Onboarding Process
Imagine waking up and suddenly finding yourself at the controls of an airplane. You have no idea what any of the blinking lights mean, or what any of the buttons and switches are for — and you have no idea what you’re expected to do.
This is how new product users feel when they open your app for the first time. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but releasing a new tool, app, or website to users without guidance can leave them feeling stranded — lost in space.
All too often, designers forget that although they have been conducting research, mapping flows, and testing interfaces, users haven’t. A newcomer to your website or app might not know how everything works or where to find what they need, even if it seems obvious to the designer or product team.
By giving your users some hand-holding and scaffolding, you are helping to save your user from that hopeless feeling of confusion and frustration — and saving your app from the discard bin.
What Is User Onboarding?
User onboarding is a designed series of interactions and/instructions that help the user ease into the product’s experience. It can be as simple as a greeting and an explanation or as complex as a series of guided tasks for users to complete. So long as you’re providing your users with an on-ramp to the benefits of your product, you’re setting them up for success.
If you’ve ever opened up a new app for the first time and seen 2–3 series of screens with short, friendly phrases explaining what the app is for, it’s more than likely you will feel a bit familiar with what to expect before you even begin to use it. Or, if a brand new social media app guides you through creating an account, setting up preferences, and adding a few interests to start, you will be starting your experience from a few steps beyond zero.
Onboarding helps give users a sense of what they’ll need to do in order to get what they need from an app or product. It’s a way of building confidence and trust with your user, which not only helps them but is key to better conversion and retention for your business.
Why Is Onboarding so Important?
First impressions are rough. On average, nearly one in four users will abandon a mobile app after using it just once. Ouch. And once they’ve tried your app and left — they’re gone. That’s why it’s absolutely essential to give your users the right-sized onboarding experience for your product.
While there can be any number of explanations that illustrate each individual case, it is highly likely that the users that ditched thought they would get something valuable from the app and weren’t immediately convinced.
When a user takes the time and effort to download a new app, it is highly probable that they expect the product will enhance their life in some way. Once they open the app, it’s crucial they feel rewarded for their faith in the product right away, otherwise, they are quite justified in abandoning it to try something else.
Intranet software platform Twine cut their drop-off rate of 65% by more than half by incorporating meaningful onboarding into their experience. They leveraged a multi-pronged approach to creating a richer first impression for visitors, as well as tutorials and progressive onboarding.
User retention and customer loyalty are major factors in the success of most apps and services. Onboarding should not be an afterthought for product teams but needs to be a consideration at each stage in the product development process.
Onboarding UX Patterns and Methodologies
Types of Onboarding
There are many ways to approach user onboarding within an app or digital product. Most products employ a combination of a few onboarding patterns in order to meet the needs of new users and retain them in the future.
- The Nickel Tour
- Coach Marks, Tooltips, and Guidestones
- Guided Task Completion
The Nickel Tour
This is a common pattern that is very popular with mobile applications. Once the user has launched an app for the first time, they are presented with a few quick screens outlining the value of the app and/or some basics on how to get around.
eg: Onboarding process of Slack
Coach Marks, Tooltips, and Guidestones
This is another very common and relatively low-effort method for onboarding users from the beginning and throughout the product experience. Simple UI devices that draw attention to areas of interaction, buttons or the location of menus help alert the user to useful elements in an app or site. These are especially helpful in more complex interfaces where these items might not be immediately apparent or easy to understand.
Guided Task Completion.
Often, the best way for something to stick in a user’s mind is for them to actually do it.
Guided task completion is a method for prompting users to interact with the product in a series of steps. This is very common when the product wants users to create an account and/or set some personalization parameters early on.
It’s also a great opportunity to help users familiarize themselves with the menus, controls, and other aspects of your product straight away. Also, by helping the user achieve an early “win,” you’re also significantly improving the chances they’ll want to use the product again.
Wireframing
Quick paper wireframes were made following the Task flows to test with the user. These were made in tandem with digital screens to give the user an idea of how data is structured and how it looks and feels.
Design
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