If you’ve dealt with user onboarding, activation, or retention for your website, odds are you may have heard of or used the software Appcues. Typically Appcues specializes in user welcome tours, new feature announcements, or those oh-so-annoying yet oh-so-useful NPS surveys. (If you don’t know what a Net Promoter Score is yet, here you go. You’re welcome.)
Instead of the typical onboarding tours, Appcues is taking it a step further with the new Onboarding Checklists feature that has us impressed. As a veteran UX designer in SaaS, I’m usually leery of any new product that claims to do wonders for user onboarding/retention.
As we’ve looked through the inner workings of the onboarding checklists, our skepticism has turned into delight. And we’re not alone — this was recently the #3 “Product of the Day” on Product Hunt.
Rather than obnoxious pop-ups on your website, this gives the user the responsibility to complete the onboarding tasks at hand. Even though there are varying onboarding checklist tools out there, this is currently our favorite.
Here’s why:
1. The steps are backed by behavioral science.
This is the best part. The tool is built to encourage positive behaviors (activation) through a bias to completion, reward, and consistency.
2. It’s unobtrusive and unannoying.
Users don’t like to think they’re being manipulated into a new feature. (Looking at you, Facebook stories.) By allowing users to complete the onboarding process on their own time through a simple, unobtrusive UX, user loyalty is maximized while user frustration is minimized. Win-win.
3. You can segment checklists with different user bases.
By allowing to segment different types onboarding checklists, you’re allowed to make informed, data-driven decisions on the demographics of users more likely to complete certain portions of the checklist and alter as needed *swoon*.
Even though the new onboarding checklist feature is legit, you still need to do your homework in applying best practices to ensure it’s effective.
Make sure to know your user personas to segment properly, conduct user research, understand the most important steps, and make the checklist clear, concise, and rewarding. Need help with some UX best practices? This blog might help.
To test the user onboarding checklist, go to this site to register for a trial Appcues account. Starter accounts begin at $159/mo and up. #notanad
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