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Principles on Effective Onboarding

Onboarding is not about your company. It has nothing to do with making users complete their profile or asking them to invite their friends. It's about their success, how they will reach their goals through your product. Onboarding is the best way for them to experience the value you promised. So, it's not only a matter of knowing how to use it, but how to use it to reach their goals.

It's about producing evidence of success, samples of it, small victories, and it's your responsibility, not the user's to make that happen. So, forget about tutorials, manuals or even your website FAQ. You do need onboarding. However, not just any kind, but the right kind.

Some companies do it as a tour of their core features. They give the user several visual clues, highlighting controls. That's not enough. It's not about knowing how things work, but how they'll work to serve users.

Other companies structure their onboarding flow with tasks in mind. Each task has a series of steps, and the user is guided to perform each one of them. Better, but still not the ideal.

What successful companies like Slack and Duolingo do is completely different. They orient all their efforts onboarding users by thinking about how can the user experience value during the process. It's actual product use, but only the aspects that give users a solid feeling of accomplishment and delight.

How is that possible? It's thoughtful planning and research. You'll be able to do this only if you understand why people are looking for your product in the first place. Figure this out by:

  1. Talk to customers and map all the jobs that your product and your competitors are being hired to do
  2. Define what success is in each one of these jobs
  3. List all the steps in your product to hit these multiple successes
  4. Write the conversation that leads people to perform these steps, reminding them about the success they'll achieve

Structure your flow around value and you will onboard people to what they really want: success. The funny thing is that you will be building your own sucess by solving a large part of your retention problems.