User onboarding from UX point of view. Part 1
This exercise is within your acquisition, activation metrics of AARRR (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral).
In this article I will be describing the process for an MVP case. So your product passed the smoke and sanity test and ready to test whe usability. Other stakeholders may have prepped the product and built initial credibility, there are multiple ways to achieve that, example:
- via founders and their story
- product usage by other ambassadors
- community or institution vouch..
Above is a startegic move and good to be done to make your experience of bringing first cohort of users easier. The easiest way to get your first users are via community, ideally your own which you have gathered while worked on the MVP. You could have prepared a landing page with a value prop to collect emails and they are ready for your announcement to come and test your product.
How do you go about onboarding your first cohort of users?
- Restrict access at the start (examine how they use your product, check funnels)
2. When you invite, give them actionable reward, i.e. “Hey, verify your account and get £100 Amazon voucher!”
“Do Step 1 , 2 and 3 to get access to ….”
3. Analyse whether they find any features without struggle. Understand and work on removing obstacles and retest.
4. If obstacle is still there, then you need to guide them.
Onboarding process
- This can be self-serve onboarding or
- Guided onboarding
Ideally, you have the self-served. In Guided onboarding you need to collect the data which will be quantitative in order to know where do you need to shine the spotlight within the product? Then add a Userflow explaining the steps. You can sue Userpilot.com for that.
ProTip:
At this stage important to keep the users engaged and gather feedback (understand their pains). May be they
- need urgent cash
- want to sell something exclusive they were not able to elsewhere
What you will get is either validate the Product-market fit or iterate a little or pivot. If latter, then you will be adjusting the roadmap and addressing the real problem which is not solved yet.
ProTip:
Thinking as a startegic PM, high level view you need to keep the original questions (used during the ideation) in mind:
1) What problem are you solving?
2) How do you know that this problem exists?
you experienced it yourself and can tell the story
you’ve done enough research to understand the problem
3) How important is the problem?
4) What other solutions exist?
5) Who exactly has this problem?
Persona canvas https://www.garyfox.co/canvas-models/persona-canvas
Where do they hang out?
Where do they complain?
6) Define the hypotheses
Gathering feedback:
One way is by looking at the Analytics set up, if it’s not clear and users won’t be as engaged as you want them to be (common for MVP) then design a guided test just like described here
If you are addressing usability at a larger scale you can use the System Usability Scale (SUS).
SUS is not diagnostic and will not tell you what specific problems you face, but it will give you a red or green light to know how badly your usability needs work. The benchmark score is 68, anything lower requires immediate action.
Suggested book:
Inspired by Marty Cogan
