Onboarding UX Patterns and Best Practices in SaaS
As a product manager, you probably already understand the importance of a great onboarding UX design and its importance for customer journey optimization and user retention.
In this article, though, our focus is on how you can improve the user onboarding process for your users.
Although working with the right onboarding software is important, our focus will be on the onboarding UX patterns and best practices that can help you improve the experience and the user journey.
TL;DR
- Onboarding UX refers to the design framework that shapes how users interact with your product during onboarding.
- An excellent onboarding UX design reduces customer churn by making your product easy to use. It drives product adoption, increases retention, and boosts revenue growth.
Some of the most common onboarding UX patterns to use are:
- Welcome messages.
- Onboarding surveys.
- User onboarding checklists.
- Product tours.
- Modals.
- Banners.
- Tooltips.
- Hotspots.
- Self-help resource centers.
To create an effective onboarding process, though, you’ll need to:
- Personalize the user onboarding experience to reduce time to value.
- Give the option to skip the user onboarding flow.
- Fill empty states with helpful content.
- Practice progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users.
- Gamify the onboarding experience to keep users engaged.
- Use clear and effective microcopy in the customer onboarding process.
- Turn user onboarding into a continuous process.
- Identify friction in the user journey and remove it.
- Run experiments to optimize the user onboarding experience.
- Collect user feedback and improve your onboarding UX design based on it.
- To get started creating the ideal onboarding UX for your product, book a Userpilot demo today!
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What is onboarding UX?
User onboarding UX is the experience first-time users have with your product.
It refers to the design framework behind how new users interact with your product during onboarding and how it shapes their opinions.
The benefits of a great user onboarding UX design
On average, roughly 21% of users abandon an app after using it just once. This means that about 1 in 5 users will try your product once and never open it again.
A strong user onboarding experience combats it by creating a great first-time experience for new users. It turns your product from a complex spaceship with unlimited features to a familiar interface that users can quickly maximize.
Thus, a good onboarding UX reduces your users’ time to value, showing them how your product solves their pain points in the shortest possible time. It also ensures that your product’s key features are quickly adopted.
As a result, onboarding users and creating a premium first-time user experience boosts user retention and loyalty. It also increases the customer lifetime value, leading to higher business revenue and growth.
9 Types of user onboarding UX patterns
There are different types of onboarding patterns you can deploy as part of the user onboarding process. Some of the most common ones include:
1. Welcome messages
Welcome messages are friendly greetings that kickstart a user’s journey with your product.
These messages kickstart a user’s journey with your product, welcoming them in with a friendly message and prepping them for the next steps.
A typical welcome message starts with the word “Hello” or “Welcome,” and ends with a call to action to view a product tour/walkthrough or begin setting up the product for your use.
Welcome messages, thus, set the tone and expectations for your product. Therefore, t’s important that you keep the message brief, the design simple, and your CTA clear.
2. Onboarding surveys
Onboarding surveys are onboarding UX patterns that are often built into welcome messages. Also known as welcome surveys, they’re designed to help you collect vital information from users.
A well-designed onboarding survey, for example, can tell you why a user needs your product, what job role they occupy, and what jobs they hope to do with it (otherwise known as their job-to-be-done).
Armed with this information, you can determine their user persona and tailor their onboarding experience accordingly. This means you can provide them with product information that fits their specific use case and goal.
3. User onboarding checklists
User onboarding checklists are lists of to-do activities users need to complete as part of the onboarding process. Also known as guided task lists, they bring to life the saying: “The best way to learn is by doing.”
Checklists ensure the user doesn’t get lost in the product by prompting them on the series of steps they need to take to get started. A checkmark shows the user which parts of the onboarding flow have been completed, and which are yet undone.
Checklists, thus, help users familiarize themselves with the product and its features, menus, and controls. When combined with a progress bar, they act as a source of motivation, giving users a target to pursue.
4. Product tours
Product tours are in-app guides that showcase your app to new users. They are designed to help familiarize users with the app’s user interface through a series of images, videos, and onboarding flows.
Product tours, thus, use a combination of UX onboarding patterns to demonstrate your app’s functionality to new users.
In recent times, however, interactive walkthroughs have replaced product tours. These walkthroughs move users step-by-step through the product. They also include elements users can interact with, ensuring they remain engaged throughout the tour.
5. Modals
Modals or modal windows are pop-up windows used to announce new information, such as a piece of important company news, a new feature, or a product release.
Thanks to their size, modals are impossible to miss and can contain media files like GIFs, images, and even video tutorials.
Although their size makes them very useful, they can also be pretty annoying as they block the user interface and interrupt the user experience. So, make them short, simple, and easy to exit.
6. Banners
Just like modal windows, banners are used to make in-app announcements. Unlike modals, though, banners are less intrusive and non-invasive, making them a popular choice for subtle alerts.
Banners can be used for various purposes, drawing the user’s attention without disrupting their experience. For example, they’re ideal for promoting webinars, announcing discounts, and celebrating achievements.
Banners are ideal for sharing information that isn’t time-sensitive. Still, you need to use colors and elements that make them easily noticed by the user.
7. Tooltips
Tooltips are brief messages that appear when you hover over an icon, feature, image, etc. Unlike the other UX/UI patterns discussed so far, tooltips are context-specific.
For example, you may use a tooltip to describe the use/function of a button to a user when they first move their cursor over it.
They are, ideal for when you need to get a user’s attention on one part of the screen or point out new information about a feature.
Like modals, tooltips are versatile onboarding UX patterns and are often used in product tours, walkthroughs, and in-app guides.
8. Hotspots
Hotspots aren’t as popular as some of the other onboarding patterns on this list. Still, they’re useful tools for drawing attention to specific UI elements or features.
Hotspots appear as a flashing “dot” on the screen, acting like beacons that force users to focus on a specific element or feature. They can be used as standalone patterns or combined with modals or tooltips.
Thanks to their size, hotspots are less intrusive and more discreet than other UI patterns.
This makes them ideal for calling attention to features without interrupting user workflow. Like tooltips, they’re also great for providing contextual information.
9. Self-help resource center
A self-help resource center is an in-app feature that provides users with educational resources and on-demand support. It features a mix of helpful articles, video tutorials, FAQs, webinars, etc.
The resource center makes it easy and convenient for users to find answers to queries or troubleshoot problems without leaving the app while enabling access to customer service if needed.
As part of the onboarding experience, resource centers can contain tutorial modules that show users how to use the product. This can guide users to success and drive product adoption.
Onboarding UX design best practices and tips for SaaS
A great user onboarding experience is one that’s designed to optimize the user journey. It puts user’s needs in perspective, captures attention, and helps them feel like the product was designed just for them.
Let’s now consider some onboarding best practices that can help you achieve this goal:
Personalize the user onboarding experience to reduce time to value
One highly recognized but oft-ignored fact of product development is that your product will be different things to different people.
To succeed, therefore, you must tailor-make different user onboarding experiences for different user personas. This means you must anticipate your product’s different use cases.
Then, you’ll need to create different onboarding flows to educate users of different backgrounds and use segmentation to trigger these flows contextually.
Give the option to skip the user onboarding flow
Avoid the urge to make the user onboarding process compulsory. Sometimes, a user is already familiar with your product and doesn’t need to be onboarded. The user may also want to explore on their own.
Whichever the case, users should be able to opt out of the onboarding flow, if they choose. Instead, you can provide an option for users to pick up on the onboarding later if they must.
Fill empty states with helpful content
Good empty-state design can make the usage of your product appealing by setting expectations and providing a clear path forward.
To fully benefit from this state, make it a part of the onboarding experience. Rather than leaving it blank, inject some content into it to introduce users to the type of content each empty element holds.
You can also go one step further, taking advantage of the empty state to prompt users to take action. For example, you can include checklists or demo content within the empty state to guide, educate, and prompt users.
Notion exemplifies this perfectly, including a checklist with complete instructions on the first-use Notion board to help users add teammates and create pages.
Practice progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users
Good onboarding is short onboarding. The longer your user onboarding process, the more “expensive” it becomes to the typical customer and the less beneficial it appears.
With that in mind, you must shorten the process to keep users from abandoning it halfway. Give them just enough information to get started, but no more.
Instead, as they progress through the product, offer progressive onboarding to provide further guidance to users and ensure they don’t get lost.
Gamify the onboarding experience to keep users engaged
Gamification is the introduction of fun, game-like elements into your product’s UX to motivate users and encourage a desired behavior.
For example, gamification may take the shape of a progress bar that shows users how far along they’ve come in the onboarding process. It can also appear as badges, leaderboards, celebratory animations, etc.
Put simply, onboarding UX gamification sets your product apart, making it more engaging and encouraging product activation for new users. For existing users, gamification pushes them further along the user journey and encourages advocacy.
Use clear and effective microcopy in the customer onboarding process
One way to keep users from skipping your product tours/onboarding flows is to keep it simple and short. While this applies to the number of steps in the tour, it also applies to the content length.
So, keep your UX copies short—100 characters or fewer. The faster the user can read through them, the earlier they can move to the next step in the process.
Here are some other tips to keep in mind when writing copy:
- Use clear verbs that cannot be misunderstood.
- Keep your terms consistent across all copies.
- Keep your sentences clear by writing in an active voice.
- Swap technical jargon for everyday language.
To produce effective product copy, leverage the latest AI technologies that help you rephrase, shorten, expand on your copy, and improve readability.
Turn user onboarding into a continuous process
We initially discussed secondary onboarding as a way to reduce the length of the user onboarding flow, but it can be much more than that.
As the months go by and you add new features and release product updates, you’ll need to onboard existing users, too. This will help keep users familiar with your product and ensure they continue to enjoy a great user experience.
Identify friction in the user journey and remove it
Despite your best efforts, you simply can’t create a perfect user experience. There’ll always be errors and bugs that somehow make it to production and create user friction.
To combat that, you must analyze, analyze, and analyze. For example, you can conduct funnel analysis to see how users progress through your product’s different funnels.
Are the drop-offs between steps in a funnel too big? If so, take that as a cue to dig deeper to identify the source of the drop-off and eliminate it.
Run experiments to optimize the user onboarding experience
Apply rigorous user testing and user research to determine the best approach for your onboarding UX. This way, you’ll rely less on your opinion of what the customer needs and more on factual data.
Thankfully, everything can be tested. Would users prefer a guided tour or a quick introduction tutorial? What copy is most compelling? Do they respond better to visuals? Which visual do they prefer? Can your button placements be improved?
Platforms like Userpilot enable you to conduct A/B tests on different onboarding elements to determine the best combination for your users.
Collect user feedback and improve your onboarding UX design based on it
Finally, the users are the best people to tell you what works for them. So, ask them.
Trigger customer satisfaction surveys at the end of the process to get the user’s opinion.
In addition to a simple rating scale question, you can also include a follow-up question to know what users love/hate about the process.
Be sure that you pay attention to the feedback you receive. This involves identifying common concerns, addressing them, and improving the process.
Conclusion
A great onboarding UX is a combination of carefully placed UX/UI patterns. From welcome screens to surveys and in-app tutorials, your goal should be to teach users to use your product effectively.
If you’re ready to get started with that goal, book a Userpilot demo today and an agent will be happy to show you how Userpilot can help you do just that.
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