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    Better Onboarding: Effective Strategies for Guiding New Users
    Better Onboarding: Effective Strategies for Guiding New Users
    Better Onboarding: Effective Strategies for Guiding New Users
    Ebook205 pages1 hour

    Better Onboarding: Effective Strategies for Guiding New Users

    By Krystal Higgins

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    About this ebook

    When users try your product or service for the first time, what encourages them to come back? Onboarding can make the difference between abandoned accounts and devoted use-

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKrystal Higgins
    Release dateMay 11, 2021
    ISBN9781763673410
    Better Onboarding: Effective Strategies for Guiding New Users
    Author

    Krystal Higgins

    Krystal Higgins is a UX designer who connects the dots between products, systems, and the people who use them. She's taught teams across the world how to design better, human-centered onboarding at events like SXSW, An Event Apart, UX London, and UX Days Tokyo; through her catalog of first-run experiences at first-run-ux.com; and through her onboarding articles at kryshiggins.com. Krystal has more than 15 years of experience designing innovative products for mobile, web, wearable, and new platforms at companies like NVIDIA, eBay, and Google. When she's not working on tech-meets-humans projects, she enjoys painting, illustration, and scuba diving.

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      Book preview

      Better Onboarding - Krystal Higgins

      chapter 1 header image

      I used to work on smartwatches

      at a time when consumers considered them fairly novel. The teams I worked with were interested in helping people see the value of wearing a smartwatch by teaching them how to use it to enhance their daily lives. These devices were prime candidates for a good onboarding experience.

      Eventually, I joined the Android Wear (now Wear OS by Google) team to help them with the setup and onboarding design of their smartwatch experience. At the time, the team had just received a round of feedback that some customers weren’t aware of all the features of their new watch, which could lead to inconsistent use. The team had just kicked off work on a tutorial video meant to appear on the phone app used to set up a new watch.

      The theory behind adding this video was reasonable: because setup required the smartwatch to be connected to a mobile phone app, users could watch a how-to video on their phone while they waited for the watch to finish the setup process. The end product was a lovely, ninety-second animated video that highlighted key features of the watch (Fig 1.1).

      Smartwatch video still with abstracted icons, reading "Let's explore the capabilities of your new watch."

      Fig 1.1:

      An early version of the Wear OS by Google mobile app showed a video to new watch owners while they were setting up their watches.

      However, we found that the video had few views, and participants in research studies often skipped it. The video’s instructional nature and linear formatting forced the viewer into a passive state, but they had just unboxed a new watch and were interested in trying it out! So, they ignored it, or skipped it, so they could start playing with their watch. Those who did view the video didn’t demonstrate any deeper comprehension of how the watch functioned than those who hadn’t.

      Ultimately, the combination of user research results, a low view count, and the work involved in making updates to the video every time the watch interface changed convinced the team to remove the video from the setup experience. When the effort expended on keeping the video up-to-date was compared to the limited benefit of the video on onboarding end-users, it became clear that it should go.

      Now, the video wasn’t the only thing the team had included to help acclimate new users. The watch also offered interactive, optional on-watch educational tips that users could move through at their own pace (Fig 1.2). This was an interactive technique the team iterated and expanded on in future releases. And videos? They found a different use—in a prepurchase capacity, often shown alongside demo devices at stores.

      Copper-colored smartwatch with white band. Display reads: "This is a sample notification. Tap to get more details."

      Fig 1.2:

      Subsequent versions of the Wear OS by Google smartwatch experience included more on-watch interactive guidance, such as sample notifications that provided contextual tips.

      This example shows how you can remove a piece of front-loaded instruction and focus instead on guidance in the context of direct interaction. As we’ll see in the next section, the latter is a more effective approach to user onboarding.

      Onboarding Is a Journey

      We have a tendency to think of user onboarding as a single moment of orientation, after which your new users will be operating on all cylinders. Perhaps that’s because many of us encounter the term in the context of joining a new company, where the word gets used to describe a series of presentations, videos, building tours, introductions…and the completion of lots and lots of forms. It’s this orientation-focused perception that has us holding firm to the notion that product onboarding can be solved with a one-size-fits-all piece of introductory content.

      But onboarding isn’t a single moment, or a single feature, or a single flow. It’s a process that connects many activities, over time, to bridge the gap between trying a new product and becoming a core user of it. Tutorials, videos, setup flows, slideshows, and signup flows may all be a part of that journey, but none alone are the journey.

      Effective onboarding handles multiple jobs that lead to retention, engagement, and commitment of newcomers to our products by:

      building trust,

      familiarizing them with a product’s offerings,

      setting up logistics,

      leading them to making a commitment, and

      guiding them toward next steps until they achieve a steady state.

      Given this scope, onboarding needs more than one moment of orientation to do all its work. In the employment world, companies have been expanding the time frame for employee onboarding programs because those that are six to twelve months long better support employee retention, loyalty, performance, and job satisfaction [1]. In the product world, we don’t necessarily have to view onboarding as a six- to twelve-month process, but we do have to think beyond day one if we want to help users in their most critical stages of acclimation (Fig 1.3).

      Timeline comparison: onboarding as small start in straight line of use versus onboarding as large portion of upward sloping line of use.

      Fig 1.3:

      When we design onboarding, we often only think about the first-time use of our product and expect all issues to be sorted out afterward (top). But onboarding is a process that happens over time, guiding nascent users toward commitment and satisfaction (bottom).

      Viewing onboarding as a process over time doesn’t diminish the importance of making a good first impression on day one. Many teams focus on creating a good first impression, which inspires users to keep going and sets them up for continued success. A bad first impression can cause users to leave a product prematurely, or predisposes them to think negatively about their future interactions [2]. Sometimes, though, we get so caught up in that first impression that we ignore what follows.

      It’s because the first impression is so important that we can’t think of onboarding only as a one-time event. If we hold that mindset, we end up with a first impression that’s stuffed full of all the information and tasks we want a new user to get through, instead of something that builds interest and excitement, leaving nothing to help that person immediately afterward. Though a good first impression gives new users initial momentum, they’ll need additional support to get them into a steady state.

      There’s one question I’ve heard many variations of throughout my career, and chances are you’ve heard it, too: New users aren’t discovering all of our features, someone will say. Can’t we show them a video or tour to make sure they know about everything? This gets asked when we notice people aren’t using our product the way we envisioned. We see data that shows poor engagement with the features we’ve built, we hear customers bemoan lack of functionality that already exists, or we watch participants struggle during a usability test. An instructional video or tour presented at the beginning of an experience should ensure everyone knows how to use our product’s features, right? Who are we to say no to such a reasonable-sounding request?

      Yet, passive instructional techniques like videos, tutorials, and slideshows often fail to onboard newcomers effectively. But why? Enter a concept known as the paradox of the active user, first named by Mary Beth Rosson and John M. Carroll, researchers at IBM in the 1980s [3]. Rosson and Carroll were studying how people acclimated to computer software. They noticed participants in their studies seldom referred to the training guides provided to them, and instead dived right into new software to try a few tasks for themselves. They did this even if it meant encountering errors and dead ends.

      How come? Because the new users were motivated by the specific goals they wanted to achieve, not by the larger potential of the technology. They were uninterested in taking time up front to learn about all the features they might benefit from in the future when there were actions they could definitely benefit from immediately. As a result, each person’s understanding of what this software was capable of was often limited to the tasks they did first. Rosson and Carroll called this a paradox because people could get more from software if they spent time learning about it up front. However, we can’t design for this because people don’t behave in such an idealized way.

      The Perils of Front-Loaded Instruction

      You might not think such troubles apply to your app or website. After all, how many digital products these days even have a user manual? But these printed behemoths have simply evolved into other forms for the digital space: video tours, explanatory slideshows, lengthy informational pages, UI mapping overlays, popups, and more—all trying to explain our products up front instead of letting people simply dive in (Fig 1.4).

      It’s tempting to think that today’s users will be so motivated by the larger promise of our products that they’ll eagerly sit through front-loaded instruction. But that’s not how most people actually behave.

      Ten-item carousel interface with headline reading "Frustrated? Use a carousel and your users will be too."

      Fig 1.4:

      Jared Smith created shouldiuseacarousel.com as a tongue-in-cheek illustration of how front-loaded explanatory patterns like carousels and slideshows are

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