Does user onboarding software actually work for your Saas product? What are the results?

I spent a long time adding onboarding to Donegood but it had zero impact!

I’ve found it much more effective to produce a demo video explaining an app than trying to make the app explain itself in a self-contained way.

If you think about it, this is how it works for a lot of the most “intuitive” software.

Apple’s touch interfaces probably wouldn’t seem nearly as intuitive if they weren’t backed by massive advertising campaigns showing them being used.

Currently trying to make Appcues work, but it's very inconsistent for me and a lot of the times the flows don't trigger for users for some random reason and you spend most of your time trying to fix them.

In general, I guess it depends on the complexity of the product. Usually there are two types of users - those who skip the flows and like to discover the product on their own (but on the next day look for resources because they've done all they can by themselves), and those who complete each step of the tour and forget it on the next day, so they need a refresher (you can send them an email, inapp message or have the option to redo a flow). I believe that if you keep these things in mind then building successful onboarding flows shouldn't be a challenge.

Thanks for sharing the article @heleana. I really appreciate all the support Eyelet got from the community in the past few months.

I'm one of the founders of Eyelet. AMA!

I've used a few user activation tools, and I can say that they definitely work. However, you should be careful about forcing users to take a tour or similar - it's often better to let them discover the features on their own. After all, part of the fun of using a new tool is exploring everything it can do but a tour should always be in place to help the user!

It works if you don't force your customer to go through it. Some like to go through the software on their own and get frustrated when you force a product tour or something.

I use http://froged.io and it works well for a soft onboarding

I assume these companies wouldn't have become big businesses if it didn't work, but I think that the value they bring is in providing no or low-code means for product and CS teams to implement onboarding and activation patterns. Obviously have a good onboarding and activation experience can make a huge difference to any business, but it so often gets deprioritised over feature work, so it's a great way for companies to manage that area of their business without taking up a lot of time from other efforts in engineering.