Column: The Onboarding Experience

For an experienced professional who, like me, transitioned from marketing to User Experience, user onboarding is one of the most crucial aspects of both Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience. A well-designed user-onboarding process helps users understand a product’s value proposition, learn how to use it effectively, and achieve their desired outcomes quickly and easily. This leads to a positive customer experience because users feel confident and successful in using the product. Plus, a good onboarding process can help to improve a product’s user experience by identifying and addressing any painpoints or usability issues that people may experience.

Therefore, it’s strange to see how onboarding remains an afterthought for most product or UX teams. Working on the HSBC’s world-class account-opening team, focusing on onboarding, opened up new horizons for my thinking about crafting compelling user onboarding experiences and what this means for product teams, customers, and users. I had not previously thought that an onboarding experience could provide a strategic lever for the success of a digital product and play a key role in customer adoption as well as retention. Read More

We are living in an era of product-led growth (PLG). This popular growth strategy relies on the actual product experience in driving acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention. What this means is less reliance on people booking demos, downloading whitepapers, and speaking with sales representatives. Today, most products strive to provide value to their customers or users in self-service mode.

The rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications has made it easier for customers to switch to a different product. Therefore, if customers don’t immediately see the value of your product, they’re likely to abandon it and move on to something else. Read More

A good onboarding team brings together people with many different talents, as follows:

• planners—Product managers map out the user journey and UX designers design the experience.
• UX designers—This team makes the onboarding process visually appealing and easy to understand and use.
• writers—They craft clear instructions and helpful messages.
• user researchers—This team endeavors to understand what users need and how they feel about the onboarding process.
• customer-support representatives—These people work directly with users to help them if they get stuck.
• data analysts—They track the ways in which users interact with the onboarding process.
• technology developers—This team builds the actual onboarding tools and features.
• project manager—This person oversees the entire onboarding project and makes sure everything works well together.

When everyone works together collaboratively to help new users get started, they can create a smooth, friendly experience for new users. They talk regularly with each other, share common goals, and follow the same plan, enabling them to adjust things throughout the project, as necessary, and make the users’ first experience even better. Read More