Love at First Onboarding
How instilling confidence early on creates power users
I used to believe the purpose of an onboarding sequence was simply just to get the user set up for using an app. Or worse, even, that an onboarding flow was just a standard convention for apps, therefore, I needed to make sure to include one or risk abandonment.
What I didn’t understand at the time is that the real goal for onboarding a user is to take them from an intermediate level user to an expert level user. Or, at the very least, instill in the user the confidence that they are an expert level or “power” user.
Whether or not the user truly is a power user upon onboarding or not doesn’t matter so much as the user carrying the feeling that they are — and that reason alone is what makes an effective onboarding sequence paramount in a product or service’s overall user experience.
In his article, “4 Best Practices for User Onboarding,” Rishabh Saxena captures this essence by comparing the digital onboarding experience to that of a physical hotel experience:
A great concierge can make all the difference in hospitality, by instantly making a guest feel comfortable. They let the guest relax just enough without letting them drift towards boredom and still have enough surprises ready, should the guest demand it — user onboarding works along those lines.
User onboarding allows us to turn amateur users into experts. What the concierge won’t say is that, onboarding provides enterprises with the golden opportunity to make users so comfortable that they feel entirely at home and the product is so much more a part of their routine than they could have realised before. Users need to move from the nascent stage to the ‘power up’ stage, and that is where the onboarding experience comes into play. It has to guide them, nurture them, and still not be intrusive to their experience in using the product.
If this perspective isn’t a compelling enough reason for you to reconsider the user onboarding experience, take note of how Jeff Bezos describes how Amazon treats its customers:
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
Too often we fail to recognize the true value the onboarding process has in creating smarter, more comfortable users of our products. Or perhaps we fall into the trap of using marketing jargon like “prospects” or “leads” that ultimately only serve to create distance between designers and users.
But our users, or in this case guests, are ultimately still being hosted by us — and the way we refer to them changes the way we act upon them.
In summary, let’s take advantage of the user onboarding to not only educate but to instill confidence and trust in users so they feel that much more “at home” while interacting with our product. This process of guiding and nurturing the user can elevate their status and allow our product to become a mainstay in their routine.
Remember that users are our guests, and the way we guide them has a material effect on their relationship with us over time.
