so. Encourage immediate action to start following others. If financial gain is the focus, streamline the onboarding to facilitate their first earnings as quickly as possible.
The primary goal of onboarding is to activate users, and the best way to achieve this is by helping them experience their "aha!" moments promptly.
Step 4: Adopt Continuous Onboarding
Onboarding is an ongoing process.
As your application evolves, with updates and new features, your onboarding strategy should also adapt. This is not solely about enhancing the onboarding experience for new users; it's equally important to introduce existing customers to new functionalities.
This doesn’t need to be an elaborate onboarding flow—a simple explanatory screen or tooltip can suffice to inform users about new features.
Activation remains critical not just for the product as a whole, but also for individual features. Whenever you make changes or introduce something new, ask yourself how you can onboard both new and existing users to this update.
In some cases, allowing users to explore the product independently might be acceptable, but ensure that this decision is intentional and not a result of oversight.