✅ How to Maximize Your Onboarding with 3 Core Principles...
3 crucial onboarding strategies for enhancing user engagement in startups, presented by Builder’s Corner: Learn how to integrate onboarding seamlessly into your product, empower users from the first interaction, and maintain engagement continuously to ensure ongoing user satisfaction and advocacy.
Welcome to Builder’s Corner, proudly presented by Redeem Studio. Keen to elevate your onboarding experience? Connect with Sherwin at Redeem Studio.
OK, so you’ve got some users and want to create an awesome experience. Short of paying people to keep using your app, how do you get them to really WANT to stay…?
Well, if you ask tech growth hacker Casey Winters, user onboarding is THE place to retain and even acquire users, because that’s where you engage them and where they refer their friends to.
And, according to CEO-coach Samuel Hulick, there’s a divine trinity for foolproof onboarding…
1. Integrate it fully
Forget tooltips, tutorials, videos or anything that overlays your interface. You want no interruptions, so build your entire product with the onboarding seamlessly integrated.
This means: The user opens the product for the first time and they’re guided by an “invisible hand” to take an action that realises instant value. I.e. make your onboarding part of your UI. Every step is friction (even the ones you think are helpful), so make it simple.
2. Let it empower them
Onboarding is not for “teaching” people how to use your UI – no one likes that. Instead, design onboarding to instantly help them do what they came here to do, fast.
3. Make it continuous
Onboarding is not just for first-time users. Build it into the fabric of your product so that even weeks or months down the line, that same “invisible hand” is still guiding them to realise value.
2 Practical onboarding examples
A) B2C Software/App: Netflix
One awesome example of an integrated, empowering and continuous onboarding experience is the Netflix app. First time you open it, there’s no visible onboarding, just an advanced recommendations engine running in the background.
The engine knows which shows most people are here for, so it automatically puts them on your first screen (integrated). The user watches the show, great, that’s what they came here for (empowering). Then, when the show’s over, it gives truly intelligent, data-based recommendations, always (continuous).
B) A Service Business: Consultant
Copy-paste this thinking for physical businesses too. A consultant, for example, can provide an awesome experience with a simple booking tool on their website, that syncs with the client’s calendar and notifies them, etc. (integrated).
Then, in the meeting itself, the consultant doesn’t overwhelm the client with “answers”, they spend the first half of the conversation actively listening and asking questions, so they are 100% sure they understand what the person needs before making a recommendation (empowering).
Lastly, the consultant might run every meeting just like this, so that the format of empowerment stays constant. Otherwise, they might create a communal dashboard or some form of data-based analytics system, from which all future discussions and actions lead (continuous).
Builder’s Corner is brought to you by Redeem Studio. Ready to take your onboarding to the next level? Chat to Sherwin at Redeem Studio.