Having a stellar user adoption rate is a beautiful thing. Converting users at a higher rate drives down your cost of user acquisition, which in turn makes your marketing resources go even further. It also increases the likelihood that people stick around longer, driving up average lifetime value, and letting you invest your product resources more strategically.<\/p>\n
The secret to getting there? First, identify the must-have experience<\/strong> that keeps people coming back, and then make sure new users experience it.<\/p>\n Ensuring your new users get that experience is a responsibility put on onboarding, but onboarding itself is rarely designed to deliver it. Rather than relentlessly focusing on progressing the user to success, onboarding workflows seem content to simply introduce the interface and then call it a day.<\/p>\n This is a shame, because in order for an onboarding experience to answer its higher calling, it has to go beyond moving people through a product tour. The story you build your onboarding experience on shouldn\u2019t be about your user interface, it should be about your user. And in order to be building on solid ground, that story \u2013 the one beginning and ending with the user \u2013 needs to be thoroughly understood.<\/p>\n When you boil it down, onboarding is really all about changing people\u2019s behavior. Your signups are frustrated with the way they\u2019re currently doing something and are hoping your way of doing things is better (or else they wouldn\u2019t be signing up). Onboarding strives to make that behavioral switcheroo a successful one for as many people as possible.<\/p>\n Onboarding experiences, when working well, are less like instruction manuals for weight benches and more like personal trainers: they don\u2019t stop at merely showing you how the equipment is used, they make sure you get all the way to attaining your fitness goals. So it goes for user onboarding: in order for it to be successful, it must ultimately engender success in others.<\/p>\n So, long before you begin to weigh your interface options (\u201cShould I go with an intro video or a series of tooltips?\u201d), let\u2019s make sure you\u2019re super clear on what your users are trying to get away from, where they want you to take them, and all the twists and turns in the road from one to the other.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s begin where your users begin: the situation they don\u2019t want to be in anymore. In the \u201cpersonal trainer\u201d metaphor, this is the last time the person stares in the mirror poking at their flabby gut before finally deciding to do something about it. It\u2019s the specific, burning motivation that\u2019s driving them to adopt a new way of doing things.<\/p>\n Clayton Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator\u2019s Dilemma<\/em>, calls this motivating situation the \u201cJob to Be Done\u201d. The essence of the concept is that products are acquired from a viewpoint very similar to a company opening up a position in their organization: recognizing that there\u2019s a need to grow or adapt, and addressing that need by making a \u201chire\u201d to fix it.<\/p>\nSetting the stage for successful onboarding<\/h2>\n
Why are people \u201chiring\u201d your product?<\/h3>\n
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