Evaluating onboarding experiences

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If you’re designing your product’s first onboarding flow or improving an existing one, you’ll need to evaluate its performance. A good assessment process helps you find opportunities for improvement and justifies the resources you need to make the new user’s experience awesome.

Often, teams measure onboarding myopically, like a feature in isolation. Apps measure clickthrough rate in an introductory slideshow. Sites measure how many people sign up. Devices measure how quickly someone gets through a setup wizard. These kinds of measurements are immediate, cheap, and easily automated. But, while they’re easy, they don’t show whether an onboarding design is contributing to or detracting from a new user’s overall success.

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Engaging new users: Personal focus

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This is the last post in the 3-part “Engaging new users” series. Part 1 covered guided interaction, the practice of educating users in a realistic context, and how it is more compelling than slideshows, videos or static instruction.  In part 2, we learned how to use free samples to demonstrate a product’s value proposition and build the trust needed to encourage sign-up.

And in today’s post, part 3, we’ll examine how giving new users a personal focus is the key to making these onboarding techniques stick.

Primary image

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Engaging new users: Free samples

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In the first part of this series, I shared how guided interaction introduces users to the authentic context of your product with just the right amount of education to ensure they find success.  Today, we investigate how the 2nd of the 3 pillars of better onboarding, the use of free samples, gets those new customers using your product in the first place.  

There are 3 overarching best practices when it comes to engaging and educating new users:

  1. Guided interaction
  2. Free samples
  3. Personal focus

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Engaging new users: Guided interaction

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In the past I’ve covered patterns and anti-patterns for onboarding new users and principles for first time user experiences.  In this post and the two that will follow, I’ll be digging into each of the 3 ways we can better engage new users:

  1. Guided interaction
  2. Free samples
  3. Personal focus

Today’s post is focused on guided interaction. So let’s jump into what it means, discover patterns for making guided interaction a reality and see a few examples.

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Free Bill Cipher jack-o-lantern stencils inspired by Gravity Falls

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Sometimes I like to take a step back from UX design and do graphic illustration work. Lately I’ve been enjoying Gravity Falls, a TV show with A+ storytelling that engages the audience by hiding codes hidden in each episode.  So with Halloween approaching, I’ve created free jack-o-lantern stencils for one of the show’s most iconic characters, Bill Cipher.  I’ve got a few options for Bill, so get ready for a rundown after the break.

BillAlone

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4 user states to consider in your onboarding design process

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If you’ve been following my first time UX work, you know I advocate the creation of onboarding experiences that provide guided interaction, free samples and a personal focus. The value of this educational effort doesn’t stop at new customers. When we build onboarding experiences with other user states in mind, we can create a versatile platform for continued education and engagement.  This makes it easier to convince your team to invest in onboarding, and beyond.

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Game of Thrones-Inspired Halloween Illustration

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Last year I started playing with the Procreate app for iPad. My first sketch was inspired by Game of Thrones, showing key characters dressed up for Halloween as their house sigils and trick-or-treating at the home of a very special man.

This year, I cleaned up the sketch and decided to share it as a free illustration for your Halloween enjoyment. Read on for a full-size version you can print or use as a wallpaper!

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New users matter too!

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I recently gave a talk about designing better first time user experiences for mobile apps, with examples gleaned from my collection of first time user experiences.

Slideshare via Krystal Higgins

In this presentation and in my other work, I stress how we need to move from a mode of telling new users about our value proposition, to a mode of letting users experience it for themselves. We want to show interact, not tell.

Here are 3 ways we can engage new users and get them interacting early:

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What’s your coaching cadence?

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In a recent presentation, I discussed the role that guided interaction and coaching can play in onboarding new users to a product. Playthroughs and user-guided tutorials are some examples of guided interaction. Guided interaction allows users to start playing with a new product quickly in an authentic context (instead of wading through abstracted coachmarks, instructions or intro tours), but also gives them enough coaching so that they’ll be motivated by an early success.

To help teams explore the right cadence of guided interaction for their product’s new user experience, I created a template to help with judging that interaction between a product and a new user. I’ve been calling it the coaching cadence worksheet. This can be used to audit an existing experience, or to explore variations for a revision or completely new first time ux. The worksheet follows.

UX Australia Sketchnotes: “The One-Way Door”

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At UX Australia, customer strategist Marie-Claire Grady kicked off her 10-minute talk “The One-Way Door to CX-Committed Executives” with a story about her grandmother. Her grandmother was a shopowner, and she made a commitment to walk through the front door every day so she could see of her shop what her customers would see of her shop. As Marie-Claire continues her presentation, this concept of needing executives to experience things exactly how their customers experience things becomes the key to improving any product’s or service’s experience.

UX Australia Sketchnotes: “Describing the Elephant”

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Eric Reiss gave a rousing second day presentation at UX Australia 2014, complete with a performance of Australia’s “Waltzing Matilda.” In his talk “Describing the Elephant,” Reiss encouraged us to recognize that UX cannot be managed by a single person, and needs to be considered a collaborative, shared discipline. My sketchnotes follow.

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UX Australia Sketchnotes: “Design at Scale”

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GE design leader Greg Petroff kicked off UX Australia 2014 with an inspiring keynote. While he touched on the impact of his work with GE’s design system, he also spoke passionately about how the survival of design depends on its democratization. My sketchnotes from the keynote follow.

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UX Australia Sketchnotes: “Syntheate Ideation”

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This UX Australia 2014 talk by Sarah Lloyd delved into aspects of neuroscience and situations that affect creativity. Syntheate Ideation: Tools for Infinite Creativity breaks down the creative process into 5 steps with insights for each, such as how to help us create new connections and pathways in the brain (a key element of idea synthesis). My sketchnotes follow.

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UX Australia Sketchnotes: “(Re)Framing”

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The following sketchnotes were taken during Steve Baty‘s talk (Re)framing: The first step towards innovative ideas. This talk was given at UX Australia 2014 and discussed how the techniques used to frame problems can mean the difference between incremental improvements and bold new approaches.

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3D Printing for Humanity’s Sake: Sketchnotes from SXSW V2V

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Elliot Kotek of Not Impossible Labs gave a moving talk at this year’s V2V conference. In “3D Printing for Humanity’s Sake-Project Daniel 2.0” he recounted the stories of an ALS patient who yearned to get back to graffiti art, and of Daniel, a double-amputee in the Sudan who didn’t want to be a burden on his family. In the case of Daniel, 3D printing not only brought him new prosthetic arms, but was a skill taught to his entire community so they could use it to take care of future needs. My sketchnotes follow.

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From Design to De$ign: Sketchnotes from SxSW V2V

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On the second day of SxSW’s startup-focused V2V conference in Las Vegas, audience members had the pleasure of hearing John Maeda (KPCB design partner, eBay Inc. design chair, RISD president & MIT professor) give the opening keynote. With background into design vs. art, he discussed design’s increased importance in the workplace now that it’s no longer enough for products just to be needed, but that they need to be loved. My sketchnotes follow.

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