What's the trick to creating onboarding for B2B SaaS companies? 👀
I get asked this all the time. So here's a 30-second rundown of what's worked for me (and my clients at Built for Mars).
— The challenges 😓 —
1. You (probably) have too many features.
2. Those features overlap different user types. Not everyone needs everything.
3. You need people to configure their account efficiently, but they don't read the onboarding prompts, and then get confused.
4. You don't have the capacity to create totally custom onboarding flows for every user type, or scenario.
5. You're still building features.
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— This manifests as... 😮 —
1. You throw together some "point and show" onboarding slides, which everyone ignores because they're excited to try your product.
2. Your roadmap is 80% new features and more complexity.
3. You have to be vague (due to lack of customisation), and so your product ends up feeling like it suits nobody perfectly.
4. Smaller SaaS companies that are more niched have a better "value fit" for that cohort of users—you start to feel bloated.
5. You can't remove features, because you have paying users who like them.
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— 5 good strategies 🙌 —
[To be clear, there's no quick fix. Sorry.]
1. Work on creating a full-team culture of fixing issues, optimising and refining, in addition to creating new stuff. I aim for about 50/50. Sometimes this means a dedicated team / person.
Jeff Bezos said: 💬
"There are tiny customer experience deficiencies, and we call them papercuts. The teams working on the big issues never get to papercuts. So you need special teams working on them."
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2. You need to try using your own product more. When was the last time you pretended to be a new user, and actually configured one of these products?
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3. Building a better user experience usually means removing, hiding and deprioritising features you love. It's one of the hardest bits (honestly).
As an exercise, remove everything, and then add everything back in one by one. Which things are hard to justify now?
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4. You need to learn who your user is as quickly as possible (i.e., entry survey), what they're trying to achieve and then *actually* modify the experience they see, based on your most popular cohorts.
i.e., don't track data, say it's personalising their experience, and then do nothing with that data. Yeah, this is 90% of saas companies.
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5. Read this case study on Slack's onboarding—it shows how they used a few techniques to build 'effortless'.
https://lnkd.in/errS_A8f
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Bonus: to see a feed of other people's onboarding UX tricks, go here: 👇
https://lnkd.in/eaYJPaEx