Someone may ask you what a user onboarding flow is. Do you know why it is essential to help product users navigate and understand your product better? A new product user needs to understand how a product works. A user onboarding flow is the best way to achieve this. It guides the new user on how to use an interface and educates the existing users on the new features available.
If you are playing a game for the first time. Chances are you don’t know what the controls are. You start guessing the buttons to press. You lose several times before you get a hang of it. Don’t you think it would have been better if the game took a hint and offered a user onboarding experience? Remember, you didn’t log into the app to learn the game but rather play it. A few tips should pop up without distracting your game.
The first impression you give to your product users is essential. It is something that will influence how they react to the product. The user onboarding experience depends on the product type and the user. When designing the user onboarding flow, think from the user’s perspective. An effective user onboarding flow highlights the product benefits, introduces new users to a product, and clarifies the product’s value. It will lead to improved user retention, product adoption, and product growth. Balance the user onboarding experience with the friction from the necessary steps such as:
- Data gathering.
- Account creation.
- User education.
The user onboarding flow may work for one product and fail to work for a different one. Designing a good user onboarding flow is complicated because it should be customized to work with the product well. The designing process involves lots of:
- Research
- Testing
- Optimization
Qualities of a good onboarding flow.
- A good user onboarding flow should be user-centric. If the onboarding flow is product-centric, the onboarding process won’t be successful.
- It should be informative. It should guide the user to do things that highly correlate with them gaining value out of the product.
- It evolves. As the market and product change over the years, the user onboarding experience should evolve too.
- It should be action-oriented and not instructive. Avoid overwhelming the user with a bunch of toolkits they will have to remember later. Guide them to do it as they learn.
Conclusion.
You cannot expect a new user to navigate and get the most out of a product without any guidance. To enable your users to get acquainted with your product quickly, the least you can do is design an onboarding flow. Apart from introducing new users to your product, a good onboarding flow will get them into the habit of using the product more frequently. Design the user onboarding flow with utmost care so they can adopt your product because they feel happy and safe. Ensure the onboarding flow is user-centric, informative, evolves, and action-oriented. The design process involves research, testing, and optimization.