How to Fix User Onboarding: 6-Step Framework with Examples from Canva, Grammarly & More

0:00I want to talk to you today about one special moment. A moment when we meet almost all of our potential users and at the same time we lose almost all of them. This is user on boarding and user on boarding should be beyond just fine or intuitive. It should be the most delightful and memorable part of your

0:24entire user journey. So welcome on board. uh today I will try to share with you what I learned on this topic over the last seven years. We will start with unpacking what are the six steps of the holistic user on boarding and how to think through that holistically. Uh then I will share with you uh three types of initiatives that can help you make your growth portfolio more diverse uh that I created during my time at mirror. We will talk about mistakes to avoid on each step of this holistic uh framework. Uh and I prepared a bunch of examples for you from best players like Canva, Dropbox, um

1:04Grammarly and other products I really love as well as one special volunteer uh from uh Micro Founders team. And at the end, I will share the bonus with you so you can take it away home and start revamping your uh user on boarding. So let's start. I'm Kit Suma. Uh I'm currently a growth advisor uh founder of Growthmates and previously I spent six years at company called Mirror. If you're familiar with the tool, I joined this team uh when it was around 50 people in a small town in Russia where I am originally from and it was a fantastic time startup time for me and although the next six years I passed

1:47with the company through the hyperrowth till the moment when it became a serious C unicorn around 2,000 people and I had a privilege to learn and work with fantastic people and uh build a team who covered the entire growth funnel. And last year I made um an intentional transition to my independent journey uh to start helping others uh growing their products. So this is how I founded growth mates um while I was gathering different examples from the industry I thought like what if we start sharing it with everybody else. So this is how I founded my podcast first then your sweater and now it's also my advisory

2:29practice. um where I talk and learn from um industry experts from fantastic companies and we'll share with you some examples today as well. So uh to start from while I was working at mirror for the whole journey and six years I remember my first design initiative was user on boarding as well as I remember when my team after six years worked still on user on boarding so it's never ending problem uh and when I'm talking to people from the industry they are all struggling with user on boarding so you are not alone here and we can start with this relatively simple question when user on boarding starts

3:12and when it ends. You can say like, Kate, isn't it just the first session and simple tutorial? So, let's check. Um, some of you might be confused looking at that. Um, but this is actually when your user on boarding already starts. It starts from the moment when you your potential user faced the problem and started looking

3:34for a solution to solve this problem. This looks already quite familiar. the registration flow and of course this is a part of your onboarding journey as well as the whole education that you show to your users during the first session and beyond that uh as well as all potential triggers and feature announcement and fe premium features that you show them to as well and all of your life cycle communication that sometimes we forget to take care of and is also a part of your user on boarding. It can take a week, it can take 30 days, it can take months to build a habit for user depending on your

4:13product and complexity of that. What I want to emphasize on here is that user on boarding is not just the first session and we need to think of that holistically. what we also know about that. So probably you can recall a moment when you registered in the product or you downloaded the app and you never came back to that. As well as 60% of people who encounter a poor on boarding experience based on data will never come back to your product and will never recommend your product to anyone. Uh recently I've done uh another industry research uh surveyed 100 companies and uncovered that 43% of them uh find that improving

5:00activation in user and boarding is very very challenging. Another study that I did last year was purely dedicated to user on boarding. And here I learned that getting to activation stage is the moment when the most users drop off for both B2B and B2C companies. So what we can say here is that activation is very very challenging and stubborn metric. Uh so we need to think of that holistically to make sure like we retain and we en uh engage our users and as I mentioned the user on boarding starts when potential user started looking for a solution uh to solve their problem. It starts from Google search from ads from any other

5:46surfaces they uncount in uh uncover your product. uh then they land on the website uh they complete the sign up flow they have the first session and then they have their whole path to experience their ha moment after that we need to care if they can build the habit around solving their their problem using your product for that and this is the habit forming we will talk about each of these step uh separately and uh we'll um share different examples uh from other products

6:21And now why we need to do all of that? You can say like it seems like super complex and complicated. Why we need to do that? Um a lot of you are founders and you care about revenue of course. So activated users uh have two times higher retention and um almost all of them will

6:43convert to pay if they are activated. So how do we get here? First we need to start from defining your activation and activation is the path. Probably some of you already have a definition of your activation metric. Uh I recommend to start defining your habit moment first. This is the moment when your most engaged users already build a habit around the product. So we need to define what is their experience, how it looks like and what we can extract from that to define our aha moment. So aha moment is when your user experience the core value of the product for the first time and we need to make

7:25it super easy for them to repeat that behavior over and over. Another thing I want to share with you before we jump into each of the step uh is this framework. Um the difference between quick wins, meaningful shifts and big bets. While working on growth for many years uh and during my time at mirror, I've noticed like sometimes teams overoptimize only for quick wins or just select big big bats and they don't reach goals fast. So what we need to do, we need to make our growth portfolio diverse. We need to include quick wins as well as big bets and sometimes something in between which doesn't take a lot of time but still can

8:07help us uh make a shift. So now let's get back to this framework and explore each step separately. Let's start from this one. This is the moment where we say hi to all of our potential users and at the same time goodbye uh because we lose most of them right here. One of the common mistakes that companies make here is that they are not communicating the product value in a very clear in a very consistent and unique way. So this was the moment when I was looking for AI note taker and this tool appeared the first uh in my um browser which is probably a great result but here they

8:52are repeating the same things over and over in the description and all other parts without making it super unique and um different. So what we can do instead of that we can try to explain the product value with some relevant keywords and showing the social proof for example let's take a look at this one from many chat so what they are doing here they are emphasizing on the value for the user saving time then they make the product positioning also quite specific it's marketing automation platform as well as they are leveraging social proof saying that this product is

9:29trusted by a million of businesses. Luckily, users passed through this stage and they are already on our website. This is their uh where they should see our product value for the first time. Uh but they don't see that product value because most of B2B companies think that they have nothing to show the product looks complex or they cannot visualize

9:54it. So the common mistake here is given no ability to see the product and to interact with some even small parts of that product before registration. And here is one of the examples um where we can see a bunch of logger types, we can see a messaging, we can see a call to action but we don't see the actual product. So instead of that, what if we try to show the product but not only show but give them the ability to interact with that a little bit. Uh here is an example from a nice company called rose.com which is a spreadsheet. Um and they tried loginless experience. What it

10:38means before registering you can even create your first spreadsheet uh in a sandbox sort of experience. And um this experiment helped them to increase the sign up by 72%. As well as people who tried the product in the sandbox uh had a 40% higher activation rate. Another example is from this product Natic. uh on their landing page. If you scroll down, you can see this demo where you can already like click through the experience, try to play with that and of course register after interacting with this for the first time. And this is an example from our volunteer find the mail. Um even if your product interface

11:25doesn't seem to be embeddible to the website, you can still try to deliver value for the first time somehow. So this is how they do that. This is ana an example from their product. So you can put your name, you can put uh the company uh website and you can find the first email. Um what they can do even better is to convert users right after that by saying like if you can if you want to repeat that or try to do that for another 10 emails, you need to create the account. For example, after that when users pass through the first experience during the website flow

12:03um they start registering in your product. This is another step of user on boarding. This is where we should learn the most uh about their us the our users and personalize it further. But instead of that we increase interaction cost. We don't ask relevant profiling information to personalize this experience. I can share with you my personal mistake from my time at Mirror. Uh it was around six years ago when I started uh working in the growth team and it looks relatively nice. So this is the registration flow. We decided to add additional animations to show the product value uh while users were registering. But what we saw after

12:50launching this experiment that we lost users on each of these steps and then we started analyzing heat maps and data and we saw that users started interacting with this fake uh whiteboard instead of selecting uh and answering the key profiling questions. Um so we just added unnecessary interaction cost here and instead of that we can focus user attention answering key profiling

13:17questions with lower interaction cost. This is an example from Dropbox and a lot of companies are using this method now. Um, when your questions are shown progressively, when you specifically ask the questions that help you profile your users for further personalization or monetization strategies or acquisition purposes. Another good question and a quick win that you can try out is asking about their experience level. So, Figma is doing that great and then you can create different onboarding flows for people

13:52with different level of experience. Uh or you can also combine two methods. For example, if you are building a product in a new category, um it doesn't look familiar for your potential users, you can combine these methods and you can show your product in a simple but still delightful way here. So make sure that you are asking the profiling information that helps you personalize this experience, learn about your users, and you can check if you are asking this information now or what can you add to the list of questions you are

14:28already asking. Another example from find the mail, our volunteer. Um they are asking quite good questions during this signup flow. However, what is not clear here is why they are asking you for this information. So to make it better, you can explain why you're asking each question uh and show what it helps to deliver to users. Maybe make it more personalized. But if you cannot answer why you are asking these questions, maybe this is a signal to revisit that question, to remove that completely to make it less um to to reduce that

15:05friction for your user during that flow. So we passed through the registration flow. Finally we are here. Not all of our users are here with us but we are still here. And this is the first session. This is the moment where we should personalize this experience and make the start relatively easy. Um but instead of that we treat all users as

15:30same and give them just the same flow. Um, one mistake and one common mistake that companies made make here is lending users to your dashboard or homepage um, just to figure it out somehow by themselves. There is no clear call to action. There is quite a complex interface. They can go here and there

15:53and usually we we can lost them here. Um, instead of that, think about what is the core action of your product and make sure that this action is the first one during their onboarding experience. An example from Dropbox. Um, it's hard to experience the product value without uploading your first file. So, this is the thing that they show to users right after the registration and then only after that they start the checklist and all of the more tailored on boarding

16:24experience. Another thing you can try out on the first session is using personalized um things like templates, starter kits, whatever you can do. And this is example from a company called Koda very horizontal uh product as well uh where they ask you first about your role, about your goal and then they give you these recommended starter kits. Beyond that they also can send you the recommendations via email so it doesn't

16:52end inside the product. So moving forward path to aha moment. This is where we should speed up the time to value. Um today we talked about that we heard a amazing tally story and simplicity really helps here. But what if your product is not that simple? Um so what we can do here we can speed up the time to core value by using some pre-made examples. uh the same reference from co coda they even show here that you can create your first document in two minutes and they guide you through this creation flow step by step uh which really speeds up the time to your first

17:38value to your first artificial but still aha moment. Another thing we can do right now with the help of AI of course is automating some parts of the journey with AI. So here is an example from Loom. Um recently they introduced chapters, summaries and other things that really speeds up the creation of the video. Uh that boosted the number of sharing and this affected their aha

18:06moment and activation. And another thing you can do here is improve the discoverability of just one most delightful feature that you have. This is also an example from my practice at mirror. The company at that time was already quite scaled and we were trying to optimize and improve aha moment for joiners for people who join the board for the first time and we have shown them checklists like tours everything

18:37didn't work and no significant results. Instead of that, we decided to uncover what is one feature, just one action that creates the most delight for the user. And the team after doing a lot of research uncovered that this feature is reactions. And instead of asking them to complete a lot of steps, we just ask them to do this one relatively simple action. And when users interacted with that, they have seen the reaction. The other person on the other side of the board have seen the reaction. but also we shown them how to use the reactions later meaning that it also boosted the feature adoption and this simple

19:14experiment quick win had a significant result on a moment. Um so luckily users experience the core value of a product for the first time. Now we need to make sure like this experience repeats over and over again. This is where our users should fall in love with the product and they should create a habit. But instead of falling in love um they churn and never come back. Um and this is quite counterintuitive because we are trying hard to get them back through emails, through

19:52notifications, through things like that. But this is the problem because bombarding users with notifications um through different channels can even lead to bigger churn um afterwards especially if these notifications are not personalized. Um if the copy there might be a little bit pushy or challenging. Um instead of that we can try showing them like valuedriven suggestions at the right time and at the right place. I really love this example from Grammarly. So they are trying to drive the habitu uh for using premium suggestions which are still available for free and they are connecting this with your goal as a user. So do you want to sound more confident try out this uh

20:39premium suggestion and if you want more of that you need to upgrade to another tier. Another strategy to drive habit forming is to drive the adoption of multiple use cases inside a product. Especially if you are building a horizontal platform and Canva of course is the champion here. They are not hiding it. They are making it very visible like you can use Canva for these purposes and they are using all possible channels for this communication. they are using their dashboard, their email life cycle and then it increases the frequency of usage

21:18naturally. So let's recap what we have just discussed. Um users start their journey when they start looking for the solution for their problem and during that step we should avoid unclear and inconsistent communication about your product value. Instead of that we should explain that in a very clear consistent unique way and maybe using things like social proof. Then on the website when they see the product for the first time um we should avoid giving no ability to interact or play with the product but instead we can uh try in a simple way give them some some idea of your product or even interaction with that. During

22:03the registration flow, we should avoid adding extra unnecessary friction, interaction cost. Instead of that, we should think about the key questions that can help us personalize this experience, learn more about your users. Um, further during the first session, um, we should avoid landing users on a homepage with no clear action when they are lost and should figure it out by themselves. And instead of that, we need to personalize this experience using templates, starter kits, anything that is in your toolkit. And during the path to aha moment, we should avoid the long time to value, leaving users alone, just

22:44figure it out how to use your product. And to try to speed up this time to value, we can automate some parts of the workflow. And finally uh to build a habit we should avoid bombarding users with this annoying notifications. Um we should put ourselves in shoes of a user and imagine if we would be bombarded with this these notifications. Instead of that we need to show some valuedriven

23:10suggestions. So how to get started? First try to evaluate the six steps of your user on boarding. um map out this journey and try to figure out what are the biggest drops, what are the biggest problems that your users face on each of these steps and then create hypothesis how to make some improvements. Try to think of quick wins as well as meaningful shifts and big bets to make this portfolio a

23:38bit more diverse. And as promised uh to help you with that uh there is a an onboarding toolkit that I prepared um to get started. So please uh feel free to submit this tally form. By the way, it wasn't intentional to put that here. I didn't know like Marie will come but I'm a user of tally because it's a fantastic product. So it's also an opportunity to try out Tally and maybe their on boarding experience as

24:06well. Thank you so much. Um and hope that we can keep more our users instead of losing them during this challenging but very important on boarding journey. [applause]