Mastering Onboarding UX
What is Onboarding UX?
Our first interaction with any product/service can be referred to as Onboarding UX.
Onboarding UX is the process of introducing new users to a product or service and helping them become familiar with its features, functions, and capabilities by implementing design patterns such as product tours, tooltips, guided walkthroughs, interactive tutorials, etc.
The primary goal of an effective onboarding UX is to make the user's initial experience as seamless and straightforward as possible so they derive value from it and fully adopt the product.
What does a good onboarding experience feel like?
An app is not just an app that helps the user to complete a task; it's an experience.
And as humans, we have a negative bias.
We don’t commonly remember the best app onboarding experiences. What we do remember are the ones we abandoned and the friction or pain they caused us never to return back. It's similar to visiting someone's house; if they welcome you well, host you nicely or make you feel good, you will always hold them in your good books for the overall experience. But, if they don't, you are never going to visit them again.
The saying that people don't remember what you said to them. They remember how you made them feel is true in the world of digital applications as well. Every micro-interaction with the system becomes a micro-conversation with the user, where onboarding is the one that sets the foundation for the relationship.
Hence, it becomes vital to make that first impression.
A report by WalkMe found that companies that invest in onboarding see a 60% increase in user adoption rates and a 50% increase in user proficiency. A well-designed onboarding experience can help improve user retention, engagement, satisfaction, and education, reduce confusion and frustration, and increase conversion, all of which are important objectives for any product to succeed.
How to design a User-friendly & Frictionless Onboarding Experience?
Different products have different onboarding experiences.
Your app onboarding mostly depends on the complexity of your platform. Some products have a straightforward onboarding process with a few value proposition screens. Some have a complex or lengthy approach as in the case of cloud-based, suite-based platforms like Monday.com, Atlassian, Microsoft 365 etc. where users might need more hand-holding.
The 3 Key Elements of Delightful Onboarding UX
The onboarding experience must be designed to meet the specific goals of the product/service. Here are three key elements to take care of:
Introduction & Value Proposition: Your onboarding experience must introduce the product and its core features to the users clearly and concisely. It must reduce your product's time to value and bring the users to their AHA moments as soon as possible. AHA moments are your product activation moments in the user flow.
Guidance: Onboarding UX must guide the users to set up their account, provide assistance in getting started and familiarise them with navigating the application and how it can help them. It must also educate users on the key features and benefits of the product, as well as any tips or tricks to help them get the most out of it.
Engagement: Onboarding UX should be engaging and interactive, capturing users' attention and encouraging them to explore the product further, making positive first impressions, and driving product adoption.
Top 6 UX/UI Onboarding Design Patterns 2023
Product Tours: A product tour consists of a step-by-step guided walkthrough that shows users how to navigate and use the product. Product tours can take different forms, such as a series of pop-up tooltips, a visual guide with arrows and callouts, or an interactive tutorial that allows users to interact with the product while receiving guidance.
Self-Selected Segmentation: Companies that cater to a diverse user base with different needs and goals can use Self-selected segmentation onboarding. It is a process of allowing users to choose their own user journey during the onboarding process based on their specific interests or needs. This approach empowers users to take control of their experience, resulting in a more personalized and relevant onboarding process, leading to higher engagement, satisfaction, and adoption rates.
Progress Bar: A progress bar is a visual indicator that displays the user's progress through the onboarding process. It is a common design pattern to provide a clear and concise overview of the user's progress toward completing the onboarding experience. A progress bar can help users understand how much of the onboarding process is completed, what steps are remaining, and how long it will take to complete. It can also serve as a motivator, as users may feel a sense of accomplishment as they complete each step and see the progress bar move closer to 100%.
Interactive Tutorial: An interactive tutorial is a type of guided walkthrough that allows users to interact with the product directly. This pattern can help users learn by doing and can be particularly useful for products that require a more hands-on approach.
User Onboarding Checklist: A User Onboarding Checklist is a list of tasks and activities that help new users get started with a product or service. The checklist typically includes items such as creating an account, setting up a profile, completing a tutorial or walkthrough, and performing specific actions within the product.
Tooltips: Tooltips are small pop-up boxes near an interface element and contain text or images that explain how to use a particular feature or provide context for what the user is seeing. They are a non-intrusive way of providing guidance and support, allowing users to explore the product or service at their own pace while still receiving assistance when needed.
Demystifying what resonates with your customer
We must learn about the behaviour of our users and analyse every design decision we make to understand its impact on their journey. Listed below are some metrics we can pull from the onboarding experience to measure how well it did and what we can do to improve it.
Completion rate: The percentage of users who complete the onboarding experience successfully.
Time to completion: The amount of time it takes users to complete the onboarding experience.
Drop-off rate: The percentage of users who start the onboarding experience but still need to complete it.
User satisfaction: Measured through surveys or feedback from users on their experience with the onboarding process.
User engagement: Measured by tracking user behavior and activity levels after completing the onboarding experience.
Conversion rate: The percentage of users who complete the onboarding experience and go on to become paying customers.
Retention rate: The percentage of users who continue to use the product after completing the onboarding experience.
Product usage: Measured by tracking the frequency and duration of user activity within the product.
Support tickets: The number of support tickets related to onboarding that are raised by users.
A/B testing: Conducting A/B tests to compare different onboarding experiences and measure which performs better.
Final Thoughts
When a product put thought, time, and resources into onboarding users with empathy, it shows care and respect to the users. Caring enough to share how it will solve their problems and respecting them enough to do it with simplicity and transparency.
Onboarding is definitely not a one-and-done act; it’s an ongoing process.
Throughout the user journey, onboarding shall actively guide our users to new features and updates. To build stronger relationships with them, we must review, test, and update our onboarding efforts and patterns every step of the way so they remain effective and relevant.
