4. Onboarding

The goal of onboarding is to speed up the time to value. You need new customers to reach that ‘aha’ moment— when they understand that your software delivers the value they seek—as quickly as possible.

The result of a successful onboarding experience is customer activation. Activation is where the customer really begins evaluating your product for long-term fit.

Think of onboarding as setting up the game board, and activation as making the first few rolls of the dice.

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Design Your Onboarding Experience

Onboarding requires a balance of setting up the required steps to reach activation without overwhelming new users. Here are a few steps to consider:

Limit “required” steps to the bare minimum.

Some software requires some critical choices to be made or confirmed for things to work properly once you start using it.

Only those steps that enable minimal viable function of the tool should be required.

For example, at Calendly, we only had two required steps: Your Calendly url (link) and default availability.

Other example or required steps:

Account information, necessary choices and key ideas needed to get started.

Provide Cognitive Orientation

Make sure you add context to every step of onboarding, including the required steps.

Customers need to understand why your product works the way it does.

Typically, cognitive orientation is done in some king of ‘wizard’ flow with text and images. But companies are experimenting with short GIFs and so on.

Add “Helpful” steps

After guiding customers through the required steps, offer helpful steps for a better user experience.

Take a “nudge” approach, utilizing passive UI features that catch the user’s attention and motivate them to complete the experience.

Examples of helpful steps:

UI walk-throughs, check lists of first tasks, intro videos and other resources.

Send Invitations to Team

Many kinds of business software does not work well for a solo employee. They are team tools. In order to successfully activate a new customer, the entire team needs to evaluate the product for fit.

Make it easy for the first evaluator to invite their teammates to try out the tool. Offer an invitation link, connect to Slack (or other team directory)

Don’t make an invitation required

When possible, design a strong solo player experience to give the first evaluator more confidence in the product (For example, try Figma)

Team Exercise: Optimize your onboarding flow

Write down each step in your onboarding flow. Then, as a team decide whether each step needs to be required or can just be a “helpful” aside. Finally, mark how users feel at each step (positive or negative psych) and take notes about how you can improve each step.