Better Onboarding (Growth Design Monthly)

June 2021

Dear Readers,Fairy bread: if you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a children’s party food popular in Australia. To make it, you take a slice of plain bread, spread butter on it, and then cover it with “hundreds and thousands” (sprinkles). How does this relate to onboarding. Because, what are we trying to do other than get hundreds and thousands of new users to stick around?  OK, silly metaphors aside: user onboarding is a serious topic. Whether you’re working on a new product or service, or an existing one trying to scale, the user onboarding journey is critical to getting new users to return and to help them understand how to get continuing value from your product over time. 

That’s why I wrote the book Better Onboarding, to help people discover the breadth of opportunity that onboarding holds. Products are getting smarter, richer, and more widely distributed, especially products that live in the B2B space. In this newsletter, I’ll share how some of the concepts from Better Onboarding relate to such spaces. And the good news is that many of the principles that underly good onboarding are as applicable to large business services as they are to small B2C ones, and not drastically different from the principles of good product design.Let’s get started,Krystal

Author of Better Onboarding

Getting on the same page

Team misalignment is one of the top challenges that both I, and people I’ve spoken with, have cited as getting in the way of designing a good onboarding experience. Before work on onboarding starts, the team needs to set the right goals. That means understanding what onboarding is: not just the first run experience, but a process. And I don’t mean a single process, like a setup process or a signup process. I mean a journey-like process that connects many activities, over time, to bridge someone from the situation they came to your product in to getting to a state of core use. Core use is when they’re getting value out of your product while contributing to the sustainability and growth of your business in turn.So, you can’t just judge onboarding success by one-time achievements like signed up, subscribed, purchased, clicked-through, or setup completed; these need to be put in the context of goals like retention, engagement, revenue, and qualitative user satisfaction. 

To get your team aligned to a good goal, collaboratively come up with what core use can mean in your product. For example, if you ran a question-and-answer platform, “Answers at least 5 questions a week” could be a good definition of core use, as this implies someone is actively contributing to the community. B2B products may need more than one core use definition because of the different segments they serve: a hiring tool, for example, might have different core use definitions for recruiters, managers, and candidates.

Guide through interaction

Because onboarding is a journey, you can’t solve it all up front with a single tutorial that tries to explain your features and is narrowly focused only on moving short-term metrics. You need to help your customers and their downstream end-users put information in context. That’s where guided interaction comes in. It’s an approach that focuses on weaving guidance into the flow of an action, allowing it to be self-paced, contextual, actionable, and authentic. First, break down your onboarding journey into the important actions that can, cumulatively, lead someone to your definition of core use—I include an activity for journey mapping and prioritizing key onboarding actions in my book, but you can also use cohort data and user research interviews from existing, core users to see which actions propelled them to success. For example, in a question-and-answer platform, the actions of posting a first question and enabling notifications could both be important actions for a new user to take.  Then, break down how to guide someone through the flow of each action. What’s the most relevant time and place to prompt someone to take that action? What can you do throughout the flow of the action to help them through the work? And how can you follow up after it’s completed to connect them to other actions they might take next? Check out my free storyboard template for breaking down these key onboarding actions. 

Flex for different situations

You will have new customers from different business types; multiple layers of new users between your customers and their customers; people who have used products like yours before and those who haven’t; and just generally people with different goals and expectations. Guided interaction inherently helps people from different situations because it allows them to encounter actions when the time is right for them. Other ways to ensure you’re supporting the range of situations your new users are in include:  Providing multiple paths to the same goal. For example, give people alternatives for completing an action, like offering data import as well as manual data entry.   Offering lots of examples. Examples in the context of a product can include editable sample documents, templates, and case studies showing how different features in your products can be applied in different situations.  Investing in help content (including customer support staff!). Make sure you have a robust, curated help center and that it’s easily accessible from multiple parts of the product. And don’t neglect staffing customer support. B2B products in particular can build trust with new users by reassuring them they can contact a real human if they need to. Nicolas Mérouze covers the importance of 1:1 touchpoint in this B2B onboarding guide. Using other channels. Thoughtfully using other channels like email and mobile app notifications can augment your in-product experience. 

Be authentic

Many folks rely on overlays for guidance (banners, popups, floating chatbots, etc). As someone who has worked on large products, I get it: overlays are easy because you don’t have to get into the “guts” of your UI. But overlays rarely feel like a natural part of a product and often interrupt folks, which can cause people to dismiss them without reading. Relying solely on hastily-dismissed, one-time overlays is a recipe for missed information, confusion, and churn. Instead, look first at your core product design to make sure it’s guiding new users. For example: Clear navigation can point to where people can go next, actions they can take, and the range of offerings you provide. Informative and actionable empty states can invite people to populate them with content. Microcopy that’s clear and recognizable can reduce ambiguity and direct action.If you want to create extra layers of guidance, the goal is to make it feel like a natural extension of your product. For example, Slack deploys its in-house help bot, Slackbot, to provide either proactive tips or reactive guidance. While it’s technically a chatbot that might be implemented as an overlay in other products, here it’s woven in like other conversations in the app, demonstrates the power of bots, and serves as a bridge to help content. 

Onboarding is an inherently human journey of learning and adaptation. It’s not a problem that can be solved with single-use, front-loaded explanations. We need to get comfortable with guiding new users as they interact, offering multiple options for people in different situations, and make sure our guidance feels like an authentic extension of our products. And this can make for a better product for all users.

Buy Better Onboarding

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About the Author

Krystal is a UX designer and author of Better Onboarding, a book about designing better user onboarding experiences. She connects the dots between products, systems, and the people who use them. Krystal’s experience has included designing products and services at companies like NVIDIA, eBay, and Google, where she currently works as a design lead (noting that this post is not affiliated with Google). 

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