Best Practices for Onboarding Software Users
User onboarding is the process of guiding new users to find value in the product. It is the time when the lifetime value of a new user can be set. It’s the first impression of the product and as in all other cases the first impressions matter when it comes to the product as well.
What value does your product add?
The soon user find and understand the product’s core value, the more certain become avid customers.
Better onboarding is important because it helps you with-
👉 Building good relationships.
Once user realize the value of the service, they stick with the product that fuels up the loyalty of the customer, which enables the good relationship.
👉 Improving engagement, adoption, and retention rate.
Optimizing the first-time user experience has a great reaching impact on the entire user journey. With great onboarding experiences users are more likely to use other parts of your product and stay engaged with it longer.
👉 Crating good momentum and motivation.
Generally people are motivated by the “goal gradient effect.” That means the closer we get to reaching a goal, the harder we work to complete it. Breaking down the onboarding journey into smaller tasks and reminding users how far along they are in the process, creates the motivation and momentum for user to complete the tasks and get proficient with the product.
Best practices for great user onboarding experiences:
The great user onboarding experience is the one thing that can create the “Wow” moment for the user.
Below are the best practices to enable this experience-
1. Understanding the user journey:
Understanding the user journey is the key to finding the “Wow” moment and how to help users to understand faster. Without understanding the user journey it’s not possible to design the great onboarding experience.
2. Communication and collaboration across teams:
An effective onboarding strategy requires cross-functional collaboration between the design, product & other teams. This also involves figuring out the core message you want to give to your users via in-app messages & onboarding checklists.
3. Focus on value:
Focusing on the value is one of the important factors in user onboarding as users will take the time and effort to learn the entire product but only after they've experienced its value. Creating small tasks and breaking the entire process into small steps to complete those tasks provides focused learning and better understanding.
4. Use data to personalize the experience:
Personalisation is about making the product/product work for a particular user. This will help us to deliver relevant onboarding experiences that speeds up the user's time to value realisation. Onboarding can be personalised using segments such as the user's role, their location, the page they are visiting, etc.
It is possible just by identifying the need of the user and analysing whether that’s related to their job title, preferences, or goal and then personalizing the UX for each user.
Great user onboarding experiences may sound difficult but it is possible to enable them for any organisation.
Gyde< https://gyde.ai/ > is a next-gen user guidance kit that comes with all the features to enable awesome user onboarding experiences.