EXECUTING GREAT USER ONBOARDING

Ben Rowe Lead Designer, Cogent

Hello! And welcome to this Cogent online workshop that’s all about user onboarding.

My name is Ben Rowe, I’m a designer here at Cogent. And in the next half hour or so I’m going to be talking to you about how to think more strategically about onboarding new customers to your digital product.

Cogent is based in Melbourne, and so I would like to begin by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand. And to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

AGENDA

• What is user onboarding?

• Why is it so important?

• What does great onboarding look like? (and what it doesn’t)

• How to think more strategically about onboarding

• Moving from activation to adoption

Ok so thanks so much for tuning in today. I’m going to start with a quick agenda of what I’ll be covering in this session.

- Firstly - I want to talk about what we mean by user onboarding, and why it’s so important to your business.

- I’ll be using some real life case studies to show you what great onboarding can look like. - But also, I’ll try and highlight what good onboarding doesn’t look like - and show where companies can often go wrong.

- From there, we’ll talk about how you can think more strategically about your onboarding experience. And how to move your onboarding flow beyond just initial activation of your users, into full adoption of your product.

It’s a big topic, and I’ll just be scratching the surface today.

But it’s one of my favourite topics within product design.

So if you have any questions, or would just like to talk more, then don’t hesitate to reach out. I’ll leave my contact details at the end of this video.

But first, and for those of you who don’t know a lot about Cogent, we’re a team of around 50 people, based in Melbourne. We’re made up of product managers, designers and

developers who work predominantly with Melbourne - based businesses. But we also have some interstate and international clients as well.

We’ve been around for over ten years, and in that time have helped many businesses launch and grow digital products.

We’ve worked with a whole range founders and teams to turn their ideas into a thriving digital businesses. And more recently, especially as the market here in Melbourne has matured,

we’ve been doing a lot more work with larger growth and scale businesses.

Product-Led Growth

One of our focus areas in recent years has been that of Product Led Growth, or PLG

Product-led growth,, is the idea that, rather than having big sales teams and marketing budgets to acquire, activate, and retain your customers - it’s really your product itself that does the hard work, and is the main vehicle for growth.

PLG is definitely a hot topic right now, especially in the Saas world, and it’s something that Cogent has been thinking a lot about lately.

USER ONBOARDING

And of course, one the key factors of a successful product-led business is a having a great user onboarding experience.

And so that’s why I’m here today, and excited to be talking to you about User onboarding.

WhAT is user onboarding?

So let’s get started.

On the surface, Usr onboarding seems pretty simple. You have a digital product, and you’re trying encourage new users to sign up and use your product.

And so you’ll employ some user onboarding tactics to

- Explain what your product does - Encourages new users to sign up - Perhaps highlight some key features - And from there, you can send users on their way - Hopefully they have enough information to figure out the rest.

Well in actual fact, there’s a lot more to it than that.

So that’s why I want to dig a little deeper today.

Why is user onboarding important?

• Helps your business to scale

• Allows your product to sell itself

• Activate and retain customers

• Improve your product virality

• Allows your customers to serve themselves

So why is user onboarding so important?

Firstly, onboarding can really help your business to scale.

In a world of product-led growth, it’s the product itself that needs to do the talking, and the selling, and onboarding is a big part of that piece.

When done well, user onboarding makes it much easier for people to understand your product, what they’ll get from using it, and ultimately why they can’t live without it.

And if you can pull this off, you’ll not only be able be able to activate more trial users, but you’ll also turn them into happy, paying, retained customers.

They, in turn become loyal users, and even advocates of your product, who will spread the word to others, and so can do wonders for your product’s virality.

Then, as your company grows, a successful onboarding experience helps you move your business from start-up to scale-up, by allowing your customer to truly serve themselves. You won’t need to hold your customers hand at every step - and this takes a lot of pressure off your sales and customer support teams.

So there are tonnes of reasons why it’s worth investing in a great onboarding experience. But despite the benefits - onboarding often goes terribly wrong.

And I think it helps to talk about where onboarding goes wrong, before we can figure out how to do it right.

I won’t name names, of course, but a lot products out their tend to fall in one of the following buckets …

A fraction too much friction

In the first bucket, we have products that look interesting, and enticing enough to want to sign up.

But when we do, we’re presented with a long and complicated signup form, and many hoops to jump through before we can start using the product.

This adds an enormous amount of friction into the sign-up experience, and as a result, new users don’t sign up at all.

Non existent on-boarding

The second bucket, is where digital products have little to no onboarding at all.

New users might have been able to sign-up for an account. But after that, they’re left entirely on their own, with no instructions on how to get started, what to do first, or where to find anything.

And so, with a lack of any clear direction, they easily become lost and confused.

And they give up.

Tacked-on(boarding)

The third bucket is where some user onboarding exists, but it feels like it’s been tacked on, as an after-thought.

The onboarding journey perhaps has

- a first run experience of tooltips, or maybe a feature tour, to tell users about what the product does … but then you’re on your own.

A lot of onboarding feels this - like a tacked on solution, that’s awkwardly different from the core product.

And it results in new users that are a bit confused, uninspired, and ultimately unwilling to buy your product.

WhAT’s THE PROBLEM HERE?

Have we invested the effort?

Are we committed?

You can see examples like these all the time where:

- The onboarding flow is long and complicated - Where there has been no consideration for onboarding at all - Or if there is, it’s an after-thought.

There are a whole lot of reasons that this may be the case. But I think that it often boils down to the fact that many business simply don’t invest the effort that’s needed to create a great onboarding experience.

And so they’re not fully committed to it.

I’d like to be able to tell you that user onboarding is easy. That you can “sprinkle a bit of onboarding” on top of your existing product. And that you can have it done in 2 sprints. But that would be a lie.

USER ONboarding IS HARD

• It’s not a small, stand-along project

• Requires commitment from the whole team

• Is ever evolving, never finished

• Needs to be “baked in” to your actual product

• Needs an owner

The truth is, onboarding is a lot of work.

It can never just be a small, stand alone project. If you treat it like, it’s always going to feel rushed, and too tactical. And that will be obvious to your customers.

Great onboarding is much bigger than that, and requires commitment from the whole team.

And It’s ever evolving, never finished. Over time, your product will evolve. And your user’s needs will evolve. So your approach to onboarding will also need to evolve over time.

It needs to be “baked in” to your actual product experience.

What I mean by that, is that it needs to be tightly coupled and fully integrated with the core user experience of your product.

So much so, that it should be hard to tell where your onboarding finishes and where the actual product begins.

But it also needs to be baked in to the way your product teams work. Rather than being an after-thought, it should become core to every new feature or release that you make.

Often, there are multiple teams that are working on the onboarding experience. Maybe your sales and marketing team are involved, along with your product teams.

So you want to avoid creating silos that lead to a lack of cohesion in the onboarding flow - so there needs to be an owner, or at least a cross functional team that have ownership and responsibility for it.

So it really does require a lot of hard work.

ONboarding - CASE STUDIES

Noom Grammarly

At the same time, there are a bucket load of companies who are fully committed to a great onboarding experience, and results are there to show that it’s a worthwhile endeavour.

Today I’m going to talk about two examples that I’ve recently come across - To give you an idea of what great onboarding can look like, and why it’s worth the effort.

The first is Noom, which is a really successful weight loss helper with more than 50 million downloads of their app, and who quadrupled their revenue last year.

The second is Grammarly, which is an AI-powered spelling, tone and grammar checking tool, recently valued at over 1 billion dollars.

These are hugely successful products, and a lot of that success can be attributed to having great onboarding experience.

We’ll dive into these examples a soon. And there are hundreds more that I could talk if we had the time.

But there’s one thing they all have in common.

great USER ONboarding IS NOT ABOUT YOU

“Here’s what our product can do”

“Here’s what you can do with our product”

They’ve realised that onboarding is not product centric. It’s customer centric.

Rather than focussing on what the product does, they focus on the customer, and what they’re trying to achieve by using their product.

So the first step to developing a more strategic approach to onboarding, is to realise that it’s not about you. And to re-frame it from the customer’s view point.

It’s a subtle difference between “Here’s what our product can do” and “Here’s what you can do with our product”, but it’s a big difference.

“User Onboarding is the process of radically

increasing the likelihood that new users become

successful when adopting your product.”

Samuel Hulick, useronboard.com

And that’s why I really like Samuel Hulick’s definition of user onboarding the most.

He says “User Onboarding is the process of radically increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.”

It’s a very user-centred definition, and it’s all about the user’s success - which is what I like about it.

great USER ONboarding IS CUSTOMER CENTRIC

• What is it that they are trying to achieve by using your product?

• What progress are they trying to make in their lives?

• What does their conversion funnel look like?

• What steps do they need to go through to be successful?

And so, like almost every part of product design, it’s more sensible to take a more customer-centred approach to onboarding.

Rather than focussing on the outcomes that you’re hoping to achieve, you should be focusing on what the user is trying to achieve, and what success looks like to them.

- What is it that *they’re* trying to achieve by using your product?

- What progress are *they* trying to make in their lives?

- What does *their* conversion funnel look like?

- What steps do *they* need to go through to be successful?

great USER ONboarding IS CUSTOMER CENTRIC

Going back to our examples

Both Noom and Grammarly really focus on what success looks like from their customer’s eyes.

Noom - they understand that success for their customers means losing weight, or getting fit for good - and their onboarding flow starts there.

Grammarly realise that success for their users is about become a better writer, which is a big part of the value proposition for them.

IT’S ABOUT VALUE(for your users)

Once we understand what success really means to our customer, we’re in a much better position to design an onboarding flow.

And we start to focus less on the user interface, and less on specific product features.

And focus more on key value that our users are looking for, and how they will become successful as a result of using our product.

So how do you figure this out?

How do you understand what progress people are trying to make, and what value they hope to get from your product?

UNDERSTAND USER VALUE

Qualitative research

• Speak to existing users • Understand their world • Where your product fits it?

Quantitative research

• What can we learn from paid users? • What features do they use the

most? • What’s the first thing they do?

One great place to start, is to learn more about your existing customers, and especially the ones that have upgraded to a paid account.

What are the things about your product that have encouraged them to stick around? Where have they been successful as result of using your product?

You can use both Quant and Qual user-research methods to uncover this.

On the quantitative side - there’s a lot to learn by reviewing your analytics data.

For what patterns can we observe about the users that have upgraded to pay for your product? What feature had they used the most before upgrading? What is the first they do when log in?

And from a qualitative side - User interviews, feedback surveys and contextual enquiries are just some methods that can help you to dig a little deeper.

It’s worth reaching out to your existing customers who have upgraded to a paid account. Take the time to get a deeper understand of their lives, their businesses, and their day-to-day.

Find out where your product is already adding the most value to them. What’s the one thing about your product that they simply can’t live without?

This should give you some strong insights into when and where your product is adding the most value. And these insights can then become the cornerstone of your onboarding experience.

Finding the shortest path to value

• Get new users to their ‘Aha moment’ - as

quickly as possible.

• Remove any friction in the process

• Before the paywall

Once customers can see the value in your product, and how it can improve their lives, they’re much more likely to become active customers.

But new users can be fickle, and unless they’re wowed within the first few minutes, you risk losing them forever. So there’s no time to waste. And your onboarding flow should be about creating the shortest path for them to realise that value.

Your goal is to get new users to their ‘Aha moment’ - the moment when they grasp the value that your product offers - as quickly as possible.

Identify which tasks or steps a user needs to complete themselves in order to experience that Aha moment.

And focus your onboarding experience towards completing those steps.

And of course - You really want to remove any friction in the process. So if there are there some steps that can be removed, or deferred until later, then you should do that.

Which of course means - all of this needs to take place *Before the paywall*. Users should get to their Aha moment - well before they’ve handed over their money.

So you need to be demonstrating value within the free or trial version of your product.

Even better, if you can get users to their Aha moment even before they have to sign up for a free account, you’re drastically reducing friction, and providing the shortest path to value.

THE AHA MOMENT

NOOM

I think Noom do this incredibly well.

As a new user, all you need to do is enter just a little bit of personal info (like age, current weight and ideal weight), Noom then present presents you with a customised weight loss plan. And a timeline for when you can expect to achieve it. It’s really powerful.

All of this happens well before you need to create an account. It provides users with an Aha moment within a minute, and that’s a strong motivation to sign up for their two-week trial.

GRAMMARLY

Grammarly uses a short animation that explains exactly how you’ll benefit from using their product - It’s like an Aha moment presented at the very onset.

But the rubber really hits the road once you’ve created an account, and presented with a “Demo document” that lets you learn the product by using the product, and creates a second “Aha moment” from the moment you’ve signed up - because as a user you are learning by doing, almost immediately.

ACTIVATION TO ADOPTION

The onboarding experience shouldn’t just be focussed on new sign-ups. That’s just step one.

Step two is to move from activation to adoption. If you did manage to convince someone new to try your product, now’s the time to deliver on your promise. Prove to them that your product is easy to use, provides them with the value that they’re looking for, and that it’s totally worth paying for.

But of course, you’ll probably need to give people a few gentle nudges along the way.

the Bowling Alley Framework

your product IS a bowling lane.

Your product is a bowling lane

*(Note - need a better image than this one)*

Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley Framework is a great analogy for thinking about your onboarding flow, and provides a great framework to think about when converting trial users into regular customers.

Think of your product as a bowling lane.

Your overall objective is to get users to bowl a strike. That’s the “must-have” moment, when users are convinced that your product is worth paying for.

But many users never bowl a strike. Most users will churn, which is the bowling alley equivalent to a gutterball.

And how do we reduce gutterballs? We put up bumpers, to stop the ball from going off track. And so we need to do the same to keep our users out of the gutter.

REDUCING tHE GUTTERBALLS

Conversational Bumpers

• —-

Product Bumpers

• —-

Wes talks about 2 types of bumpers that we can put up, to nudge our users back in the right direction:

**Conversational Bumpers** are typically out-of-app nudges to educate your users about what they can do, and bring them back into your app. They include welcome emails, usage tips and explainer videos.

**Product Bumpers** are usually in-app methods to make sure you’re helping people use the product. Smart empty states, Product walkthroughs, In-app messaging and usage checklists are all good examples of product buffers.

Make sure you understand when your users are churning, and specifically where they need some encourage to stay the course. Then you can decide which tactics to use to increase the likelihood that users will knock down all the pins.

—

Once they’ve signed up for a free trial, it becomes more tactical Using in-app / out of app tactics to keep users on their path to the ‘must have’ moment Measure drop-off points, and determine where some nudges

Out of app - Welcome Emails / Usage Tips - Triggered email

In-app

- Onboarding Tooltips - Product Tours - Empty States - Progress Bars / Checklists

START TODAY

User onboarding is a critical component of Product-Led-Growth. It’s the best way to reduce customer churn, and increase product adoption. Without a solid onboarding strategy in place, you simply won’t convince many new users that your product is right for them.

The best time to start working on your product’s user onboarding was on day one. From the very beginning. Ideally, every product starts with a sound onboarding strategy in place.

The second best time is today. Now’s the time to re-visit your onboarding experience.

www.cogent.co

THANKs

Ben Rowe ben.rowe@cogent.co

@benhyphenrowe

(And of course - talk to Cogent if you’d like some help.)