Best Practices for User Onboarding

Hey Everyone,

Today, I want to share a mistake that I made and a list of resources for how you can reverse that mistake. I believe every mistake starts with two things; wrong mindset or distraction. Probably, ours came from the latter. For short context, we are a team of 2 who are trying to solve their own problem. Story begins with our problem but I don’t want to waste your time by going into depth on that.

We were focused on two things: retention and product. Those are highly correlated two things and seem like the right things to focus on. I think our distraction comes from misunderstanding of retention and product. We were not focusing on the holistic experience of the user. Instead our focus was on the product but in a way that makes us blasting new features. The problem was most of the features were irrelevant to users and not focusing on the better experience and value but instead just trying to increase retention.

We realized that we are missing activation. We didn’t realize that activation is a part of the product in a holistic way. We were distracted by the numbers of retention. I’m not saying retention is something useless, instead saying that it’s a function of a couple things.

• In order to increase retention you get the product right
• In order to get the product right you need to get the market, value prop. and activation right,
• Thus you can increase your retention.

So, without creating that AHA moment you can’t get users to retain and activations is basically a function of the product.

Now our first focus is not the number, it’s a compass. We’re creating a better onboarding. I don’t know whether it will make a difference or not, but I know that there is a misconception of “moving fast and breaking things”. Not that because the quote is wrong but because so many people get wrong, like me. But perhaps that is a subject for an essay.

While focusing on creating great onboarding, I have curated a list of best practices for Onboarding. As I understand so far, it can really make a difference if you manage to create a flow that takes users to the AHA moment ASAP.

I tried to filter out the noise and curate the best material about Onboarding. I hope it helps,

Here’s the resources: Best Practices for User Onboarding

Also, I am curating a list of resources for User/Customer Activation too. Stay tuned for that.

Thanks for reading.