For the good or the bad, we learned how to live with digital technology, and accepted the fact that it can solve almost every problem in our life. Designers discovered a treasure box in the growing industry, and started overwhelming us with all sorts of apps whose use we can no longer postpone.
With all those apps in the stores, the ones developing apps should really start worrying about competition. Still, unique creation technicalities won’t be the biggest problem in it: it will be quality user onboarding.
Image source: Anastasiia Andriichuk
The first challenge is obviously to present the app to users and to motivate them to install it, but the work doesn’t finish there. There are many users who will read about your app, be impressed by it, install it, and never come back.
What determines the future success of your app is how users can launch it, and you have to make their welcoming process as painless as possible. If they like it, they will come back, and you certainly prefer that to letting them go for another one.
Image source: Ghani Pradita
The imperative duty is to work properly with your resources, and to put UX in the focus of your priorities from the very first moment.
Let us suggest few app onboarding best practices that can help you stop users from forgetting your app:
Keep it simple: if possible, remove sign up forms altogether
Following the rule of thumb, no prospective user arrives on the app with a defined intention to sign up and give access to his personal information, regardless of how easy you’ve made that. This may be a common practice with social networks, or certain really indispensible apps people use daily on their phone, but not with new services the user simply can live without.
Image source: Ramotion
And that’s exactly where your new app stands.
If a user lands on the app and sees an initial screen with a sign up form, he will immediately rethink his decision to use it, as it is always when sharing personal information. You’re still an unknown provider, and you should try to earn people’s trust instead of asking them to trust you from the first moment.
Trust, as such, has become a luxury with all suspicious content on the internet nowadays, so we better not even think what would happen if your app has too many information fields or improperly communicated special requests.
At the same time, the purpose of the app can play a decisive role, and you may be running exactly an app that doesn’t make sense without an account.
Even in such cases we recommend you to keep the ball down, and to make the signup form desirable, rather than compulsory. The users that want to connect with you and to share experience with fellow members will sync data even if you don’t ask them, so don’t push that hard.
The other problem is that logins can be tricky: they go to extreme nitpicky levels for a simple drop-off visit, which is exactly where 56% of users go away, but it is still the unfortunate truth of why the vast majority of apps don’t succeed today.
Image source: Balraj Chana
Your task here would be to optimize sign in-s and to retain users with simplicity. You should be gathering information quickly and seamlessly, and transferring users to the next step without them even noticing or becoming distracted.
In order to understand why it is essential to keep up with the rule, follow your personal example: do YOU have enough time to fill lengthy registration forms, and most of all – how does it make you feel? Not that relaxed, we believe.
As you can see, the ideal scenario is not to have a sign up form on the app at all. In case users have to register for it, make the process as painless as you can. Keep requirements short, comprehensive, and intuitive; and install inline validation, smart defaults, compliance bars, and other useful hacks that will spare you from having to ask annoying questions.
Image source: Anton Chandra
If you can, postpone sign up forms until they become completely unavoidable. A good idea would be to create a test drive version with limited functionality, and invite users to join the community just after they’ve used it.
The ultimate goal is to give users a pleasant first experience, so that they could estimate the value of your app and make a voluntary decision to share information with you.
Welcoming screens and walkthrough turns
Image source: Anton Chandra
The more useful real-time experience you include in the app, the better. Think of buying a TV, for instance: would you read the manual before it? Probably not, but what you’d certainly do is to plug it in, and start checking the buttons on the remote.
That’s how apps work too: the digital equivalents of user manuals are the so-called walkthrough routes which can really help users familiarize with app. The problem with some of them is that they are obligatory in order for users to be allowed to access the app. How do you think this affects the overall experience?
Image source: Ionut Zamfir
If possible, free users from compulsory tutorials, and let them look for help just in case they need it. If your navigation pattern is intuitive, they won’t even have to use to tutorial at all. Nobody likes being annoyed with unsolicited help, so don’t interrupt their work unless you really need to.
Finally, think of alternative ways to provide help, and keep them somewhere on the side. In today’s world, users are already familiar with all sorts of apps and web services, and they’re only looking for a simple team kind enough to leave them finish their job.
Permissions
Image source: Iris Atalay
Push notifications are among the most powerful tools you could use to re-engage users, but you need to handle them with care. The biggest problem you’re about to face is the unpleasant experience most users have from other applications: most of the time, they’re asked to give permission immediately upon download, before they’ve even managed to log in.
This might be the trickiest part of the onboarding process, because you are risking annoying users with constant and misplaced permission requirements, as a consequence of which they will think that their experience is ruined. They may even get so frustrated that they will leave the app altogether, and that’s not exactly what you want.
Image source: Alexander Zaytsev
Think about it first: does the app really require access to that information? If the matter is urgent, go for it, but offer something in return. Most users will be delighted to allow access against something valuable, as the right to use an additional technical operation.
In order to make users trust you and to enable push notifications is to wait for the very deadline to ask for permissions. The user needs to know exactly how you’ll be pushing those notifications, and what you expect to gain from it. The more they know the higher opt-rates you’re about to record.
Final thoughts
Image source: Alexey Izotov
Our most common mistake is putting obstacles to users trying out our service/app for the first time. Almost nobody visits for an exhaustive research – they want a fast spin around it, and we chase them away with complications.
Most of the time, it is because we’re too anxious to improve our metrics and to achieve our business goal, and we let users pass without considering their needs.
The effectiveness of our users’ initial experience depends only on the manner in which we fragment and disclose information, and we have to do our best to make the experience so attractive that users would be glad to repeat it.
Image source: Prakhar Neel Sharma
Pleasant onboarding is not rocket science after all, and the tips mentioned in this article are very likely to make it happen.
Whatever you do, take care of users first. Learn what they like, and use quantitative methods (testing and optimization, for instance) and qualitative research to develop an effective strategy.
