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

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

We are living in an era of product-led growth (PLG). This popular growth strategy relies on the actual product experience in driving acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention. What this means is less reliance on people booking demos, downloading whitepapers, and speaking with sales representatives. Today, most products strive to provide value to their customers or users in self-service mode.

The rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications has made it easier for customers to switch to a different product. Therefore, if customers don’t immediately see the value of your product, they’re likely to abandon it and move on to something else. Read More