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Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

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Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#101

Post by natvod »

Something I've noticed is a lot of companies use user onboarding and educational messages as a crutch for confusing UX and product experiences.

Many companies also have a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, where they send the same messages to all users, regardless of their in-product actions. Instead, it's better to trigger relevant messages if the user has taken a specific action and hasn't taken the next step to achieve Y result.

You can always send onboarding sequence to users who haven't taken any actions at all.

It should also be noted that for some established companies, a lot of their onboarding isn't necessarily to educate you but to force you to take certain actions that their testing has shown will make you active. For example, Pinterest forces you to follow certain topics when you sign up.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#102

Post by atoav »

overcast wrote: post #47
atoav wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. there are products that are complicated, because the underlying problem your product helps to solve is complicated. And if there are existing solutions that tackle this problems differently to you, you might have to give users a pointer. If you e.g. design a software for electronic circuit design, good user on-boarding will allow you to highlight specifically why your product shines in comparison to other…

Do you honestly believe you can onboard someone to electronic circuit design software, by having a bunch of annoying modal boxes popping up showing you where some key features are? I agree there is complicated software, but that isn't made less complicated by silly onboarding. And if your software is not complicated, you're just pissing people off having to click away from all that junk. If it's not complicated, but…

So you take the idea of on-boarding in it’s most horrible manifestation and use it as a argument against the fundamental idea of introducing users to new concepts within the software they are using?

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#103

Post by joshvm »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #76
joshvm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One grey area that I approve of is referral links, if they're obviously presented as such. For example if you read a tutorial on how to build a weather station and the author provides referral links to a component on Amazon, I'm happy to use those links. Referral systems are open to abuse though, like the myriad of ultra specific comparison websites with tenuous "expert" reviews.

@rurp- A lot of those referral links do have logging (seeing who visited / hoe many people have) and tracking (general location, some demographics). Is that okay to you?

In my case, I guess I am? Obviously the site owner will get some logging results, and maybe they will try to optimise for that.

I'm fine with a site owner knowing their demographic. That's potentially useful for other things, eg should you invest in localisation? Otherwise unless you have a vpn, your IP is going to be visible anyway.

It probably depends on the referral site. For example, do Amazon have any reason to sell my data to anyone else? It's most valuable to them and they already have a decade+ of purchase and browsing history.

I still think this a preferable situation to targeted ads which try to guess what I want.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#105

Post by frenchy »

wolco wrote: post #99
Xixi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to feel that way, until I built several services (the latest being tomotcha.com). Turns out, once you've built something, you need to advertise its existence out there. I mean "advertise" in the largest meaning of the word, not only paid for advertisement on Google/Facebook/Twitter/Criteo. That includes writing blog posts for people to stumble upon, talk about it on Hacker News, send samples to reviewers, etc.…

I think people confuse advertising in general with the 360 tracking facebook/google and others use. People need to advertise and it's helpful to both the consumer/company.

I'm not sure that people confused the two, it's just that the intrusive forms of advertising make up an overwhelmingly large part of a normal person's interactions with ads that we all just assume that that is what you're talking about.

I think we mostly appreciate the need for the so-called "getting the word out there", but it ought to be done in way that's appropriate. There's a balance to be made between the potential value of a product, and the amount of attention you're trying to steal. Most people think the products they make are more valuable than they really are.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#106

Post by frenchy »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #98
enlyth wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I don't care if your ad is clever, relevant, organically sourced, environmentally friendly, necessary for financing your product, something I actually want, need, or didn't know I wanted yet. The internet is plagued with this cancer everywhere you go, no matter what you do. Somehow it's become acceptable that every second of our attention and time is competed for by corporations trying to sell us…

The take-away here is to just buy covert ads that you confuse for content. It's win-win. You get to think you're not seeing ads, and advertisers get to advertise in unblockable ways.

I don't really have a problem with that. If you're making content, and it's valuable, and it's related to a product, that's great. If your content isn't valuable to me, then I won't bother with it.

If you're just getting folks on facebook to promote your products in the hope of some minor dispensation or something (a popular gimic these days). That's easily identifiable and blockable.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#107

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

tomc1985 wrote: post #92
burtonator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are our stats for Polar.... Before onboarding our cohort retention was 2%...after 1 week. This means that after a week only 2% of our users came back to use the app. After a basic onboarding we jumped to 10%. We're now at about 14-15% (just via improving the app). About 50% of our users completely skip the onboarding altogether. I think I'm going to experiment with a video instead of a tour to see the difference…

God I hate user onboarding... seeing stats like that make me so sad, and feel ever further away from the current internet zeitgeist.

Half of their users skip the on-boarding. Why would that make you feel far away from the current internet zeitgeist?

Presumably the user group you've self selected into also has a retention rate that is 20x lower than those that don't skip the on-boarding.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#108

Post by DanHulton »

gav wrote: post #104

One of my favorite resources for onboarding is Samuel Hulick's https://www.useronboard.com/ His teardowns are particularly valuable to see how others do things and what does and doesn't work. Plus they're entertaining.

Absolutely an inspiration of mine. If anything, my only quibble is that he doesn't go far enough. I'm working on a similar series, except I'm examining the entire Trial-to-Paid flow, from the moment you sign up to the moment you convert, including lifecycle emails, payment flow, etc. Takes a while to do, though, since you usually have a month or more before the email cycle is exhausted.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#109

Post by overcast »

atoav wrote: post #102
overcast wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe you can onboard someone to electronic circuit design software, by having a bunch of annoying modal boxes popping up showing you where some key features are? I agree there is complicated software, but that isn't made less complicated by silly onboarding. And if your software is not complicated, you're just pissing people off having to click away from all that junk. If it's not complicated, but…

So you take the idea of on-boarding in it’s most horrible manifestation and use it as a argument against the fundamental idea of introducing users to new concepts within the software they are using?

Yes, because the vast majority are as I described. Onboarding prompts are like those EU browser notifications multiplied by a hundred. No one cares, no one has ever read them. We are autotuned to just click away.

Re: Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

#110

Post by DanHulton »

mitko wrote: post #97

The article talks about “user onboarding” as if it is different from the first run experience. Perhaps it is a SaaSy jargon to separate them. But for us at Sleek, we obsess over the first run as it is how we onboard users - until the user has gone through their use case, we assume they’re new to it. Learn by doing, not by learning.

It's one of those weird terms that seems to mean different things to different people. For some, it means "first-run experience", and for some it means "the tooltip hoops you make people jump through". I think for too many, it's the latter.

But yeah, many people only get a first run. You have to obsess over it, because if that doesn't work for you, it can be like pulling teeth to get people to come back.

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