Your product onboarding playbook
A cohesive product onboarding guide, along with tips and best practices to nail it!
What is onboarding?
Imagine you are checking in to a hotel, and a concierge greets you with a welcoming smile, hands you the keys with directions to your room, advises you on the available amenities and facilities, and ensures you have all the information you need. Navigating to find your room is a breeze as the hotel signage is timely and straightforward, while the key opens your door with just a swipe. Inside, you find everything you’ve expected, where you’ve expected it, plus instructions to connect to the wifi, order food, travel the city and more. That’s nice! You take a big breath and jump into your bed! You are now officially onboarded! Of course, the journey doesn’t stop here, and you might occasionally need assistance, but you now have the means and confidence to explore.
That’s what product onboarding aims to do for users. It welcomes them into the product, provides essential information for navigating its content, and highlights main features or interactions to allow a confident beginning to their experience. Just as a seamless hotel check-in sets the tone for an enjoyable stay, ensuring you make the most of its facilities and amenities so that you want to extend your stay and re-visit, effective product onboarding is the foundation for a positive and successful user journey that people want to take again and again.
Why use onboarding?
Effective onboarding anticipates user needs and pain points at different stages of their product interaction. It offers just the right amount of information, guidance and support to keep users engaged and motivated to explore, discover and successfully use the product.
Onboarding helps convey the product value from fully experiencing it.
In a nutshell, onboarding helps us set priorities and assist users in exploring most of, or the entire product as soon as possible to reach an “AHA” moment; this is when they realise, “Oh, this is how this product solves my problem!”. So, onboarding helps convey the product value from fully experiencing it. Improved user acquisition and retention is an inherent and very desirable outcome.
Different types of onboarding
Product Overview
A set of screens that aims to give users a broad perspective of what the product is, what it does and how it can benefit them. It often highlights various use cases and product key features, showcasing how the product can address different needs or pain points while encouraging people to explore it further.
Contextual onboarding
In product messages, within modals, tooltips or banners, highlighting the next-best action users can or should take to reach their goals or that AHA moment. These messages can be conditional, if this then that, so they provide relevant information at the right time and acknowledge, or even celebrate, desirable behaviour to nurture habits.
Personalised onboarding
In-product messages that, just like contextual onboarding, focus on creating habits but are tailored to the specific user’s needs. It requires acquiring information about the individual user upfront, but it’s a beneficial method for products that serve multiple use cases.
Empty states
Messages and graphics that act as placeholders when there’s no content or data to display. Those are great opportunities to share tips and examples to guide and prompt users to create, add, and populate the product.Empty states are ideal for products that involve content creation, organisation or handling.
Guided tours
Hints that walk users through the product’s key features and functionalities step-by-step. They often include tooltips, pop-ups, or overlays highlighting key UI elements with an option to skip ahead or go back if users prefer to explore at their own pace. It’s good for more UI-heavy products that might include more nuanced design patterns. Usually, after a user dismisses any of the tips, they lose access to the whole sequence, so it’s a good practice to provide a way to resurface the tips.
Interactive walkthroughs
A series of interactive tasks or challenges that direct users to take specific actions, complete tasks, or make decisions as they explore the product’s features and functionalities. They actively involve users in learning, making it a more engaging and memorable experience. They also allow them to practice in a controlled environment, increasing their confidence and skill.
Hotspots
UI elements that draw peoples’ attention to specific points or areas on the screen, prompting them to interact and explore. These are usually dots that pulsate and upon interaction expand to reveal helpful onboarding information. They offer great flexibility while keeping interfaces decluttered, as they can maintain a lot of hidden information which users can access when and if they wish to.
Checklists
Visual lists of tasks or actions users have to complete to make the most of the product. These tasks are usually presented with checkboxes or other progress indicators to motivate users and help them keep track their progress, providing structure and a sense of achievement. Checklists offer more flexibility and reduce stress, as the users can go through them whenever they like. For products that cover multiple use cases, information about the particular user’s needs is vital to offer relevant tasks.
Video guides
Short video clips that demonstrate how to use different features or accomplish specific tasks within the product. These might be good to give an overview of a product feature for the more visual people, but it relies a lot on memory and, according to our research, some users prefer to learn by doing, not watching.
Email Drip Campaigns
Automated educational emails are sent to users over time, usually after they take a specific action. Each email provides valuable information, tips, and guidance to educate users gradually. It’s excellent for products that offer different layers or levels of usage and require a more in-depth understanding.
Self-Service Onboarding
Users are provided with all the necessary resources, such as tutorials, FAQs, and guides, and are left to navigate and go through them on their own time. It can be great for people who want to be prepared and dive deep into the product’s world, but there are better methods for most people who will jump straight into the product.
Tips & best practices
Data & Research
- Understand users through user research and personas. What are their goals, needs, pain points, and expectations?
- Understand how the product solves their problems. What are the different use cases? Which are the most prominent or valuable for both users and the business?
- What are the actions, tasks, and steps users should take to solve their problems and achieve their goals? The jobs-to-be-done framework can be a helpful tool here.
- How do people currently use the product? Are there any blockers or inconveniences in interaction that we could eliminate with better design or onboarding? Data can shed some light on the most used and the not-so-used features. Screen viewers can provide insights about how users interact with the product, while user interviews can dive deeper into the why behind it.
- What are the different types of onboarding we can apply? Should we A/B test multiple approaches?
Copy writing & Design
- The tone of voice. Be minimal. Use onboarding only when needed, and keep it short and sweet to not disturb people.
- Understand and speak the users’ language to communicate effectively.
- Use a consistent and positive product tone of voice to make people feel good when using your product.
- Add personality and emotion when appropriate to connect with people.
- Develop personalised messaging that is informative and encouraging to deliver relevant tips that help people achieve their goals using your product.
- Celebrate! Highlight positive progress or success with tailored messages. Use them as an opportunity to motivate users and push them to the next level.
- Illustrate or animate to drive attention and delight users.
- Offer flexibility. Allow for skipping and resurfacing.
- Add game-like mechanics like progress bars, checklists, badges, etc., to engage and motivate people.
- Test different onboarding methods and treatments to find the best suited for the product and its users.
Evaluation & testing
- Look into how the implemented onboarding improved and promoted interaction data. Follow metrics like time spent on the product and tasks completed to understand the effectiveness of your onboarding solution.
- Watch people to see how they now use the product. Were there any improvements in their interaction since the last iteration? Was there any unnecessary friction introduced? Is there room for further improvement?
- Looking at longer-term data, how did onboarding improve acquisition & retention?
- Keep iterating to reach the desirable results.
Final thoughts
Onboarding can be an extremely beneficial tool for any business, but it won’t solve core usability issues. We should first aim to develop an intuitive product with as common UI patterns as possible, simplified interactions and clear copy. Then, with onboarding applied to the product, it’s vital to monitor key metrics, watching users interacting with it, to ensure the onboarding method used is appropriate and doesn’t introduce any unnecessary friction.
