But that's not true. What a user really buys with any solution is a real-life situation where they feel good. Any user wants to feel successful, stress-free, and socially comfortable. Your app just facilitates the process—they’re buying into being successful as a result.
Any user onboarding is all about psychology: the early feeling of success and accomplishment will make the user come back. This feeling is a strong psychological bond that works much better than any email reminder.
Your goal is to evoke that positive feeling of accomplishment as early as possible. It's got to happen during the first visit.
Your core usability goal: make everything so obvious it doesn't require any tricks to remember.
Ideally, you should ditch your FAQ pages once and for all. Instead, sprinkle useful bits of microcopy exactly where it's needed. Vent doubts and reduce frustration with clear labels, obvious icons, and simple workflow.
No matter what, remain human and remember that the learning curve can be steep for anyone.
“These little devils have regrettably become deeply associated with user onboarding, to the point where many companies have come to believe that this UI technique is onboarding. This is flat-out incorrect. It is also, ironically, a strong indicator that the onboarding experience was tacked on as an afterthought.”
Here's what you shouldn't do for user onboarding: Introductory slideshows Wizards Coach marks UI tours
As users, we can't wait to get our hands on the actual product. We can't wait to see the UI and start playing with it. While these nicely designed bits of information just annoy us and prevent from getting there. Imagine yourself going to a new gym. You're standing there awkwardly in your street clothes, and a polite sales rep is showing you around. Are you listening to her carefully, or would you rather change into your brand-new fitness attire and try out that shiny elliptical?
The first-run experience isn't the appropriate place for any design showcase.
Instead, we should focus on making the UI itself as self-evident as possible, and subtly guide the user into learning it on their own
Analyze any classic introductory tour, and you'll find that the messages there fall into 2 categories: Messages that illustrate truly complex situations Messages that are slapped on just to say something or add visual interest
You can gamify the experience using the natural human desire to accomplish things and compete with others. Here's what you can do here: Show leaderboards, scores, and badges Use wizards that promote a sequence of in-app goals Unlock some pleasant perks as users achieve these goals Automatically give your users significant progress credit upfront. People are much more likely to complete something that's already done by 60%. This initial 60% can consist of something as simple as “Log in, register, and input your name.”
Email reminders are a strong tool that make the user remember and come back to the app. Even though email sequences aren’t precisely a subject of UI design, you should keep this scenario in mind while developing your onboarding strategy. Your goal is to include as many wins as possible into the first visit in order to boast about these achievements in the upcoming email reminders.
And very often, I try my best to steer people toward asking questions more like these instead: What are the different reasons that drive people to sign up for our app? Which early user actions most strongly correlate with long-term retention? What has to happen for people to feel like they've made progress in their lives outside of our product? In other words, I very often see people jumping straight into "getting users to do stuff" phase without first evaluating what "the stuff we get users to do" should even be in the first place.
From the user's perspective, it's a drag to have to "explore features" by playing tooltip tour whack-a-mole and then not even winding up anywhere meaningful at the end of it. And from the business' perspective... well, let's just say that there are more effective retention strategies than getting people to do a bunch of things that they largely find relatively meaningless.
In that same way, you want to make sure you're focusing on helping users make progress in something that they actually value, rather than just clicking around because you told them to.
The faster your product can show users that this is where they can find a path to a better version of themselves, the faster they integrate your product into their lives. This is why it's worth paying attention to how you order the steps in your onboarding flow. When you front-load it with user value, it can pay major dividends.
Momentum is a state of mind in which you feel that things are unstoppably going your way. Psychologists actually refer to it as a power -- when athletes feel it they perform better, when gamblers feel it they take bigger risks, and when you feel it doing household chores, psychologists Iso-Ahola and Dotson have observed, your home sparkles a little more. Momentum is built in wins. At least two in a row. Two consecutive wins, and you're on a "hot streak": the task you're performing suddenly becomes easier and smoother.
The problem is that losing momentum feels terrible and is even worse for performance than no momentum. A task that the user has to "restart" is more demanding and difficult. And oscillating between losing and gaining momentum exponentially increases frustration. The idea, in essence, is simple: success breeds success — so if you want to set users up for success — get them there fast and keep the wins coming. If 10 steps make up your onboarding flow, how many quick wins are you giving users in the first five? Or the first three? How many can you cut out? How many can you postpone?
A rule of thumb that's proved useful in the past is this simple question: is the user actually better off for having made it through the onboarding flow?
If the user could see what their future would be like on the other side of your onboarding before they started signing up, would they want to switch places with that future self?
Activity and achievement are two different things. User actions only add value if they bring the user closer to what they're seeking. Put those steps first, and let their momentum carry the rest.
The difference between simplicity and ease Is difficulty a momentum killer? No. Maybe users have to do something difficult to find value, that might just be the nature of the problem you’re solving. The funny thing is it's difficulty that makes achievement feel good, so a challenging onboarding flow is okay!
The principle of gradual engagement suggests postponing registration or form filling to create a low barrier of entry into your product. Front-loading user value is coupling a low barrier for entry with an ordering of onboarding steps that builds momentum.
When you "prime" users for an ask, you're explaining two things: why you're asking for something and how responding will benefit them. Both have strategic underpinnings: Communicating why you need the access directs the user's attention to what you need from them to deliver value, building trust. Focusing on the benefit reminds them they signed up to receive that value, building motivation.
Asking for permission breaks up the onboarding flow. The more natural the ask, the less jarring it is.
Don't ask for permission to use the camera until you need to use it, in other words. If you wait to ask for access to the camera when the user is all set to take a picture, they won't think twice about giving it the go-ahead.
Success states have become synonymous with celebration, particularly in user onboarding. But the fact is that guiding a user through a complicated flow of actions with positive feedback is more than celebrating a milestone. It's expanding the first conversation that users have with your product.
In many workflows, a screen makes a demand of the user and when the user complies, the product moves on like nothing even happened. Taking a beat to verify that all is well can give the user 1) mental closure and 2) feedback that the product is listening and reacting.
Make them visual (confirmation and green go great together!) And immediate (don't wait until a user has finished filling out a form to let them know there's more password work to do.) Remember that it's a conversation (your user communicates in interactions, your product responds in success states)
A well-timed pat on the back can simply feel good to receive, especially when it's for a meaningful accomplishment. These success states are good ol' fashioned celebrations of progress.
Success states work best for achievements that are meaningful from a user's point of view—this way you're not celebrating their activity within the product, you're celebrating their taking another step towards a better version of themselves.
Save encouragement states for milestones. Empty praise usually erodes motivation instead of amplifying it. You can use success states to do more than one thing at a time: combine "encouragement" and "signpost" success states to celebrate users and steer them towards a follow-on activity.
Permission priming can help solve this problem by: Directing the user's awareness: Users know that a photo editing app needs camera access. Evidence shows that a reminder, directing the user's awareness to this fact, prepares them for the ask better. Tying access to value: Users sign up to do something specific. Let them know that you're only asking for access to help them achieve their goals.
“Start your designing where users start their using.”
But that's not true. What a user really buys with any solution is a real-life situation where they feel good. Any user wants to feel successful, stress-free, and socially comfortable. Your app just facilitates the process—they’re buying into being successful as a result.
Missing Reference