User onboarding: best practices
Simple rules that will help you design a streamlined first-time users experience
A great user onboarding experience shortens the time it takes for users to understand the value of your product, and get to their first “Aha” or “Wow” moment ( a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition or comprehension).
First impressions are crucial
Onboarding lies at the start of your customer journey. Capturing users’ loyalty in those initial interactions with the product will leave a lasting impression, turning them into long-term customers and advocates.
In a customer lifecycle onboarding comes first, followed by product adoption and retention stages.
- Onboarding — First-time experience, becoming a user
- Adoption — Becoming proficient in using the product or feature that results in accomplishing intended goals to achieve anticipated benefits.
- User retention — Increasing engagement and utilizing more of what the product can offer to become an expert user and product advocate.
It’s much more than series of intro screens
Often onboarding is confused with the series of beautifully designed intro screens that explain product functionality and benefits.
When you add those screens to your first time experience ask yourself:
- Are those screens helping users to get what they want faster or do they just become an inconvenience on their path?
- Am I explaining the obvious?
- Is this information actionable or usefull at this moment in time or not?
Enable users to get started from the first screen. Use app marketplace app previews rather than in-app intro screens to explain the basic functionality or benefits of your product, this is a more appropriate place.
Often best onboarding — is no onboarding
Some products are simple enough. Requirements for your onboarding process can depend on many factors:
- User objectives and needs
- Business requirements, industry standards, regulatory requirements
- Level of experience and proficiency that your product requires
- How familiar or groundbreaking is your product
For some products having lengthy onboarding and training is the fastest way to achieve users’ goals and avoid costly mistakes, others are ready for use immediately after you “pick them off the shelf”.
Onboarding process can be composed of many elements
Like registration, subscription, feature promotion, customization, and various action nudges. The importance and flow of the onboarding process is highly dependent on your product revenue model. For subscription-based products, that offer free trials, this initial evaluation of the product will affect subscription rates immensely. You can find more details on various onboarding elements here Mobile-App Onboarding: An Analysis of Components and Techniques.
Instructions, tips & action nudges
The goal of in-app tutorials and instructions is to educate users on how to use certain features and navigate within the product. This may come in many forms like Deck of cards tutorials, automated product tours, video tutorials or tooltips.
Good design should be self-explanatory, and a key objective is to focus effort and resources on designing User Interface that is clear and can stand on its own and not instructions mechanisms.
- Avoid lengthy upfront or application tours
- Provide brief in-context, actionable tips or nudges that users can disable
Action nudges — requests or suggestions to perform an action like sharing something with friends, rating an App, or enabling notifications. Those requests are often misplaced and premature within the onboarding process, resulting in a poor conversion rate.
- Avoid instant out-of-place requests
- Use in-context action nudges with a clear benefit to the user, or a lost opportunity in case of not performing this action at the moment
The shorter your onboarding the better
Bet you didn’t expect that)
One of the basic UX principles is Cost Benefit — Activity will be pursued only if its benefits are equal to or greater than costs.
The standard length of the onboarding can vary from 5–10 steps in music streaming services to 25–50 steps in banking (because of the many regulatory compliance requirements for most financial service platforms).
- Aspire to have faster onboarding than your direct competitors, reduce the number of clicks required for users to complete the process
- Products that offer unique benefits can go away with a more demanding registration or onboarding process due to a lack of alternatives or large perceived rewards.
- Provide a good reason for each question or data point required
Incremental onboarding
Is a great way to increase the success rates for the long onboarding process by breaking it up into several stages, allowing users to access some elements of the product while others will require additional onboarding. Incremental onboarding has many benefits:
- This reduces perceived effort and rewards users along the way for completing each stage.
- Ensures storage of users’ progress in case of pause and captures useful information that was already provided in case of drop off
Wise fully leverages an incremental onboarding approach to only ask their customers what they need when they need it. After a quick registration, you immediately get access to the app where you will need to go through additional steps to open an account or make a transfer.
Be transparent, communicate progress
A lack of understanding of onboarding process, its stages or objectives creates a feeling of anxiety and lack of control. In the example below we see how a little indication of a progress bar and a hint of “this will just take 5 min” makes Moka onboarding more transparent and friendly than Revolut.
- For a long onboarding flow visualize users’ progression with help of progress bars, lists, and checks.
- Put effort into good microcopy to set the right expectations and encourage users
Understand key friction points
Those are the danger areas that are best avoided or if unavoidable require special design efforts to mitigate. The factors below are the top reasons users abandon the onboarding process:
- Security & privacy concerns
- Massive forms and a long onboarding process
- Aggressive advertising or upselling
- Paywalls before users are able to realize the value of the product
- Unnecessary questions without clear rational
- Forcing account creation or registration too early
- Forcing uniformed decions
- Lack of localization in the product
Get to know your users and tailor their experience
First-time user experience is a great chance to know more about your user and adapt product experience based on their role, goals, and preferences. By asking users what are their favorite artists a YouTube Music will create a unique, relevant playlist for new listeners. Hell, it even complements your taste in music).
Understanding user content preferences as quickly as possible is crucial for retention and session length for any content streaming service.
Duolingo starts by focusing on students’ language learning objectives and current expertise to create a unique path for each user. Letting users set their own goals is proven to have a higher level of success than predefined objectives set by the system.
Go all in with your brand
First meeting with your customer is a great time to introduce them to your company, and let them know what you stand for and why you are different. Good branding integration, a bit of gamification, or a friendly mascot can help users bond with the product instantly.
A great example is Headspace onboarding. Instead of rushing to registration like any other app, it starts with cute animation asking you to “ Breathe in” and “Breathe out”. Just this simple interaction sets it apart, helping users focus on the moment and be more mindful.
Think of empty states
After onboarding, some products will be ready to use, others can look empty and uninviting. Designing for empty states and using them as opportunities to chart a path for users will ensure your great onboarding will lead to fast product adoption. Mailchimp helps news users reach their goals with a simple getting started checklist helping them create their first email campaign.
If you would like to learn more about how to drive user engagement and improve Product adoption next give this story a clap.
