Chapter 4: The Framework to Improve Your User Onboarding

CHAPTER 4: The Framework to Improve Your User OnboardingBuilding a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.
- Clare Muscutt
All users are lazy, vain, and selfish.
It sounds harsh. But I didn’t say it. Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, did.
It’s an observation that before users feel invested in a product, they’re all looking out for number one first – themselves. 
Think about the last time you tried out a product. What thoughts and questions came to mind first? 

• “How will this product help me?”
• “How is this product better than what I’m doing right now?”
• “How will I look if my friends or colleagues found out I’m using this product?”
• “Why would I want to drop what I’m currently doing and replace it with this?”

First, these questions show we are lazy. We don’t have the time or energy to figure out what a new product is or what it’s not. We want to know now. We have no patience to read long directions. We have no time for steep learning curves. Our default is to find the easiest and quickest path to what we want.
Second, we are vain. We care about how our friends and colleagues perceive us. Once our physiological and safety needs are met, we look for ways to feel loved, connected, and accomplished by others. Whether it’s social apps like Instagram that help us receive more “likes” or a visual reporting tool to help us create presentations at work, products tap into our social needs.
Finally, we are selfish. Even when we’re trying out a product that could help the team be more productive or protects the environment, we want to make sure we’ll be rewarded immediately. That’s why assisting new users to achieve quick wins is critical, regardless of a company’s long-term vision.

That’s the real challenge with onboarding—we’re dealing with lazy, vain, and selfish new users. They want to know how a product can solve their problem. And they want to know now.
Time-to-Value

For this reason, one of the most impactful tools at your disposal to improve user onboarding is to minimize the time-to-value (TTV). This is the amount of time it takes a new customer to realize value from a product. 
In a sales-led business model, you can get away with a longer TTV since, in most cases, the customers paid upfront, and they’re usually stuck in an annual contract. If something gets delayed with the deployment and implementation, it may take a considerable amount of time from purchasing the product to experiencing its value.
In a product-led world where users are easy-come-easy-go (because there is usually no upfront cost), the tolerance for delays and frustrations is much smaller. If your TTV is too long, new users will leave… for good. 
Process over Prescription

So, how do you improve a product’s user onboarding to reduce the TTV?
To make it very simple, I could give you a list of best practices and attributes of bad versus good onboarding, like below:
But adopting the wrong best practice could do more harm than good. Being too prescriptive dismisses how unique a product, market, team, and users are. 

For example, some users love heavy-handed product tours, while others find it annoying. Some might feel overwhelmed with too many onboarding emails, while others might want more tips and resources. 
Instead of explaining what you should and should not do with user onboarding, my goal is to provide a framework and process to help your users perceive, experience, and adopt your product. 
The EUREKA Framework

Along with Wes Bush and the ProductLed team, I’ve worked with dozens of organizations to improve their user onboarding experience from the very first touchpoint. Called the EUREKA framework, this six-step process will shorten the TTV for more new users to be successfully onboarded to your product: 

1. Establish your onboarding team: To deliver an effective, immersive, and seamless onboarding experience for new users, your approach needs to be collaborative across functions and departments. Onboarding can't just be quilted together from the work of different teams. It must be holistic. If it's not, users will receive a fractured experience. In the next chapter, I’ll help you form an onboarding ‘A’ team.
2. Understand your user’s desired outcomes: The best way to successfully onboard new users is to figure out why they signed up in the first place. Particularly, you need to know what value means to users. In Chapter Six, I’ll help you figure out how to do that using the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework. 
3. Refine your onboarding success criteria and metric: Your team needs a clear picture of what it means to successfully onboard new users. In Chapter Seven, I’ll help your team identify the onboarding success metric using data. We’ll also define Product Qualified Leads (PQLs).
4. Evaluate and optimize your onboarding path: To minimize the time it takes for new users to experience a product’s value, you have to map out the user’s journey to discover which steps should be delayed or eliminated. In Chapter Eight, we’ll do just that with Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework.
5. Keep new users engaged inside and outside of your product: To help guide new users to experience a product’s value, consider using triggers both inside and outside of the product. These could include product tours, welcome messages, progress bars, onboarding emails, SMS, and in-app notifications. In Chapter Nine, I’ll help you determine which “Product Bumpers” and “Conversational Bumpers ” to use for user onboarding using the BJ Fogg Behavior Model.
6. Apply the changes, analyze the results, and repeat: User onboarding is a continuous process. In Chapter Ten, I’ll help you analyze the results and apply the learnings into the next iteration of your onboarding experience. 

Ready to experience your own EUREKA moment? 

Let’s go!