The First Industry Study and 10 Insights from Onboarding Report
The research of 80+ companies (Notion, Coda, HubSpot, and more) + how it all started 🖤
This is how it all started 6 months ago…
I left Miro in September 2023 after working on an incredible product for 6+ years. In October, I took time off to travel across Europe with my best friend whom I haven’t seen for almost 2 years —
We took a car and spent 2 weeks without any plan — riding wherever the eyes took us. We passed through Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, and reflected on 5 years we worked together and what we’d like to envision in the future.
One story that we both remembered: while we were still in our 2nd year at Miro, we had an idea of helping others with User Onboarding. For some reason, we had so much passion for doing that, so instead of watching Netflix shows in the late evenings we joked that we watch Slack onboarding recordings 😅
In parallel, the extended time off and that trip took me to deeper considerations — What do I enjoy? What kind of value I can deliver?
These thoughts brought me to this:
1. I’m very excited about research
2. I find a lot of pleasure in visualizing insights
3. And there’s one theme I’ve been passionate about for years. Where I can combine both PLG and UX I truly love 💜
Guess what was that theme? 😉 Yes, User Onboarding.
After coming back from this trip, we finalized our first industry research project, surveyed 80+ companies, and created a 20+ page report that over 2000 people downloaded.
We talked to many people who found the report useful, and many folks mentioned that they'd like to get some support from us to improve this experience. We decided to produce that help in a format that can help more people and created the course on the topic of Self-Serve Onboarding.
So here I am today:
→ Launching the first course next week
→ Maintaining the passion in what I'm doing day-to-day
→ Writing this story late in the evening, but truly enjoying this ride 🚀
By the way, if you’re interested in Self-serve Onboarding course that starts on the 15th of April, there’s a last chance to join this cohort 👇
Last call for the Onboarding course: registrations close on 14th April, 9 pm CET ⏰
Get 10+ frameworks to improve your onboarding and activation, practice on 2 projects connected to your ongoing product work, and receive personalized feedback on your ideas directly from us. Starts on the 15th of April.
Anyways, today’s newsletter is about getting back to the past and sharing the 10 key insights from the massive industry research that just 2 of us ran 6 months ago. Let’s see what we have found.
🤓 Who is the report useful for:
Product Managers
Product Designers
Product Marketing Managers
Product Analysts
CEO and Founders
Growth teams in both B2B and B2C Products
🙌 Who have participated:
80+ product companies, including Product Managers, Product Designers, and Growth Leaders from companies like:
🎯 How you can use it?
Share with your product team to reflect on user onboarding in your product;
Use insights and learnings to grow your product by improving the onboarding journey;
Get inspired by the best products on the market;
Learn how to measure user onboarding success.
👉 Insight 1. Most users drop off before getting to the Activation stage.
Onboarding is challenging for both B2B and B2C. Most users drop off before getting to the Activation stage. To drive Activation you need to create a long-term onboarding journey, not just tutorials for the first session.
One of the biggest misunderstandings is treating onboarding as just the first session. It’s a holistic journey, and your team needs to define an Activation journey and polish the experience on different steps (yes, Emails as well).
👉 Insight 2. Over 60% of companies are still relying on step-by-step tutorials.
Users have different mental models and learning styles. So it is crucial to provide a variety of different learning materials, personalized onboarding, and education to deliver value to various user segments.
👉 Insight 3. More onboarding content can lead to a decrease in the Activation metric.
It’s quite hard to find the balance of educational materials: sometimes companies don’t have any proper education at all, but sometimes adding more content for complex enterprise SaaS doesn’t lead to a positive impact on Activation. We proved that with this insight that the Design Leader from HubSpot shared with us:
Our experiments are not always successful, but we always learn something from them. We ran an experiment that led to an increase in engagement with onboarding discovery content but led to a decrease in activation (which was counterintuitive). We learned that potential customers who were trying out the platform were using up their allocated time reading through it, and not enough time using the actual product.
Ronan Spratt
Senior Design Manager Growth, HubSpot
👉 Insight 4. Too complex interface is the #1 problem for B2B self-serve onboarding.
We asked participants: What are the primary user problems that you uncovered when addressing user onboarding?
Some challenges were common, while some user problems for B2B and B2C are quite different. Too complex interface was the #1 problem for B2B self-serve onboarding. Trying to balance the complexity of the interface and education materials, so the users can self-serve themselves. If the product is not self-servable, it can be very difficult to enable PLG motion.
Learn about problems for B2C and get Eventbrite’s perspective in a full report.
👉 Insight 5. “Human touch” onboarding led to better success for complex B2B.
More complex B2B SaaS products require deeper onboarding that is sometimes harder to deliver through a pure Self-service approach. In my previous article I already shared how complex products like Intercom is approaching User Onboarding for their variety of use cases.
However, I also noticed a trend of combining Self-serve and Human-touch onboarding for more complex products. For example, Mailchimp shows the trigger to set up a 1:1 onboarding call with a specialist above a powerful checklist.
👉 Insight 6. Lack of value communication is learning from most failed experiments.
The need to communicate the product’s value better by connecting CTAs with desired outcomes and showing the anticipated value upfront with product visuals. It’s important to communicate that value consistently across all the steps through Setup, Aha, and Habit moments. In a full report, we describe 4 patterns from unsuccessful experiments that we’ve noticed.
👉 Insight 7. Companies are struggling with collecting data and defining opportunities.
When start to measure your activation steps, always start from defining the last step — habit moment. Check its correlation and causation with LR retention and CR to paid and then go to Aha and Set up moments. It’s quite hard to define a proper Activation metric, and only 30% of participants mentioned that they used this metric to measure the success of user onboarding.
👉 Insight 8. Continuous experimentation is a must-have for onboarding success.
This one will be quite simple — Never stop after the first iteration.
Iterate based on user feedback and behavior, not only data. Once you get the first results, dive into the behavioral data post-analysis to map learnings, and solution ideas for iterations. And always run a second iteration.
👉 Insight 9. TOP products with the best user onboarding based on responses.
We surveyed our participants and requested them to identify products with the best user onboarding experiences. Their responses yielded the following list of B2B and B2C products:
Tip ✨ Review onboarding flows from these products. Split the list between PM and Designer to uncover improvements faster. Repeat the regular reference check at least once a quarter.
👉 Insight 10 — TOP tools that can help with user onboarding.
This toolset can help you get the most out of analyzing the onboarding experience — such as setting no-code onboarding, enabling personalization, or even powerful unmoderated user research.
Appcues to set up no-code onboarding;
FullStory to watch users’ onboarding sessions;
UserTesting to find relevant users for usability testing.
This post is supported by Appcues — the platform that helps you design, deploy, and test captivating onboarding experiences.
Appcues created the Product Adoption Academy to help you level up your product adoption, and you can use it for free. Check out the template that I created to help companies connect growth hypotheses with behavioral patterns to uncover meaningful improvements. Find an example of Dropbox Onboarding inside and apply it to review any growth flows.
This is all for today, dear reader 💜
It’s been an amazing adventure that reminded me about the things I truly love — discovering insights, researching complex problems, and bringing these insights back to people in the form of Advising, Coaching, and this long-lasting Report format.
I didn’t expect that it would lead to creating the Self-serve Onboarding course that starts already in 3 days. If you’d like to get a fresh perspective on your User Onboarding from me, join this cohort with a 15% discount.
Otherwise, see you next time with a new study and a bunch of industry insights (that I’m already preparing 🧑🍳)