Measuring the effectiveness of your solutions and reiterating to optimize for user adoption
Lesson #5
Measuring the effectiveness of your solutions and reiterating to optimize for user adoption
In this lesson, we’ll be going over some of the key processes you should keep in mind while building onboarding experiences.
The goal of this lesson is to help you integrate onboarding as an ongoing process in your product-led strategy.
Set goals for each test
In the past few lessons, you’ve learned how to spot problems in the user journey. You’ve then learned how to use certain UI patterns to implement your solutions.
It’s now time to analyze the implemented solutions to see what kind of effects they have on our success metrics.
At this stage, we have to keep in mind that building the whole onboarding experience and measuring its effect as a whole will not be very effective.
Instead, we must define a clear goal for each onboarding experience separately.
This will allow us to iterate and optimize more efficiently.
For instance, you might have three onboarding experiences for a first time user. Obviously, all three experiences are optimizing for activation. Yet, it will be much easier to separately measure the effect of each experience on its own.
Each experience in this case must have a clear goal on how it contributes to the bigger picture of paving the way to activation.
One of the experiences might, for example, try to drive the initial Aha! moment, while the other two push for activation events.
Therefore, you must clearly define the expectation from each experience.
In most cases, goals are tied to custom in-app events. This makes it easy to see how users react to onboarding experiences.
In other words, how likely is a user to accomplish a certain in-app event in response to an onboarding experience?
You should also analyze the engagement and completion rates for every deployed onboarding experience.
Factors such as the UI pattern used, the copy and the context can all have major effects on the results.
Optimize your solutions
After analyzing each test separately, it’s important to come up with ways to improve results.
First, take a look at the onboarding flow completion rate.
If the onboarding experience has a low completion rate, then you might want to consider choosing a different UI pattern, or making it a bit shorter.
Users are more likely to drop out from onboarding flows that are too lengthy. Stay focused with short, ‘to the point’ experiences.
Next, you should take a look at your goal achievement %.
A low goal % almost always means that your onboarding experience was either triggered in the wrong context, or for the wrong persona.
Try testing different onboarding experiences for different user personas. Users are more likely to engage with content that they can relate to.
Additionally, you should always keep context in mind.
Focus on reacting to what the user is doing in the app. Which features have they used? Which page are they currently on? What are they trying to achieve?
Always be relevant, and never force them to go into generic and unhelpful onboarding flows.
Finally, a good completion and goal % doesn’t necessarily mean your job is done.
In fact, you must always double down on onboarding experiences that are working.
Try optimizing your copy and the design of your UI patterns; this usually has a positive effect on completion and goals.
You can also A/B test your onboarding flows either against other flows, or against doing nothing at all.
Communicate findings with your team
It’s always a good idea to share your latest findings with your team.
This will help you brainstorm effective ways on how to improve on each and every one of your tests.
It will also demonstrate the importance of onboarding to your teammates, and how it can have a real effect on success metrics.
This will help you brainstorm effective ways on how to improve on each and every one of your tests.
It will also demonstrate the importance of onboarding to your teammates, and how it can have a real effect on success metrics.
Keep key success metrics in check
Optimization for success metrics, such as activation, is the core of the user onboarding process.
It’s unlikely that you will nail the onboarding experience first time round.
It usually takes many iterations for your optimal onboarding experience to start shaping up.
And even then, your onboarding process will keep evolving with every iteration of your product.
This is why it’s absolutely crucial to keep track of changes to the goals you want to achieve, and constantly update your expectations from the onboarding experience.
Lesson 5 Key Points
- You must always set clear goals for each onboarding experience.
- Measure the effectiveness of each experience by looking at its completion rate as well as the goals achieved.
- Share findings with your team to keep them involved in the process
- Always keep an eye on the bigger picture, and iterate on your onboarding as your product evolves.
Next Steps
Congratulations! You have completed all the lessons you need to create a stellar onboarding process.