First impressions last a lifetime. This also applies to apps. When a user opens your app for the first time, the following steps that are taken can mean the difference between a loyal user or someone who deletes the app right away. In other words, the onboarding experience of a new user is crucial. In this blog post we're going to look at onboarding do's and don'ts, how you measure results from this and how we helped BabyManager improve their onboarding experience.
The Do's and Don'ts
When creating a concept for your app, the Unique Selling Point (USP) is one of the first things that needs to be discussed. What makes your app unique? And what is the value of this. A user will ask themselves the same thing. After all, they were looking for something and ended up at your app. It's up to you to convince them during onboarding. This is how we managed to optimize the experience of BabyManager app users. By offering users a free trial period for premium features already during the onboarding process without making it overly obvious. Subtly processed in the screens you see after opening the app for the first time.
So, get to the point and, for example, make creating an account not too lengthy a process, you could even give the option to skip it entirely. You want to keep the user's attention engaged. A good tip is also to incorporate a progress indicator in the onboarding journey. This allows the user to see exactly how many steps they still need to take before they can get going with the app.
To further build on this, it is also important to keep text relatively short. Use short, easily scannable sentences when it comes to instructions. Then also mainly use illustrations and short videos to show complicated features of your app. It's also best to postpone introducing notifications and/or permissions to use certain functions of the device. You can try to make the flow of this as user-friendly as possible too.
Take, for example, an app with which you can edit photos, for the user allowing camera use for the app sounds logical from the start already. Think carefully about how you can make this logical, so that no friction arises during onboarding.
Enter the Metrics
You've gone through all the steps and ensured optimal flow in your onboarding process. But how do you now measure the effectiveness of your onboarding process or the adjustments you make to it? Below is the most valuable data you can track and how.
Retention rate: is leading in this. Ultimately you want as many users as possible to actually keep coming back to your app. Does the percentage go up after an adjustment in your onboarding flow? Then this could be related to it. It is therefore also important that you can trace every 'step' in your app. This way you know when users leave the app and you can make adjustments on pages where that happens a lot.
Time to Value (TTV)
Feature Adoption Rate
Completion Rate
Engagement Rate
Activation Rate
