Welcome to the Party! A guide to User Onboarding (with notes)

An approach to onboarding wherein I examine the baseline components, the big questions about product-user relationships that need to be in front of any onboarding decisions, and how both metrics and meaning should drive how you sequence the process. Presented at Interact London, 2014. Presenter notes included.

Transcript

1. Welcome to the Party A GUIDE TO USER ONBOARDING @grandin
2. Party time! Excellent! A METAPHOR IS A DEAD HORSE 1 Think of your product or service - or your clients product or service - as a party. You want people to come, right? And you want them to have a good time. How do you make sure people have a good time?
3. Well, you want to have a good crowd. That’s a key ingredient, but you don’t always have the most control over that, though you should try.
4. You gotta have the punch. Everybody loves punch.
5. You gotta put up some streamers, make sure there’s pointy hats to go around.
6. But one of the most important parts of the party, is you, the host. You in all your stock photo glory. Specifically, how you welcome you guests, make them feel comfortable, and get them into the swing of the party so they can have best time possible.
7. Greeting Orienting Serving ONBOARDING Greeting, orienting and serving your guests is a lot like onboarding users to your product or service. So we have our punch, crowd, and party hats. What do we have to help us onboard users?
8. PRESENTATION TOURS REGISTRATION PROFILING & PERSONALISATION OPT-INS USER ASSISTANCE
9. Onboarding orders enabling As we’ll see, successful onboarding is placing these elements in the order that best enables your users to get value from your product, quickly.
10. Its about making sure your guests stay, and have a great time, at your party.
11. What is onboarding? DEFINITION AND PRINCIPLES 2 So there’s the metaphor that I will proceed to beat to death over the next half hour. How about a more precise definition.
12. Between arriving and staying Onboarding is what happens from when a new user shows up at your website, or downloads and opens your app, to when they complete a successful first run.
13. Acquisition to Activation It corresponds to the tail-end of acquisition and the entirety of the activation phase of the user lifecycle…
14. Good onboarding = retention …and its goal is to assure retention. Teaching users what your service can do, how to use it, and ultimately getting them to use and derive value from it, is one of the most important things you can do in your relationship with them. Get them to the party, get them into the party right, and the idea is they’ll stay.
15. The Four A’s Just to be a good boy, I should tell you that onboarding comes from Human Resources practice, and is associated with 4 main phases, each of which, as you might have guessed, begin with the letter “A”.
16. ACQUIRE ACCOMMODATE ASSIMILATE ACCLERATE Acquire: Get them to your party. Letterpress invites or wheat pasted posters. Whatever your style. Accommodate: Give them what they need to enjoy your party. Name tag. Glowstick. Jaegerbomb. Assimilate: Get them into the vibe and culture of the party. Introduce them to some people. Accelerate: Help them get the most out of the party before the sun comes up. There’s your textbook definition. It’s good, and you should know it, but I won’t be coming back to it.
17. Why it’s important now Why is onboarding more important now than ever?
18. Why now? • Market: Ever more competition • Market: Complex, novel services • Touch: No hover, no inline tooltips • Touch: Gestures instead of interactors There’s market reasons - general competition in digital, and for startups, the overhead of explaining complex or new services. Then there’s touch. We no longer have hover to provide inline tooltips, and gestural vocabularies mean increasingly fewer onscreen interactors.
19. Why it should be taken seriously Now, we all know that we should strive for recognition over recall. The best tutorial is no tutorial, right? Or one that is so integrated as to not be felt as such. But sometimes you need to explain, or show, or give a helping hand.
20. Why so serious? • Client side: Retention, Engagement • Company side: Clear relations between KPIs and KSPs Rigorously planning user activation has obvious business benefits like retention and engagement, but planning and designing it is an exercise the can help clarify the relationship between KPIs and KSPs for the product team.
21. Onboarding principles? Are there some guiding principles for onboarding?
22. UX Principles vs Onboarding Principles The problem with principles is that they’re often applicable to everything.
23. Theory Fortunately, Stefanie Andersen has defined some principles that are particular to the onboarding process. In her excellent presentation, “Creating Kick- Ass Users: An Approach to Onboarding and User Assistance”, she takes a good look at the importance of fun to learning and engagement, and comes up with a number of principles for onboarding I don’t see much need to improve on:
24. Onboarding Principles 1. Be persuasive 2. Offer clear goals and guidance 3. Shape the path 4. Make it relevant and meaningful 5. Inspire users with ideas and examples 6. Use compelling, conversational language - Stefanie Andersen, “Creating Kick-Ass Users” 1. Be persuasive - manage ability, attention and motivation to boost the desired behavior. I am telling you now, I am not going to talk about BJ Fogg, triggers, desire engines, or reward centers. You can look into it if you’re interested. 2. Offer clear goals and guidance - Be transparent and direct about the steps ahead, and the job to be done. 3. Shape the path - Use gradual engagement to combine selling and learning product from the inside. Make sure the rails get them through the main value proposition. 4. Make it relevant and meaningful - this means going “beyond the tool” to show where value is created in the user’s life or work context. 5. Inspire users with ideas and examples - Blank slates do a lot for freedom, but don’t really show you much. Nothing transmits a value proposition better than evidence of what it can produce. 6. Use compelling, conversational language - You wouldn’t greet your party guests using bland or jargony language, would you?
25. Practice: Doing it yourself Those principles are great, and can help you make decisions in onboarding flows for your own clients or products. In practice, however, we need to look at some other factors: understanding the the nuts-and- bolts components of onboarding, the bigger picture relationships between product and user, and the strategy and storytelling you’ll use to sequence the experience while respecting those broader relationships.
26. Door, Foyer, Hall & Parlor COMPONENTS OF ONBOARDING EXPERIENCES 3 I’ve already mentioned the main component families you’ll need to make your decisions around onboarding. Keep in mind that the order I present them in is by no means the order they should be show to the user, though presentation will obviously come earlier.
27. PRESENTATION TOURS REGISTRATION PROFILING & PERSONALISATION OPT-INS USER ASSISTANCE A little recap
28. Presentation Presentation elements are those most firmly placed within the acquisition phase. It’s typically the first contact a user has with the brand. Think of it as the front door to the party. Presentation is all about welcoming the prospect and making a good first impression. It is the frontline of product marketing, so making the offer clear in the blink of an eye is critical.
29. Presentation Homepage - Clear At the minimum you’ll need to lead with the key selling point in a strong baseline or visual, and carefully place your calls to action. After that the info density is up to you - you can keep it light, or follow up with features and benefits, testimonials, press, etc. Clear opts for a horizontally segmented poster-style page that are quite common these days, where you scroll to discover the various benefits.
30. Presentation Homepage - Tinder Tinder has a more frontal approach: a gif showing it’s card-based primary interaction, with two CTAs: download or watch a video.
31. Presentation Appstore- Clear For apps, however, you also have the store page. If google is your homepage for websites, Store pages are homepages for apps. Don’t neglect them.
32. Presentation App Splash Pages
33. Tours & Tutorials Tours and tutorials are the “telling” part of your pitch. They’re most often in the form of a slideshow that gives the key benefits, either in an app or in a webpage popover.
34. Tours & Tutorial Yummly - Product Tour
35. Tours & Tutorial Soundcloud - Product Tour
36. Registration Once you’ve hit the door, a lot of parties might have you check off the guestlist, maybe put on a name tag. It’s a pain, we know. Whether it’s necessary, and whether you do it from the get go or later on depends upon your product. You know as well as I that registration should be kept as easy as possible; whether or not you integrate with some or all of your profiling and personalisation flows will depend on how necessary additional information is to a successful first run.
37. Trad FontYou If an account is necessary to get started, start with it. We can go the traditional route with email and password…
38. Conversational Huffduffer or even change it up to be conversational
39. Social Pinterest or offer social login with or without the traditional option Social login is No need to remember password Avoids duplicate account creation Fastest path to success Just watch out for depending on a third party solution, and anti-social prospects
40. SMS Square Cash or by sending or receiving an SMS
41. Progressive registration Pandora If it’s not necessary to sign up users out of the gate, find another way to do it later. This can be great as a part of an overall strategy of gradual engagement, where, to quote Luke W “the first time experience is focused on giving people an understanding of how they can use a service and why they should care to.”
42. Profiling and Personalisation Profiling and personalisation can include a wide variety of tasks strung across different moments. I've separated personalization into 3 categories, which all ultimately impact content: what you’re presenting, what you’re receiving, and who you’re getting it from.
43. Profile completion Progressive profiling - LinkedIn Profile completion gets your profile to a state that the user is happy represents himself, and more importantly facilitates or qualifies interaction with others, boosting your value within a public or private system. LinkedIn is a familiar example of it done gradually - progress bars or completion percentages serve as reminders to go that little bit further.
44. Content profiling Forced profiling - Quora Setting content preferences is important for anything oriented on discovery, as it assures the minimum relevance of what the user is exposed to.
45. Content profiling Forced profiling - Beats
46. Find, follow, invite Forced follow - Twitter The last major profiling tasks are find, follow or invite - social tasks that link you up with people. They are like content preferences insofar as they affect what sort of material will be shared with or exposed to you, an interest graph that goes through people.
47. Functional Opt-ins Functional opt-ins, especially when dealing with apps, have a more fundamental impact on the way users relate to and exploit the system of your product itself, or its relationship with other products. The golden rules are “prime” and “only when necessary”. “Priming” means setting up the user for the ask, and giving them a reason to say yes. “Only when necessary” means what it says - you ask only for what is absolutely required, and then only when it is relevant. Nothing is worse than launching an app and plowing through a series of asks without being told why. I break these functional opt-ins into three categories:
48. Device permissions Heydey - Location opt-in with priming Device permissions, which effect the way a product can interact with information, sensors and features that are essentially native to the device.
49. Ecosystem integration Jukely - Service Connection Ecosystem integration - making it so your product can benefit from working with other products - is becoming increasingly standardised. App URL callbacks with rich syntax, and now iOS extensions, have app interoperability more the rule than the exception. Social sync Sync services App extensions Desktop or Mobile install
50. Upgrading and payment Premium upgrade - Evernote And finally, transactions, which may include upgrading to unlock functionality, or rely on payment integration to do core or secondary tasks.
51. User assistance Finally we have user assistance. Now, I had some trouble deciding what I was gonna call this - User Assistance, Tutorial, Walkthrough, etc. There’s a lot of overlap with the “Tour” slideshows, but for me they are two different things. The Tour tells you why a product might interest you; user assistance shows you how to use it, while also showing you its value.
52. Tooltips/Coachmarks Art.sy - Desktop Tooltip Tooltips or coach marks are generally overlays that show you how to do something.
53. Mobile tooltips Various When sequenced and designed correctly, they can work. When done poorly, they are more signal than noise. Personally, I’m not a big fan.
54. Interactive walkthrough Vine Interactive walkthroughs, which favor learning by doing, can be more impactful than tooltips. They are guided, and get you through the main points actively rather than passively.
55. Sandbox Basecamp - Sample Project Another option is the sandbox - offer a pre filled area that has content for them to manipulate, so they can just jump right in and try things out
56. Party planning PRODUCT & USER RELATIONSHIPS 4 So far, so good. We know what onboarding is. We have some high level principles. We know what legos we have to work with. There’s just one thing: context. What are the core questions you need to answer before even beginning to design the onbording process?
57. “It’s that kind of party” There’s lots of different kinds of parties. You’ve got house-parties, mixers, massives, concerts, keggers, and then get-togethers that’s aren’t even really parties, but that still need a good host - seminars, meetings, book clubs, play dates. There’s even the party of one, but we’re not here to talk about blowing your own horn. “What kind of party” you’re throwing is a key factor in how you decorate, and how you receive, because you need to be true to the occasion.
58. What kind of product is it? So the question is, “What kind of product is it?” Productivity? Music? Personal accounting? Insurance? Health? Media consumption, curation, creation? All have different needs that will profoundly affect how we get into, learn, and use them. There’s a difference between Twitter and Tesco.
59. What frequency and intensity of interaction? Is it a flash mob, a one-off, or a residency? What are your ambitions in terms of user interaction… How often do you anticipate they’ll be using your service? Daily, weekly monthly? Hourly? How intensely? For seconds, minutes, hours? You need to plan for that. Maybe you need to greet your users more than once?
60. Is it digital native, or digital touchpoint? Does the product exist solely on the web or as an app, or is it the digital extension of something otherwise non-digital - your bank, your car, your airline?
61. Service extension, or new service? If it’s a new digital touchpoint, how big is the gap from the original service? Does it provide the same service as the real-world or digital parent, or does it extend the service in a new way? It’s the difference between a simple banking app, or a banking app that lets you scan checks, split tabs, or pay.
62. “A certain crowd” Another key factor is the guestlist. Who’s on it? Where do they come from? Do you know everybody? Do they know you?
63. What is the user’s relationship with your brand or product? How does the user currently relate to the brand or product?
64. “Do I know you?” Do they know it really well? Is it a brand they already trust and understand? Or is it completely new? How much explaining are you likely to have to do? How much confidence will you need to build?
65. “You on the list?” Do your users already have an account or do they need to make one? If your users already have an account, is it a digital account or a “real world” account they’ll need to bridge?
66. Are you selling to them, or selling them? Who’s paying? What’s the business model? If it’s paid, does the transactional engagement take place inside the touchpoint or outside? How critical is upgrading to optimal experience? Or, worse, how will you be selling your users through advertising or data vending?
67. Do they use it for business or pleasure? Lines between enterprise and mass- market can be blurry, with both new digital services and with old ones. SAP or Bloomberg are one thing, but what about Dropbox, which also has business options next to their mainline consumer products?
68. Partyhopping? And then there’s the question of other parties. Some nights are just more popular than others. How do you plan against soirees that are going on at the same time? Some of your guests might already be committed, others might just be considering taking off. What is your response to the competition?
69. The house across the street There might be frontal competition trying to draw your guests away. The problem becomes not just getting them into the swing of things, but convincing them that your party is the better of the two, and they should stay.
70. “We’re just saying goodbye over here” What about users that are at another party? How do you help them come over to yours? Beyond convincing them to come, do you send a car to pick them up? Do you need to bootstrap content or setting migration? Hell, some people make a party out of moving itself!
71. RELATIONSHIPS FRAME AND DRIVE ONBOARDING While these questions may seem basic or obvious, it’s important to put them in front of any onboarding design decisions. Principles can guide practice, but they do not structure your choices in the same way that the context between user and product does. Relationships frame and drive onboarding
72. The arc of the night SEQUENCING, STRATEGY & STORYTELLING 5 How you sequence your onboarding process depends on what you need to give your users, and what you need to get out of them, so that they can get the most out of your product. No amount of benchmarking can tell you what steps to put in what order to optimise your onboarding. Your onboarding will be as effective as it is linked to creating effective users, and what an effective user is depends upon your product and how difficult it is get value from it. It’s your party, so how do you order the festivities to make sure people dig it as fast as possible?
73. Sequencing as strategy Getting the right order requires a strategic approach - what is the main thing that makes your party rock, and how do you encourage people to get into that groove? If you want people to dance, you should probably get a DJ, but also clear out the living room, and try to keep people from congregating in the the kitchen.
74. Metrics = Strategy From a product standpoint, metrics are, or at least should be, a direct reflection of your strategy. Now, what you initially think your best success predictors are, and what they actually may be might not match up. Over time you should have an idea of “what your product is to people”, and how that translates into key performance indicators. Let these KPIs drive the order of your onboarding.
75. One man’s trash is another man’s engagement As I’ve said before, and won’t stop saying, this will always depend on your product. Frequency will vary hugely between a messaging or music app, and a travel search engine or insurance site. Likewise, retention over weeks or months will probably be higher for reference, sports or weather sites than - we would hope, for a dating service or the casual game du jour. How is engagement measured in your product category? How do you measure engagement for your own product?
76. HITS Just a reminder = HITS are “How Idiots Track Statistics”
77. What KPI makes it “click”? Again, How do you measure engagement for your own product? I ask this because, when planning onboarding, one of the most important and perhaps most difficult questions you can answer, is what KPI is associated with the highest rate of engagement, as you measure it, or overall lifetime user value? What experience, activity, or task can you objectively point to and say - “The majority of users that have done THIS stick around for the party.“ Be careful! It might not be what you think - what drives engagement is not necessarily the same thing as what activated them in the first place, so keep an open mind when trying to suss out that “a-ha” moment.
78. WORK BACKWARDS! While having one central KPI will help clarify things, there will always be several factors affecting your users’ success on and engagement with your service. You’ll likely need to work backwards to identify them.
79. What tracks with retention? What do returning users tend to have in common?
80. What tracks with frequency? What characteristics do frequent users tend to share?
81. What tracks with conversion? What kind of user converts best?
82. Predictors, cause, effect Finding predictors for these metrics may be as hard as locating your “activation” moment, but in the search you’ll learn a lot about cause and effect within your feature set, which will help you in overall optimisation and roadmap planning. For example, do you know that once a profile hits 50% completion, those users are three times as likely to upgrade? Or that A certain number of friends or followers or playlists or shared articles means means a spike in visit frequency? Well slap my mouth!
83. Sequencing and storytelling What order you do things in isn’t going to be a purely mathematical affair. While you may have a firm grasp on the metrics, and know that of the 150 people you invited, 70 will likely show up and 20 of them will probably bring a six-pack, you still need to take care of each person as they arrive. How you address them makes a big difference. That’s your job as a host, right?
84. THE PAIN! Remember that onboarding, at it worst, can be a series of pain-points - obnoxious tasks that grind users into abandoning. We can’t forget that even optimised flows can contain a great deal of friction, and that we need to give equal attention to content as to form design.
85. Comfort: A safe party is a fun party Use the opportunity to smooth things whenever possible. Your labels and instructions, errors and confirmations, messages and promises should work to comfort the user. This party is a good place to be, right?
86. Comfort • Establish Voice and tone • Remove obstacles • Reassure • Prime Comfort your user by establishing voice and tone: do you favour empathy, humor, irony? Remove obstacles and reassure the user on points they might be hesitant. Tell them what you will and won’t be doing with their information. Tell them why you need them to do something for you.
87. Clarify: This is an all-nighter Brevity is the soul of wit, and web- writing. When done right, it’s clear.
88. Clarify • Keep it light • Keep it sparse • CTAs that mean something • Be transparent Copy in onboarding should adhere to the general tenets of web-writing. Not too much, not too dense, not too vague. And of course, be transparent about what’s next, where the should click, how many steps are left, what the business model is, etc.
89. Convince: Stay all night But don’t forget you’re still in sales mode, so provide - or demonstrate - the user benefit to drive home understanding.
90. Convince • Meaningful pitch • Understandable benefits • Social proof • The first win • The free sample There’s plenty of weapons in the product marketing arsenal. You’ll want to have a meaningful pitch and describe the product benefits in terms they understand, and perhaps provide a bit of social proof. More than anything, however, you want to get them to the first win, the feeling that they’re actually deriving value from what you have to offer. As we’ve seen, these goals can be dispatched by telling, in a tutorial or tour, or preferably by showing, in a guided walkthrough, inside a sandbox or via a free sample.
91. Tough choices An integrated approach to onboarding, wherein metrics and meaning get equal consideration, means you have to be ready to make some difficult decisions. While in the best of all worlds we’ll want to acquire as many users as possible, and explain every last feature to them, in reality we need to select for quality over quantity - in our arguments, and among our potential users.
92. Ease and value on balance If you’ve done a good job of dissecting your metrics, you should be able to know which higher-friction steps translate to more capable, and thus higher-value users. Finding the balance between ease and value is critical...
93. Churn for the better users …because strategically introducing friction can turn churn into a filter for positive value. This friction can come from tasks - optional or required, from content, or even from time spent. You’ll need to define your own thresholds, and testing will be crucial, but don’t be shy:
94. Friction can be your friend Just remember that friction can be your friend, if friction creates value.
95. FRICTION QUALIFICATION VALUE ENGAGEMENT Add friction to qualify. Qualify to enable value. Create value to engage.
96. THE PLEASURE! If your onboarding content is carefully deployed, if you take care to address hesitation, if you motivate the process, and if you leverage expository and experiential ways to communicate your selling points, you can improve the overall ambience so that the otherwise onerous becomes advantageous.
97. Now if all this talk of product metrics, storytelling, and acceptable churn seems to go deeper into the user lifecycle than onboarding, that’s kind of the point. If you can identify what a “successful user” is, then you can get to work shortcutting their way to success. Which, as a host, is what you want to do
98. Get them to the dancefloor Get them to the dance floor, well ready to move.
99. drop the mic So you can drop the mic
100. MERCI
101. DigitasLBi France @grandin