Product-Led Onboarding™ boosts your user activation rate, by eliminating "busy work" in your current onboarding process and helping more users experience your product's value, faster. You do this by optimizing your product's time-to-value.
In this course, you'll learn how to:
Wes Bush:
If you haven't gone through that with your product yet, please do so. I want to make sure that you have mapped out your user journey before we go through and deciding what should we rip out, what should we keep, throughout this whole process. So let's dig in to the third stage of this.
Wes Bush:
There's three questions you need to ask yourself whenever you're vetting your product experience. The first one is really just around what steps can be eliminated? Maybe it's a form field, something simple. Maybe it's something else. There's just a bug or something else that's popping up whenever people log in. And then, what steps can we delay? Whenever we're thinking about onboarding experiences, a lot of companies try and just do a one-trick pony at the beginning.
Wes Bush:
We have users sign up and then we want to show them the entire product in one sitting. And that's really ineffective, because people get overwhelmed quickly. They probably don't care about all of your product. They just want to get their problem solved for them right away. And if we don't create an experience that expedites that for them, then we're just going to lose them and they're not going to have a good reason to come back. And then the last piece, when we're vetting is [inaudible 00:01:22] what are those mission critical steps? What do we actually, really, really need here for someone to get to that first strike in the product?
Wes Bush:
So this usually takes around 10 minutes. It depends on how big your product is. But I'm only going to spend about a couple minutes on it, going through the Canva example. But if something is labeled red, this means it's an unnecessary step. We can remove it from the user journey, without sacrificing anything. And if it's yellow, it means it's probably an advanced step. And when someone, let's say, explores that section of the product around video and analytics, yes, you can kick off another onboarding journey for them to walk them through that section.
Wes Bush:
So is it necessary at the beginning? No. It's dependent on what someone's doing. And so, there's tons of examples of this. For instance, Slack has done a really good job at this when you sign up. They're not actually asking you to integrate with Google Drive and a bunch of other tools. No. They are really being practical, that they keep it as simple as they can, but then whenever you share a Google Drive link in Slack, well, what do you know? They kick off the onboarding for that integration. And so, just thinking about when it's actually necessary to do something is super important, because advanced steps can overwhelm people at the beginning, but they are necessary. Onboarding isn't something that's one and done. It's ongoing.
Wes Bush:
And then the last piece is what are those mission critical steps? So let's go back to our Canva example and I'll share with you how I've approached this. When we're thinking about the beginning of the user journey, in this particular case, I've labeled these as green. So I did have to type how to make a poster. I did have to click landing page to get into the actual website. And then when I was on the landing page, I did actually have to click on the CTA.
Wes Bush:
Oh. One thing we could even think about here, too, is as it relates to cookies, because that's usually a step for a lot of people in Europe, but is it necessary in your country or not or could you just have a, "By using this website, we consent to using your data?" That's something, obviously, that is very based on where you live and the data policies that you're deploying, but that could be a step there that just wasn't mentioned.
Wes Bush:
For registration, once I click the CTA and I say, "I want to start designing my poster." Okay. What if I had to activate my email? Is probably be lower here. But, in this case, activating email is a lot of steps. And so, if I had to go in and now activate my email, this is something that I would label as it's unnecessary. It's not impacting it at all. If this was a product, let's say, that had very high security and was like mission critical. People would die if they got access to this information and everything else. Yes. A little let's add more friction. Let's make sure we're validating all of these people and accounts and make sure this is a legitimate email address. But for a lot of our products, it's not the case. And so I would label this as unnecessary.
Wes Bush:
And then, whenever it comes to picking your company fit, okay. So we're asking people how many employees do you have? Are you zero to 50? Are you 51 to 200? Are you 201 to 500. If we're asking this, it's really just for a sales qualification. So if your sales team is using this, might be helpful for them. But, at the end of the day, what you can also think about is, if we're asking them for their email and we, let's say, are in the U.S. and we enriched that email, we could probably get this figure. And it might even be more accurate than what people are going to give us. And so, also thinking about, if we are asking for this, is this a required step? Is this optional? If I was asking this, this would definitely be optional on my product. But if it's a must have, then yes. Please make these things optional.
Wes Bush:
And so, for the purposes of this, given that Canva doesn't sell too much to bigger teams. Their main products are definitely the individual one. I'm going to label this as unnecessary for right now. And you can always change these things and test them out, but the purpose of what we're doing right now in vetting every step is really just to get to the point where we know there's the absolute minimum number of steps required for someone to get to the end goal in this case, which is showcasing their poster.
Wes Bush:
All right. So we haven't touched on a yellow light. I'm going to show you an example of how this could have gone down with Canva. All right. So if, let's say, we logged into Canva for the first time and then they had a tool tip. And the tool tip was saying hey, here's the template section. Look at all the templates. Scroll down. Okay, great. Now look at the uploads. Upload your first image, and now, look at all the photos here. You didn't have to do that. You didn't have to upload that photo. You just uploaded them randomly. You could have just picked one here. And then, it goes to elements. Look at all the elements you have access to. Great. You can add fire. You can add a bunch of other things. You can add flowers and then there's text. Great. Let's make this fun. Type the text one. Put it on there. Let's make it really fun. We got more than one fun here. We got three funs. It's very fun to do this.
Wes Bush:
Now let's add a video. Great. Now we're really going somewhere. Expand that out. We are making progress here. This is super fun. Okay. Now your background, you have to change it. All right. Now it's looking real fun. And so, this is what a lot of onboarding experiences look like. We are just exploring, exploring, exploring every single piece of the software, showing people the tour of the world, I call it. And yet, I'm actually nowhere closer. In fact, I'm probably even farther away from experiencing the main value of the product. And so, that's an advanced step of actually exploring every single part of the product. In fact, what would have been a bit more helpful, if this was a complex product, is having minimal onboarding at the beginning of like Canva did. But if there was an advanced in, let's say, 3D graphics or something like that, there could be another onboarding experience kicked off. When I do, I take interest in, "Oh. Here's how to make 3D designs." There's a bit more work here, but here's how to do it in Canva.
Wes Bush:
That would have been super helpful, because it's contextual. It's based on what I'm interested in. And if I don't get to it in that first time or first visit, that's fine. Now, if I'm super keen and want to explore that, there's that option too, but it's not forced.
Wes Bush:
And so, that's what you really want to be aware of for advanced steps is we're not forcing people to learn stuff that they don't need to learn right then. It's just like any sport. If you think about all the techniques. You could tell someone who's learning tennis, "Hey, here's the ultimate technique for how to put a curve and spin on that ball, so it's harder for your opponent to hit. But if they're still struggling with figuring out how to hit the ball in the first place, don't worry about that stuff. It doesn't matter." So think about everything in progression. And that's what we're really trying to emphasize here with the yellow steps.
Wes Bush:
All right. So we've gone through the good old Canva example. What I really want you to do is pause this and vet every single step of your onboarding experience and really trying to identify what is unnecessary, what is mandatory, and what can we delay throughout this experience? Because at the end we're getting to here is you're going to be left with a straight-line onboarding experience, once you identify all of your green lights.
