At first, when you meet someone, you get impressed with the person’s physical features. Similar is with a mobile application; here the user onboarding process makes the impression. The onboarding experience has a direct link with product engagement.

When the users sense a “feel good” experience, they tend to explore more about your app. Therefore, you should make the onboarding process as streamlined as possible, so the customer finds it easy to navigate through your app.

The Importance of First Impressions

Onboarding is the process of bringing and familiarizing the target customers with your platform. This process educates the users about the features and values of the application. They learn how to use the services available to them. These initial experiences determine whether the customer is going to be loyal, or they will run away.

Creating a smooth onboarding process can never be a choice; it is a must. This is because we never know whether you will get a chance to make a second impression, especially in the mobile application industry. When the tone is set, customers will try to deeply engage with your app.

Opposite to it, if your onboarding process is overly expressive and full of features and notices, it would annoy your customer. The customer shouldn’t be hustling at the very beginning. You must focus on crafting the onboarding process that is informative as well as interesting.

Understanding Your Users

Before you jump to any conclusion, you must be aware of who your customers are and their goals. You must have a realization of what value your app users are looking for. Then, to provide that value, conduct thorough research to understand their challenges, pain points, expectations, and preferences.

Accordingly, design the onboarding process that will create an unwinding feeling among them. It must focus on addressing the needs of customers. To be more precise in this, you can create user personas so different sets of target users can find your app useful.

Simplicity and Progressive Disclosure

Imagine entering a room and suddenly having loads of items thrown at you all at once; of course, no one wants that. The same is true with the app; you must not bombard with so many features and options all at once when a customer onboards. Why overwhelm your customers with so much news? Focus on reducing the cognitive load by simplifying the process.

At first, show only core functionalities and then gradually progress to advanced options. The transition should be made after the user gets familiar with your services. Enforce progressive disclosure, which means giving your customer time to grasp the context at their own pace.

Personalization and Contextual Guidance

To enhance the value of your app among the users, make your app highly relatable or personalize it. Personalization involves certain settings that primarily aim to fulfill customers’ expectations and goals. Such settings uplevel the user experience. To enable a personalized experience, ask a few questions initially to your customer to evaluate their needs.

Another option is contextual guidance, which means providing tooltips, hints, and short explanations about the features. It will allow your app users to gather contextual knowledge while navigating only.

Also, you can incorporate certain tools like https://userguiding.com/ to create a terrific, personalized onboarding experience. It is an in-app guidance tool that helps you significantly improve processes over time.

Gamification and Progress Tracking

The onboarding process shouldn’t be boring; make it amusing by incorporating gamification elements. Gamification elements fascinate users to dig into the app with added motivation. These elements may include achievement badges, leaderboards, progress bars, progress displays, or small rewards.

Such elements simplify the process of learning in a game-like setting. It encourages them to explore the features and accomplish the goals. The user can always have an idea of how much is remaining to discover.

Measuring Onboarding Success

You might have an idea of how to create an onboarding strategy. The second step is tracking the progress being made. Tracking your progress helps you improve in your arena. Keep a thorough check on the following key metrics:

• Time to achieve the value: It measures the time taken by a user to achieve a valuable outcome with your services.
• Feature adoption rate: It measures the percentage of users who utilize a particular feature while and after onboarding.
• User activation rate: It records the key actions by the users that ensure they are adopting your service.
• Retention rate: It measures how loyal a user is.

Continuous Improvement and Iteration

Since the onboarding process is an ongoing thing, the strategy must evolve with time. You must work on the reviews and feedback from users. Keep on improving the experiences to keep your app the most relevant and trendy in the market.

Your every decision must be data-driven. Consider A/B testing to evaluate the difference between your before and after services.

Beyond Initial Onboarding

When you onboarded the users successfully, they were aware of the existing feature and remained stuck to it. They may not be ready for something very new when you must; it would be a challenge.

This is because the existing users may not be familiar with the latest features. You must re-evaluate the ongoing onboarding strategy to gradually familiarize your existing users with the newest updates.

The Role of Customer Support

You cannot assume all your app users are comprehending every operation. There would always be a few customers who would encounter difficulties and have complaints.

For such customers, you must ensure terrific customer support. You must incorporate omnichannel to facilitate goal-oriented communication between the service support and the customer.

Leveraging Onboarding for Product Insights

The onboarding process provides you with an opportunity to gather insights about your product development. Keep the process smooth, let your customer know what you are offering, and record their responses on the same.

In this way, you can identify how users are considering your product, which features are valuable, and whether it is helpful to them or not. It will foster engagement.

The Ongoing Journey of Onboarding

The first step to call out engagement is the incredible onboarding process. No user would want to go through a hectic process where there is no clarity. You must keep this process highly simplified, personalized, and interesting to drive engagement.

When the onboarding process is successful, the users get the tone of your offerings. This process is consistent and demands improvements. With the help of data and feedback, consider strategic approaches.

The post User Onboarding: The Key to Boosting Product Engagement appeared first on The Total Entrepreneurs.

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