Designing Great Onboarding Walkthroughs
This is part two in a five-part series on creating exceptional onboarding experiences
tl;dr - In this post, you’ll learn:
Three principles for creating great onboarding walkthroughs
Considerations for different user journeys in the onboarding process
Some extra pizzaz you can add to your onboarding walkthroughs to tie them to business KPIs
User preferences are critically important in the onboarding experience. Consider how many different goals a user might come to your product with. They could be there to complete some specific goal, come via a shared asset from another user, come in browsing mode to see how your product could solve one of their problems, and on and on.
These distinctions matter because onboarding users is not one-size-fits-all. In the three stages of information collection during onboarding, only the first stage should be universally applied to all users. From there, it becomes a choose-your-own-adventure for each user, and your onboarding processes - including walkthroughs - should follow suit. Here are three rules of thumb to consider when creating new user onboarding walkthroughs
1. Always Ask Permission
There is rarely a justifiable use case to simply dump a user into a walkthrough without first knowing if they’re interested, or at the very least, understanding their primary goals in using your product. If someone is coming from an existing user’s share/request, or entering with a specific goal in mind, then the tour will likely kill their momentum and hurt their long-term product usage. Make sure the onboarding is available for users who want it, and easily avoidable for those who don’t
In practice, this can be a modal/pop-up after stage 1 of onboarding that asks them if they’d like to learn how to get the most out of the product. It could also be the first step of the guide (more on this below) with a clear option for them to abandon. Alternatively, you can drop users into the Home view of your product and highlight a popup that lets them jump into the onboarding tour. Unless it really suits your use case, I think this last option should largely be avoided - it hurts both buckets of users (specific goal seekers and generalists) by making it unclear for both of them what they should do. It also diminishes the onboarding guide completion rate, which isn’t inherently bad, but probably is in this case.
2. Be clear about investment, expectations, and outcomes
The first step in the onboarding guide should clearly spell out what the guide is, what it will cover, and (often overlooked) what users will get out of it. Too often, product designers fall into the Feature > Benefit trap that also plagues copywriting and marketing teams. You can tell users, “This guide will teach you how to do X, Y, Z”, but make sure that also includes the problems that X, Y, and Z help them solve.
Bad Experience: You build advertising software that lets marketers create campaigns with a bunch of different configs. As part of onboarding, you show them how to enable each of these different configs, which are buried in campaign settings and have tons of options. It’s not clear who might benefit from these configs or what the net benefit is to the marketers or the people they’re targeting
Good Experience: You use an example Base Campaign. You choose the 3 most common config options and go through each individually, showing users where to find it, how to enable it, considerations when setting configs up, and the end benefit to them as marketers (aka their incentive for taking action on that config). As a bonus, you could also show them how to then report on those configs to track success metrics, either in a separate onboarding walkthrough or by linking to a help center article at the end of this walkthrough.
Added Bonus: Convince your product/engineering/data teams to track checkpoints in the onboarding process and measure how many of the users who complete the Campaign Configs Onboarding Guide ultimately end up setting those features up, and potentially even any net performance improvement they see over users who don’t do the onboarding. This data point then becomes an incentive/forcing function to get users to complete the onboarding. If onboarding improves user adoption of these configs, that has a direct impact on stickiness in the product and churn reduction. Design is a business function too 😉
While it’s important to express the benefits up front, a user’s decision to complete or abandon the onboarding guide will also be impacted by the amount of input needed to complete the guide. Specifically, it’s good to call out in the first step that the walkthrough is expected to take about X minutes, where X should always be a small number. By setting expectations up front, you can limit the abandon-at-any-cost-clicking users do when they know they’re trapped (eg mindlessly clicking through to complete corporate workplace trainings).
The number of separate features/workflows you highlight in the walkthrough is important, to an extent, but becomes less important the more you provide flexibility for the users to create their own journey. For example, having detailed walkthroughs that follow these best practices for five different workflows might feel like a lot, but you’ll also be showcasing the specific workflow that users are coming there to complete. By giving them the option to skip the other four, you’re improving their onboarding experience and reducing their likelihood of churning.
3. Abandon (and revisit) any time
Let users drop out of the onboarding guide at any point in the workflow. Holding them hostage creates frustration, which IS NOT a feeling you want to be associated with their first interaction with your product.
As part of the abandonment, tell them where in the UI they can resume the walkthrough at any point, and ask them if they’d like to be reminded at a later date to pick back up where they left off. There is value in your walkthroughs (if done well), but the user’s initial interaction just might not be the right moment for them to derive that value. Recycle the walkthrough content into a help center or “Mastery” content to help them get the most out of their key workflows at any point in their journey.
Abandoning users likely have a specific goal in mind. Wherever possible, try to limit obstacles to completing that goal. If they received a link from a shared report, try to drop them in that report after they’ve signed up and signified that they want to skip the walkthrough. If they receive a shared link, sign up, skip the walkthrough, and wind up on the homepage, they’ll be totally lost as to how to get back to the report that was shared with them.
While there are very few hard and fast rules without exceptions in product design, these will - at the very least - get you asking the right questions as you start laying out your onboarding walkthroughs. Always consider the entry points for your users, and what their goals are:
Immediately at that moment
In the long term with your product
When in doubt, flexibility for users to make informed decisions is rarely a bad fallback, and these principles will help you achieve that flexibility.