When you're building user onboarding for the very first time, it seems natural to start with rich feature tours.
But experience tells us it's much more efficient to start with the less complex touchpoints instead. Why? Beause you'll see the impact on your KPIs faster.
Follow this checklist to get started in the right direction. You don't have to create all the touchpoints in one go, it's fine to spread it over few days. But we advice you to build all of them in order to see their compound effect on adoption KPIs .
- Welcome Tour
- Hints & tooltips
- Feedback widget
- Life Ring Button
- Feature Tours
If you want to launch product adoption flows on staging first, check this guide.
The purpose of the Welcome Tour is to welcome new users, explain the benefits of your application and introduce its main features. Think of it as an overview rather than a deep dive. That's what Feature Tour is for.
The advantage of hints is, that they are always accessible. They're the perfect self-help tool because the user can engage with them when they need it. The information that's delivered is therefore highly contextual.
Start by creating hints for places where the user is likely to need more information.
Setting up the Feedback widget takes less than 10 minutes and your users will be able to send you not only texts but also screenshots and videos. You can automatically forward these messages to your help desk.
Life Ring Button is the single point of contact for everything your customer needs. Add Tours so you users can replay them, add links to your support documentation, link your Youtube or your meeting scheduler.
Integrate any 3rd party chat widget so users have a single point of contact for all things support.
Feature Tours are describing a specific part of the application in a step-by-step manner. Each of your killer features deserves a tour. In some cases, even the app setup requires a guided walkthrough. Especially if it's a process that takes multiple steps to complete.
In any case, start with one feature, make the tour work, and only then move on to the next feature.
To sum it up: Hints are super-efficient and often overlooked feature, Feedback widget and Life Ring Button provide great service for your users and their set-up takes less than 10 minutes. As regards the Tours, the best practice is to create a Welcome tour first, then start adding Feature tours which are teaching your user how to use your app.
