Growing Your Userbase with Better Onboarding – Samuel Hulick (UserOnboard) – MicroConf 2015

0:00[Music] [Music] hello let's talk onboarding let's start with an easy one what is user onboarding you think if you ask a lot of people what it is a lot of people will say it's something along these lines where if we zoom in a little further you can see it's basically an interface layered on top of another interface meant to describe the interface that it's covering up and I think that's a problematic definition of onboarding for two main reasons one is you're taking the the continuum of the onboarding experience and you're reducing it down to a single design pattern where there's a lot more breadth and depth there and

0:44the other main reason that I wouldn't recommend defining users are important as this is because most people really hate to do these so I actually I came across this on Twitter because somebody had posted it with the caption I think this app is trying to teach me a football formation and so it's not not super ideal into mr. McLeish is point there is it seems to be a lot of verbosity in the instructions for something that's the functional equivalent of that basically so for a garage door opening app maybe don't need that much interruption to get things going so my question is really how does this happen we're in the product design

1:24process do we wind up with something like this that users tend to hate it tends to halt progress and this is such a key time to because when you're onboarding somebody new they've probably been thinking about using your product for a while they've probably been struggling with other options that they have it they're at their disposal maybe they're switching from a competitor of yours or direct competitor so really really precious amount of attention that they're providing you in that one moment and to kind of put the brakes on it and say hold on first we're gonna give you like a memory quiz of our interface before you do anything else it can be a

1:57real momentum killer so if you look at your typical design process if you think of people getting up to speed with your product is going from 0 to 60 let's say you have a dashboard in your product you're designing it mostly for the 60 state you're designing it for once ever your things I've been running and they've gotten all the integrations integrated and they have lots of interesting data that goes back six months and they can make all these awesome decisions then great but the problem with that is that the minority of people who sign up for your product will ever get to this point and

2:28so spending a significant amount of your time designing for that as opposed to designing to ensure that more and more people can get to that cool spot is an area that I think there's a lot of opportunity and that's really what I want to dig into today so instead of working all your time on this and then at the eleventh hour being like oh right if like if there's no data then everything just shows up broken and and we can't use it and like at the 11th hour realizing that before you ship kind of going into what I call like an Apollo 13 problem where they had to like

2:56jury-rigged the stock to fix the air filter or whatever that was instead of taking an approach like if you're building an airplane like the core use of an airplane is to fly it's to fly to different places through the air and you don't need wheels to fly and you don't need doors to fly so why would you include wheels and doors on your plane well because you need to get it off the ground at some point and if you don't have that built into the core product from the very beginning having a plane with no wheels and no doors is essentially as valuable as having no

3:26plane at all so instead of taking approach where you build the plane with that and then you're like oh like get in somehow or any like you're just literally pointing out like you know aim up I guess you know don't scrape the bottom there aren't any wheels could be dangerous like how do you approach that in a different way and my recommendation is to start you're designing where your users start they're using that basically if you can't get someone from step A to B you're never going to get them to from A to Z to begin with and so don't spend so much time on Z as opposed to B is

3:58this is actually there's a precedent for this in the video game industry we're really really like best of all time classic games Mario for NES so like over 40 million copies and the endings are just terrible like this is you you just battled through like this surreal 8 world of inhuman enemies and it's like thank you your your we're done like it's over so press B and if you can trust that instead with the beginning of the game where it's this lush and warm and inviting atmosphere and really really a ton of detail and design attention was paid to it you can kind of contrast it to you and really quickly

4:38pick up on the fact that the designers of the videogame spent a huge amount of their time on the intro level and the beginning started experience because if they didn't really nail that it didn't matter how great the ending of the game was and so for that reason oh and I also really really recommend there's a 5 minutes and 43 seconds breakdown on YouTube if you do a search for even just level 1 - 1 or Mario level 1 1 it's really really cool and from a product design perspective there's a lot to be said for taking inspiration from that and incorporating that into your own

5:09software and there was a cool quote from a person T Kaos itself who said I didn't know this much thought was put into the first level and I didn't know I learned so much about the game while I didn't notice it was teaching me and if you contrast that and the idea of I'm learning and I don't even know that I'm being taught was something that's still interruptive like a tooltip tour or like a wall of tooltips you can really kind of begin to see the contrast there so as far as how do we approach this differently from a design perspective one recommendation that I really make if you have to if you're

5:41dead set on using tooltip tours I would go with just one at a time and I would also really recommend making them action-oriented as opposed to instructive or requiring rote memorization to get things through so any tool tip that you say here's where you do this thing do it now and it's walking you through the process as opposed to this button great when you click create new project it creates a new project and when you click exit it exits and like you're basically just reinforcing labels or maybe you have a discoverability problem in your product and you can change the interface to fix that but just putting more interruptions

6:14into the process isn't going to typically be a bit super helpful another interesting thing that Optimizely does is it actually walks you through something substantial in creating your actual process it doesn't introduce you to the interface it actually introduces you to the end outcome of what you'd be using Optimizely for which is running a test and so at the end of it they say congratulations you're almost done before you start it's time to pick a plan and this is a really compelling approach because instead of asking you to sign up and putting that friction in the process early in the process before they've delivered value they're asking for it after the fact and

6:50after you've actually created something that you perceive as valuable and so from a psychological perspective there's a concept called loss aversion which is basically you know given two equal things the thing that I already have I'm going to value three times more valuable valuable than I otherwise would and the thing that I don't have I would value three times less valuable than I otherwise would and so there's this 9x difference of once I have something in my possession I'm really on uninterested in losing that and the quickest that you can give somebody something to lose the more motivation they will have to continue the signup process and continue

7:26using your product so changing gears a little bit I wish that we as product people were a little bit more loss averse about the synapse that we get if you look at a customer lifecycle breakdown like Dave McClure's pirate metrics where there's activation or acquisition activation retention referral and revenue what the initial is a ar-ar-ar like what a pirate says basically like the the two areas that onboarding really comes into play are the acquisition which is just getting somebody to sign up for something and then activation and retention and onboarding I especially like to pay attention to in the activation of retention stage and I would like to kind

8:08of break those down into their core concepts and go from there so if you're looking at activation it's basically not losing new users and if you look at retention it's not losing active users it's kind of a simple way to break that down but then we introduced like the concept of churn and you might be like oh turn was written in red like maybe it's not cool but like maybe it's cool like maybe it's like this kind of churn and like that's unfortunately not the kind of churn that I'm talking about this this churn sucks churn is basically whenever you're losing something that you already have either in the form of

8:40revenue or total user count signups activated users things along those lines and so let's dive a little bit deeper into both of these starting with retention you're going to have a point of conversion in your product where if you charge for your product it's basically when you start charging that's that would be considered you know a user that you would want to retain if you don't charge for your product that's a little bit fuzzier a lot of companies will have a retention metric or an engagement metric that acts as a proxy like Facebook has seven friends in three days and Twitter has follow 30 people but it's some sort of

9:13behavioral threshold that once people cross that they're really really unlikely to kind of just bounce out with your product so whatever that point is you're starting there and the amount of people that it's typically considered acceptable to lose is somewhere in the vicinity of five percent month-over-month like if you're significantly under that it's probably a really good idea to pull the brake line and say hey where we have a really leaky bucket on our hands and we really need to fix this problem but just as a general you know point of reference like let's say you're losing five percent month-over-month if we go back to activation which

9:43precedes retention the sign up is the where that begins in a kind of ends at conversion and in that case you're looking at losing like fifteen percent of people of all the people who sign up so you know that can really vary it can depend on whether you have a credit card upfront or not or if you front-load with value or not or if you're freemium or things like that but if anyone in this room basically asked me to guess what their their signup to retain conversion rate was I would have to assume it would I guess would be fifteen percent something like that and then it kind of

10:16gets even worse because if you just look at well what percentage of people even log back in a second time you're looking at something along the lines of fifty percent so half the people who you're working so hard with all of your marketing and expensive advertising and landing pages and all of those kind of things to get people just to try your product like you're just you know leaving half on the table right away and then it gets kind of well and so like if you contrast the two like if five percent month-over-month is unacceptable for a losing retained users but eighty five percent is okay for signing for new

10:50signups then there has to be a lot of room for opportunity there and you can make it how you can really find an outsized effect and the trickle down through the conversion funnel the slide gets worse one more time and then that's the last time which is instead of like the ninety five percent versus fifteen percent it's actually 95 percent of the 15 percent that make it through so there's a real gating mechanism at play here and hopefully it is a a good way to reinforce the the importance of onboarding so going back to Optimizely another recommendation that I would make if you are dead set on using tool tip

11:25tours is to assume that they would be skipped especially if it's like this button does this and this button does this I've seen so many people so many times I myself have done it so many times I assume everyone in this room has where you just go next xxxxxx okay great now what and so in that case if you have tool tip tours assume that they're gonna be skipped and design around them anyway and a preferably design around them in such a way that you don't need tool tip tours to begin with the sort of mobile version of this is like the the intro slides where it's like hey we're so

11:54happy to tell you all about us and like you know you can see like there's like those little dots at the bottom like okay so I just have to like swipe that many dots and then I can start using the product which is interesting because it's like the same gestures dumping somebody on tinder where you're just like I just have to say no to you four times and then I can hopefully start using your product if it makes sense but let's say you like it you get them through whatever kind of introductions you have and it's time to you know get kind of the rubber hits the road we

12:22transition to a design pattern called empty states or blank States and I like live chat software but I pick on them for their blank states because they're really blank it's kind of like walking into like your own personal ghost town in some ways like there are literally holes in the interface and there's a really big forward kind of admonishing statement of like you have no chat okay like what are you doing here okay it's like I mean and this is the first you can't help but experience this like this is this is where you this is how they kick things off I guess basically and you know one thing that I really

13:01recommend from a design perspective is to have your software behave as you would if you were in front of your user and so I would really tend to assume that anyone walking into live chat HQ and saying hi I would like to use your product I really doubt that the you know whoever receiving them it would be like well you don't have any chance so you know basically looking at kicking things off in a warm and welcoming and human way is something that I really recommend Oh also I digged up I dug up this gem from 2007 YouTube kicked things off in theirs with you have no friends so

13:40really just starting that relationship off on the right foot so by contrast instead of having empty things and kind of you know admonishing or sociopathic statements to start the relationship off I recommend filling it up with with warmth abundance and and help and I think Basecamp does a great job of that instead of coming in just being like do you don't have any projects they say welcome and there's like this orange thing where you're like this doesn't look like it's always going to be here maybe I should pay attention to that and it's got an exclamation point it's kind of chipper and then instead of you know

14:12instead of just holes where projects would go they filled it up with a sample project that walks you through how to use projects and inside the project they have instead of empty to do this they have to do lists that's filled up with how to use to-do lists and they've really taken a lot of time to go through the process of getting started and understanding not only understanding the interface but understanding how to accomplish what you want to accomplish within the product and laying that out really in a demonstrable demonstrative and like a modeling kind of a way another example that people really really love is slack again it's like

14:46super high personality really warm really human but they also have a thing where they could have abstracted out the whole account creation process they have a couple fields at the beginning that you have to fill out but then they really quickly dump you into their actual interface and introduce themselves through the core use of the product so this being a group communication tool they have you entered your information in via chat instead of via a wizard or just a really cold form with field entry or something like that and then from a personality perspective they say like ice life out here you know to start what is your first name and

15:21then the introduction at the top when it says this is a slack bot is pretty dumb but tries to be helpful which I want to put on my business card but so like let's say that you're fully set up with the product all the information that you need to get up and running has been entered it's time to actually do something of consequence within the two that were the next design pattern that I really recommend paying attention to are what I call progress trackers and those come in two main flavors as far as I've seen one skews more like towards a to-do list another skews more towards a progress

15:53meter or a completion tracker or a completion meter so in Dropbox's case they have the like go do these things and at the end you'll get more or you'll get more and more free space as you go and we will let you you know visibly show you the progress that you're making and it feels I mean it just feels good to cross things off of it to-do lists or LinkedIn on the other hand has the progress tracker where it says okay you're 80% complete go enter your what weird of they even asking for now I guess like employment or whatever that might be and so when you look at this

16:25like one question that people a lot of times will have a trouble answering is okay so like let's say I want to get people to do things what are those things that I should be getting them to do and like it might be kind of hard to identify you know that zero to sixty like I was referring to before and so looking at this activation and retention chart that we were paying attention to before the question is really like what is the driving force that would get someone to want to go through that process anyway and I actually have kind of like a story that I hope will be

16:57helpful it's not a it's not a software related but I was living with my girlfriend at the time several years ago and she was a professional chef and so she made these really really awesome dinners every night and I was like you know what I care about her I got to communicate that to her I was like look every Sunday night I'm gonna cook for you it's on me don't worry about it and that worked so so well for two weeks until I was out of recipes and I was like shoot now what am I gonna do and so I was like uh hmm well and so I went to

17:30the store and I bought a grill and I was like that sounds it's kind of manly it'll be kind of like an adventure let's see what happens with this and so I bought the grill unfortunately it came with like these setup instructions and I was able to like assemble I was I could activate the grill like it was pretty straightforward to do that but I wouldn't have considered it to be like a great experience or a success in my life if I had activated it but just let it sit and rust I actually had to start cooking outside and cooking like you know edible meals in order for that to actually

18:01fulfill the desire that I had when I purchased it to begin with and so fortunately well Mike Believe It or Not a little touch-and-go at the beginning there was one time sometimes things came out well there was another time that I was talking my neighbor while I was grilling ribs and a fireball shot out at the bottom of the grill and I saw it out of the corner of my eye and my neighbor was like you should probably look into that and I was like yeah I probably look into that so in order to become a better outdoor cook and not just become a better grill assembler

18:33fortunately Weber which was the company that I bought it from provides all this supplemental material so they have a website where it tells you like what temperature you should cook meats to they have an iPhone app they have YouTube videos which actually are super helpful a really good grilling book I own that one it's very very good and through a long process I actually got to be I would say fairly decent at grilling and I was able to convince maybe in some small part because of that the girlfriend at the time to become my wife and we have a four year old and this past summer I bought him a little grill

19:06and we grill together and so there's also the obligatory micro-trauma slide so but yeah so so instead of looking at like onboarding as the process of activating features or setting up an account or getting a product up and going and being like a small part of the overall product experience I like to take a bigger step back and look at the product as being a small part of an overall life experience that you're facilitating and you're transitioning someone from a frustrating situation like for me not being able to cook for my girlfriend and feeling weird about that to like having this abundant family life and feeling confident when I walk

19:43up to a grill and things along those lines and so that's really the transition that you're looking to facilitate in someone's life not just getting them up to speed in your software but getting up them up to speed in the life that they want to have so you might be familiar with this graphic that I made but it's a similar thing it's really not about the thing that gets them from A to Z it's it's just getting them there whatever you can do if it's providing outside resources life cycle emails educational material on your blog all these things that are not necessarily part of your feature set but are still

20:13required and helping people be successful in the way that they are hoping you will help them become successful are what I consider onboarding your onboarding them instead of up to speed your product on wording them to a better life and so on that note people don't buy products they buy better versions of themselves and what you need to accomplish from a especially if you're a SAS product is to continually be upgrading them to a better version of themselves on an ongoing basis you can't just sell a grill and if it sits there and rust so be it because we got our money and that's fine with us you know their

20:48repurchase repurchasing the grill month-over-month and you need to keep providing that ability to cook outdoors and do it well so identifying that as the driving force you can kind of look at it as like there's the the frustrated a tiny bad cooking mario and then the really good grilling super mario who's throwing well five miles I didn't even think of that when I thought but yeah so so yeah so once you have that spectrum laid out that's when you can start at or at least coming up with guesses around what people should be doing because there are accomplishments in their life that you're getting them to do and not

21:22just explore this feature or activate this this product or things along those lines and one really interesting thing too is anytime that you have the opportunity to start people off with some progress you'll see a big uptick in the amount of people that actually make it through there was a study done called the endowed product or sorry the the the the concept is called the endow Progress effect and there was a study done I believe back in the 70s where they were at a car wash and there were those loyalty punch cards and they gave half the people a ten punch card that had two pre punches and half the people an a

21:56punch card that had zero pre punches so they were essentially either in both cases they needed to get eight car washes to get their free car wash but one group was starting off at 0% progress the other group was starting off at 20% progress and they the 20% progress group got free car washes got to the end and completed the punch card at twice the rate that the other ones did just by having the presence of these two pre punches and having something again to lose and feeling like you're already making progress and interestingly Korra does this with their unborn to-do list this is the very first screen that you can

22:30possibly arrive at after going through whatever their walkthrough was you could not have accomplished more or less it's impossible but still they have a five-step list with three actions already completed so instead of starting off at zero percent in a two step list you're starting off at 60 percent in a five step list and I found it really psychologically compelling when I was going through and I was like yes I'm almost done even I'm just gonna go and I'm gonna make these happen and I bet I'm gonna get like a cool pat on the back or something once it's once it's in place and instead of just disappeared

23:04like where it's like it was like yeah like Korra got what Courtney did so well yeah that's it so I really recommend not doing this I really recommend taking any opportunity you can to provide positive reinforcement and just in general be there to celebrate the success that you're facilitating in someone's life and so in Shopify's case they have you can't really see it because the contrast is low but they're like these booster rocket clouds taking up the entire screen and it's like looks like you're ready for launch and they're really there to pat you on the back and be you know basically say hey look at how great

23:38you are brought to you by us and any opportunity that you can have in feedback messages that you know large and small so something in the moment like your email looks great as you're entering your email address or anything like that especially for major accomplishments really going over the top and letting people know that they've done a great job can be really really helpful so from that standpoint I would also like to try to end this on a successful note and thank you very much for having me and I would love to take any questions that you might have [Applause] thank you very much Samuel questions so

24:20the tooltip thing where you're saying users will swipe through all the screens quickly or skip all your tooltips quickly is that for an audience of people made up of people like us like do you find that to be different for non-technical folks who would read that uh that's a fair question it's kind of like Patrick's thing about like some people like getting emails I would say in general it's not so much of a type of person problem as it is I'm trying to accomplish something and you are throwing breaks at me I look at a lot from a flow state kind of perspective that a lot of the best games or yeah

24:59games and software tenten be non interruptive and non instructive that they're intuitive and it's just easy to you kind of like what was the the t chaos guy who was like I didn't even realize I was learning things and the closer you can get to that as opposed to like if Mario it started up and like it's like burp press B to jump don't hit these guys like it you know it's just interrupting the flow of the experience and so I really recommend taking things that are persistent and non interruptive over interruptive and temporary testing just kidding yes it's better than shouting I'm sorry I did that I thought I was the only one

25:39raising my hand um just quick question what are some things you you see that you like people doing or some software that's out there that maybe helps you and also what things you see people doing that you don't like like over and over again or some software that's supposedly useful for this kind of thing but it's actually terrible okay thank you useful but actually terrible oh sorry that markets itself is being useful and people think oh I got to do it because this software tells me I should do this or some book tells me I should do it but you think it's bad advice yeah well my my my default answer

26:14to those kind questions of like what is good or bad is typically what is good or bad for you I you know I would certainly if tooltips are just blowing doors in your product great you know like I mean I don't have like a philosophical bent against them just typically I think that if that is the the default that people assume and and consider that to be the extent of onboarding where okay well we kind of went in and like explain what our buttons were so I guess we did our onboarding I would say that there's a healthy amount of opportunity there to explore a lot more diversity around how

26:45your product can be getting people up to speed in a lot of different ways and probably a lot of different ways that are more immersive and natural within your product experience hey Sam my question is on on setting up so we've had a debate between having it be very rigid and forcing people to go through steps one two or three the way we want them and then showing them the rest of the product or we want to show them something first and then kind of convince them to start the setup you have any opinion on on that yeah my first question would be you know if

27:20you're encountering it were you saying like you were struggling with one and you tried the other or you're just thinking about doing either or we're debating on whether or not we can improve it by making it much more rigid okay yeah so my first question would be like if you're if you're encountering friction from your users who are like I don't want to be taking these steps it's possible that those are just not the steps that people really should be taking so getting really clear on are these things that people really absolutely need to be doing to be getting value out of the product and having that you know compelling

27:53experience and increasing the likelihood that they're going to return and so on and so forth so I would say even before you're making a design decision around should we be making these unskipable or not questioning like what are the things that people are even wanting to skip and why beyond that I would typically recommend take inserting yourself into the feedback loop as much as possible so if you can include chat in your experience or there's any kind of feedback mechanism where somebody could opt out of something and but they have to tell you why they are a lot of times that can be a really quick way to get in

28:27and understand what it is that you need to be doing or what the nuance there is and then the last thing that I would recommend is identifying what the absolute core experience like kind of like in Mario we're like if you don't learn to jump you're not going to you know you're not literally not going to get fire in the game and you're just not going to enjoy it and so if you it's really crucial that mario has to be able that were the the operator of mario has to know how to make him jump and so if there are things that are just absolutely critical in

28:54your product I would definitely recommend making those unskipable or highly enforced early in the process but outside of that I think that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity to sort of lighten the burden of onboarding in either direction across the chronology so if there are concepts that people need to wrap their heads around in order to be successful using your product then you can spin that out as pre signup educational material like how you know having blog posts that covered that or using that as a forum a lead generation you know that those people are already up to speed on it and then likewise after the first run experience like the

29:29ongoing onboarding there's a tremendous amount of opportunity to be showing people new features and giving them a comprehensive outlook of your product outside of that critical experience via life cycle emails and things along those lines and those are really good reasons to drop you people back in like it's almost it's almost a good excuse for you to reach out to them what you want to do to kind of build up that habitual or natural use of the product let's have a warm round of applause for Samuel thank you very much you