In late 2013, Portland-based designer Samuel Hulick published a detailed account of his experience of signing up for online accounting software company LessAccounting's service.
Hulick walked through each step of the sign-up process, from hitting the company's homepage to signing up for the service to getting started using the actual product. He documented his first impressions of the product and the problems he ran into, and made recommendations to improve the overall experience for new users. Why didn't the homepage have a better explanation of what the product does? Why was the company asking for sensitive information, like a customer's bank account, so early in the sign-up [process?
Hulick calls this continuum of attracting new users, helping them get started, and convincing them to come back "user onboarding," and he was building a consulting business around the idea. The LessAccounting critique was just a sample of part of his process.
It was fun and informative, but it didn't shy away from criticism. So when an email appeared in his inbox the next morning from the company's co-founder Allan Branch, Hulick panicked. He'd picked the company at random, and hadn't talked to LessAccounting before posting the critique. Now he regretted it. What had he been thinking, airing a company's dirty laundry without their permission? But it was too late to worry now. He held his breath and opened the email, expecting the worst.
LessAccounting was actually thrilled with the feedback. Branch even ended up posting the critique on its own site. More importantly, other companies were interested in having him critique their onboarding processes, too. Since posting the LessAccounting critique, Hulick has published dozens of such "teardowns," consulted for companies like Mailchimp, WordPress and the Khan Academy, and published a book called The Elements of User Onboarding.
Hulick might be the only consultant currently focused exclusively on user onboarding, as opposed to a bigger view of user experience or customer retention, but it's an increasingly important part of how companies think about designing and marketing their products, says Sean Ellis, a former marketer for companies like Dropbox and KISSmetrics, and the co-founder of customer feedback company Qualaroo. He says that though companies have been struggling with onboarding issues for years, they're only just beginning to emphasize it in their design.
"I think it's way under the radar still," he says. "Companies don't spend nearly enough time on it."
Hulick's philosophy of user onboarding is simple. "People don't buy products, they buy better versions of themselves," he says, sounding more than a little like Don Draper, despite his long beard and casual attire. For example, a team thinking about buying a project management tool doesn't want a project management tool. They want to be a well organized team that does good work and finishes it on time. The job of the company selling the tool, then, is to enable the team reach that goal. Helping people actually get the result you've advertised is user onboarding in a nutshell.
That may sound obvious, but Mara Zepeda, co-founder of the web-based community platform Switchboard, which Hulick advises, says that it's something too few startup founders think about. "A lot of his philosophy involves this Socratic method of asking questions," she says.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when onboarding, Hulick says, is getting in a new user's way when they're trying to get started. Those early minutes or hours when someone has first signed up are when they have the most momentum. "Someone has been thinking about signing up for your product, and some sort of event has happened and they want to use it," he explains. "They're in go mode."
The common practice of forcing users to walk through a tutorial immediately after signing up, before they have a chance to explore the product themselves, is an example of breaking that momentum. And in addition to getting in the user's way, it doesn't actually help them learn the product. "You're also essentially trying to get them to learn through rote memory by showing them instead of having them learn by doing," he says.
Instead, he prefers progress trackers that recommend specific features to explore or tasks to complete. LinkedIn's "profile strength" meter, which displays your progress towards completely filling out your profile, is an example. He's also a big fan of examples, such as the empty projects that populate the accounts of new users of the project management application Basecamp, which can help them get a sense of what they can do with a tool and how to use it.
Also helpful: simply telling customers why they should do something. For example, Zepeda says that telling Switchboard users that they are twice as likely to succeed on the site if they upload a photo made uses far more likely to do so.
Ultimately, though, what a company does or doesn't do should be determined by data on how effective it is. In some cases, a tutorial might actually be better than a progress tracker. "I always defer to the data," he says.
It's hard to dismiss the importance of user onboarding if you've ever struggled to understand how to use a new app or web-based service. But is it actually new, or just one part of a broader field, such as usability, user experience design, or the nascent growth hacking movement, which focuses on using data-driven experimentation to improve metrics such as new sign-ups and retention?
Hulick doesn't seem interested in the question. For him, it's just the work that matters. But Ellis, who coined the term "growth hacker" while working at Dropbox, thinks of onboarding as a part of growth hacking. Zepeda, on the other hand, sees it as a fundamentally distinct field. "User onboarding focuses on the quality of the user experience, not the quantity of users that you sign up," she says.
Like many of the new fields we've written about in "Is This A Real Job?," such as customer success management and growth hacking, user onboarding is defined by its cross-functionality. While a usability tester or user experience designer might be confined to the product development team, Hulick's work spans both marketing and product development.
Because it's such a new field, there's no direct route into user onboarding as a career. Hulick started out as a web developer, both writing code and doing graphic design. But he was frusterated by the number of usability problems he'd encounter while working on client project. "Often it was too late to do anything about them," he says. "So I wanted to come into the process earlier on."
That led him into a career in user experience design. But two questions kept him up at night: "How do I know that I'm getting better as a designer?" and "How do I know I'm actually making the experience better for the customers, as opposed to getting better at getting people to listen to me?"
So he took a customer success job at the cloud computing management company >Cloudability, which helped shape his design philosophy and gave him more of a background in data-driven research. His consulting practice largely grew out of what he learned in customer success and his background in design.
To learn more about onboarding, Hulick recommends looking at game design literature, in addition to his own book. He says that although there's decades of research into computer usability, not much of it is focused on onboarding. But game designers have wrestled with teaching people the mechanics of their games -- and keeping them coming back for more -- for years.
As for those simply trying to improve the onboarding of their own products, Hulick says to wait until after you've launched. "I usually say if it's early in the product life, you should be doing it personally," he says. "You see what people want to do, where they're getting stumped."
