The Art of Sign-up: A 3-step Framework to Create Momentum in Your Onboarding Experience
This is part one in a five-part series on creating exceptional onboarding experiences
tl;dr
In this post, you’ll learn:
The value of momentum in user onboarding
How to identify and design for minimum viable information
How to incorporate user momentum into your onboarding workflows
Onboarding Is a Pivotal Point in User Experience
We don’t think enough about onboarding experiences. As designers, developers, or founders, we’re so focused on building a product that users want, that we treat onboarding the way we’d treat help center content. We’ll get to it when we get to it, but for now here’s a placeholder sign-up template. Then, the marketing team runs a bunch of A/B tests and can’t figure out why nothing really converts that well. But, when done right, user onboarding can be a massive competitive advantage for your product by:
Increasing stickiness and reducing churn
Functioning as an extension of your marketing efforts, and leading to improved conversion rates from 0 → Free and Free → Premium
Collecting the right information from users at the right time, allowing you to understand their needs and build better solutions
Accelerating initial user momentum to complete a journey, rather than killing it
The onboarding experience, at its core, is an agreement between user and builder. As a user, I’m willing to provide you - the builder - some amount of my personal information in exchange for you solving a handful of the problems I’m currently facing. However you - the builder - also need a certain amount of information from me to make your product more useful to me - the user - and it’s not always clear upfront to both parties what the agreed upon level should be. Like a first date, ask for too much too quickly, and you’ll come off as pushy and weird. Don’t ask enough, and you’ll never really connect with the other person or understand them well enough for the relationship to flourish.
To understand the checkpoints where you’ll collect user information, we’ll break the process down into 3 stages of information collection:
Minimum Viable Information (or Required Info)
Effective User Information
Optimal User Information
Level 1: Minimum Viable Information
Once that potential user has hit your landing page, skimmed your solutions, and decided that you might be a good fit to solve their problem, the onboarding process has begun in their mind. They’ll look for a Sign Up or Get Started button, which should always be readily available from your landing page - either in a top nav bar, or as a floating button. Users should not have to think for even a second about how to start the onboarding process. This is trivial and should be a given, but you’d be surprised how many companies miss on this.
Once they’ve clicked and signaled to you that they’re ready to turn over their information in exchange for you solving their problems, the question arises - What information do I need to collect from them?
The first stage of information collection is the Minimum Viable Information stage. This is the absolute minimum amount of information you as a product builder need from a user in order for them to get anything out of the product. Anything less, and they’d just be browsing passively or unable to use any of your core features. Anything more, and you start getting into more customized, advanced features that get unlocked, rather than just getting them in the door.
For the vast majority of products, this is going to be an email address, a password, and maybe one or two other readily available responses. Ideally, this is a single page or screen, with a small form and familiar feel. This is really table stakes, but if you do it correctly, it makes the rest of the process simple, and even if you do it incorrectly, you can still salvage the relationship because now you have their email address (it may just be much harder).
Another way to consider what might be Minimum Viable Information is to ask yourself what is absolutely necessary for both you and the user - or what is the required information. If there is anything in your product that they’ll need to save, or send, or create, they’ll likely need that to be associated to an email address - or more commonly as of late, a phone number - and an email address will require a password to protect it. At most, you should add one or two more fields, but only if absolutely necessary.
**Semi-related tangent - please do not label an email address as a username, or ask for both a username and an email address in this initial step. Especially if you’re not a product that they’re logging into often, trying to remember if your username is actually a username or a password, leads to a much higher rate of password/username resetting, and a significantly worse experience
A lot of products like to ask for a name, and then use that name to do a welcome flow that feels more personal. That’s fine if you’re planning to do anything meaningful with their name later on (eg if they can share things with other users and their name will serve as a From field), but otherwise, let’s just get them signed up and worry about the rest in stage 2.
Speaking of which…
Level 2: Effective Information Collection
The second stage of information capture during the onboarding process is the Effective level of information.
Depending on your product, this might include a number of additional fields:
User’s role at their company
Company details
Other products they’ve tried
Selecting their primary problem from the 3 or 4 you solve for
Probing their familiarity with your product
Think of this level as the information that can start to inform the key journeys they’ll be likely to take in your product. If you’ve built a tool for managing employee time-off, for example, the critical flows for managers will be different than for ICs. Managers will need to visibility into their entire team’s requests and balances, they’ll need to be able to approve other users’ requests, etc, while an IC might simply need to see their own balance and be able to request/edit/delete time off submissions.
This level of information is likely too burdensome to group alongside the information in Level 1, and will almost always be best-suited to go through a walkthrough/survey flow after they’ve completed the initial sign-up. While you as the builder may consider this information absolutely necessary, remember that it is probably not and that the user may not want to fill out a bunch of questions immediately.
If you opt to have a multi-step process post-signup where they fill out this Effective Information, it’s a good practice to give them an idea of what they’re getting into. As the first step in the survey, give them background on what they’re about to do, how long it will take (make it quick), and perhaps most importantly, what benefits they’ll get out of providing this information to you.
Be especially careful not to kill user momentum at this phase. Giving the opt out may feel like you’re going to hurt usage in the long tun, but if you’ve clearly articulated the benefits to them, then they’ll know to come back eventually (and you can always use some nudges or forcing functions in the core workflows of the product to collect this information later). The opt out also services a very specific user, which is the user who is coming to your product with a pre-determined use case in mind, and has a lot of momentum to complete that journey. For example:
Someone sent me a clip from Instagram that I’m especially interested in, and said “follow this account for similar posts that are really helpful”. I don’t have instagram, so I sign up, but I really only care about one thing at this point - finding that account and following them (with a secondary goal of following similar accounts). I don’t plan on sharing too much to begin with, or connecting with everyone I went to high school with, so I don’t want to upload a profile picture, or follow 20 accounts right away, or learn how to make a reel. I just want to follow that account as quickly as possible, watch their content, and find similar accounts.
In the normal Instagram sign up flow, I’d hit at least 3 or 4 steps in the onboarding process that would absolutely kill my momentum. I’m sure the product team there has all sorts of data that sign-ups that complete these steps have better engagement in the long run, but for my use case, I don’t care about any of them in the moment. I’m happy to share my email, and connect my Facebook, but after that I just want to find the account that was shared with me.
If the product is really working like the Instagram team wants it to, then letting me do that will likely lead to engagement in the long run anyway, and they can slowly and steadily have me complete their Stage 2 information requests throughout the product (eg when I post a comment, remind me that commenter with a profile photo tend to hear back from creators, etc). By making Level 2 opt-out, they’ve now increased my likelihood of sticking around.
Stage 2 information is going to unlock tremendous value for +80% of your users, but make sure to keep the other 20% in mind and give them all a chance to onboard in their own preferred way. On opt-out, you can always serve a parting reminder where to find this Stage 2 information so they can update later.
Stage 3: Optimal Information Collection
The final level of information collection is the Optimal Level. This is the final 10% that will elevate normal users of your product to power users. This level of information needs to strike the finest balance between the benefit to you as the product team, and your users. Without clearly explaining the benefits of this information, you run the risk of frustrating the user and pushing them to abandon (much more so than the first two levels of information).
In practice, this level includes information like:
User profile customization
Integrations with other products
Team/organization info
Saved views/workflows/reports
These things are likely too high-effort and low-impact for use immediately after signup. If you add these requests on top of the first two levels during onboarding, users will lose their momentum and enthusiasm, and abandonment will skyrocket.
Having a custom profile also doesn’t serve a user immediately, or resonate with them why it might be a good idea. But if they’ve onboarded and are browsing and see other profiles that are customized or any other cool feature in action, they’ll be more likely to follow through and get value out of it. You should have these information collection processes readily available throughout the product, but not force users into them at any point. Clearly articulate the value of these fields during their core workflows, and then make it clear where they can implement them.
Particularly in Freemium products, this final stage can be a powerful lever to get Free → Premium upgrades by helping users realize the incremental value they can unlock,
Wrapping Up
Effectively collecting information from users is alchemy. There are best practices for onboarding (we’ll cover more of those in subsequent posts, if you’re interested), but a lot of it also comes down to trusting users and giving them the right nudges at the right time. Try not to think of Onboarding as a one-time process, but something that has an initial workflow, and then a series of maintenance activities throughout the user’s lifecycle in your product.
Collect minimum viable (required) information in as low-friction a process as possible. What is the cover charge for them to get into the product and see what it’s all about
Give the user clear expectations and benefit for completing the Effective Information requests, always with an option to opt out and resume later. This prevents momentum loss for users who are already locked in on a specific journey or have a niche goal they already know they want to complete, but also allows “generalist” users to understand a bit more about the value they’re getting and where to find it
Use core workflows in the product and well-crafted tooltips to capture the final 10% of information that you need from users. Don’t burden them with a survey, or by locking them into filling out this information during onboarding.
Next time you think about just dropping in a pre-built sign-up template as your “onboarding” flow, remember that onboarding actually serves as a connector between marketing, retention, freemium upgrades, and your future roadmap. By implementing these phases, you can unlock growth in all of those areas and deliver even more value for your users.