Column: The Onboarding Experience

For an experienced professional who, like me, transitioned from marketing to User Experience, user onboarding is one of the most crucial aspects of both Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience. A well-designed user-onboarding process helps users understand a product’s value proposition, learn how to use it effectively, and achieve their desired outcomes quickly and easily. This leads to a positive customer experience because users feel confident and successful in using the product. Plus, a good onboarding process can help to improve a product’s user experience by identifying and addressing any painpoints or usability issues that people may experience.

Therefore, it’s strange to see how onboarding remains an afterthought for most product or UX teams. Working on the HSBC’s world-class account-opening team, focusing on onboarding, opened up new horizons for my thinking about crafting compelling user onboarding experiences and what this means for product teams, customers, and users. I had not previously thought that an onboarding experience could provide a strategic lever for the success of a digital product and play a key role in customer adoption as well as retention. Read More

In the user onboarding realm, landing pages are crucial elements of the pre-signup experience and the starting point for most onboarding journeys. Visiting such a landing page is the equivalent of new prospects visiting your shop to see what you offer, how credible you are, and what you can do for them.

However, many startups treat these landing pages as an afterthought. Often, they create templated landing pages or just mimic their competitors, negatively impacting both their acquisition costs and activation metrics, especially if they are investing in driving traffic to these pages.

Creating an effective landing page requires a combination of conversion rate optimization (CRO), optimizing your onboarding user experience, and creating a well-crafted user journey through consistent testing and experimentation. Read More

People who create products often talk about two important ideas: the Aha! moment and user activation. While these ideas might seem very similar at first, they happen at different times and have two different results. In this article, I’ll explain what these ideas mean, why they are important, and provide some tips for making users like, adopt, and engage with your product more.

What Is an Aha! Moment?

An Aha! moment occurs when someone suddenly sees how useful and amazing a product is. They might think, “Wow, this is great! I really like this!” It’s an emotional response to discovering something new that could change their life. Read More