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State of SaaS Product Onboarding
- jedimastert 7y agoFun and slightly related, useronboard.com maintains a list of first time onboarding experiences of various websites with great commentary.<https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/> https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/>
- pulkitsh1234 7y agoWhat a great resource! Thanks for sharing this, I wish we had this handy at my previous workplace when we were redesigning/rethinking our onboarding process. I/We wasted a lot of hours in meetings and discussions in trying to think of things from scratch.
- samuelhulick 7y agoThank you for sharing this! I made those teardowns, and it's awesome to see people getting use out of them. :)
- chrispauley 7y ago> Well, if you use something called a "sniper link", you might make your users' lives easier. Simply go to your inbox and run a search that displays your confirmation email. Then copy that link, and use that on your confirmation page. Then your users will be directed straight to the actual email. This saves them time, and improves the overall user experience. Never heard of this before, I'm assuming it means generate a link to a search which will show the confirmation email based on the domain of the email address. This will likely not work for anyone using a work email unless you do some snooping on the DNS for that domain (sorry B2B).
- Geee 7y agoIt seems that the term comes from here https://growth.design/case-studies/trello-user-onboarding/ https://growth.design/case-studies/trello-user-onboarding/ and it means that you can add search parameters in the link, e.g. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3A%40trello.com+in%3Aanywhere https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3A%40trello.co...
- fbelzile 7y agoThat actually sounds like a cool SaaS business idea on it's own. Create an API to convert email addresses like example@gmail.com to links with custom search parameters like so: hxxps://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3Aexample.com+subject%3AComplete+Registration+in%3Aanywhere
- ryanjm33 7y agoThe problem with this approach is that you assume the user only has one email address signed in. They might have `/u/1/` as their personal email used on your website. This could cause more confusion than help since this isn't common practice. (Plus you are assuming gmail.)
- ai_growth 7y agoIt would be interesting to see video statistics broken down by the country from which the website is operated. It could be that the percentage of sites that use videos is so low because many of the sites are from countries where English is not their first language thus it is hard for them to create videos in English.
- Matticus_Rex 7y agoThe product I work on has the opposite problem -- our team speaks English and French (mostly US-based), but a minority of our users have either of those as a first language. Our product is in twelve languages, and most of our users seem to hate video subtitles, so everything has to be text. The product is too complex to do meaningful video without spoken or written language, which makes onboarding design incredibly tough.
- markdown 7y agoNow I'm really curious about your product. Care to share a link?
- Matticus_Rex 7y agohttps://www.glassfrog.com/ https://www.glassfrog.com/ SaaS for the Holacracy niche.
- mooktakim 7y agoI know this page visually looks amazing, but it was really hard for me to read the content. Weird layout and huge font sizes.
- Cenk 7y ago> You might think it's common courtesy to greet users who are new to your product. However, we found that a massive 40% of SaaS products didn't greet us with some form of welcome screen. > That means two-fifths of the software we tested didn't acknowledge us at all. That's a lot of alienated users. Am I the only one that doesn’t like welcome screens and closes them immediately? Just let me get to work
- aantix 7y agoAgree, there’s a certain art to getting it right and most just come off as pandering. Sort of like the testimonial sections - rarely do they feel authentic. Compliments so sweet that they taste disgusting.
- mrhappyunhappy 7y agoIt’s funny how we know testimonials are hand picked but still get influenced by them, even if they don’t feel authentic. Those star ratings must act as dopamine hits or something.
- aantix 7y agoI think the only time I'm swayed anymore is if they seem to reveal an authentic self. E.g. "I figured this was yet another half-baked project management application, but this surprised me." -- Customer #1
- gk1 7y agoMakes me wonder how much of this is based on experiment data. I’ve seen teams spend weeks on well crafted, thought-out welcome messages and walkthroughs, only to find (through analytics) that most users just X out of the walkthrough right away.
- jmngomes 7y agoThis is actually something that I'm missing in this analysis: walkthroughs and greeting messages are presented as a "must have", but unlike other conclusions in the report, I didn't see any data supporting these assumptions.
- thehodge 7y agoInteractive Walkthrough - That's why we were a little surprised that only 24% of SaaS products included one. - We don't have one because they are a lot of work! Working on a SaaS is a constant juggle of priorities and I don't see an Interactive Walkthrough being that high on the list for us.
- kamranahmedse 7y agoA bit off-topic but I made https://github.com/kamranahmedse/driver.js https://github.com/kamranahmedse/driver.js an MIT licensed library for onboarding your users.
- dayvough 7y agoI'll say the video game industry has more to teach us about onboarding than other industries will.
- crtlaltdel 7y agoabsolutely. not just onboarding, but in-app help/references. it is dispiriting to get kicked out to some faq site.
- veeralpatel979 7y agoHave you heard of the email startup Superhuman (http://superhuman.co/ http://superhuman.co/)? To use Superhuman, you need to join the waiting list and have one of their team members go through a 30 minute onboarding call with you. Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra has said many times that he's modeled the user experience for Superhuman after video game design. Note that this isn't the same as gamification. He views the onboarding for Superhuman as a "tutorial" level in a game, while getting to Inbox Zero is a reward and referring other people is the equivalent of playing with other people. Controversially, he says that he doesn't care what people want or need, but obsesses over how they feel. People don't need video games after all; they operate as entertainment. I'd highly recommend watching a talk or two of his on YouTube if you're interested in his thoughts on the relationship between video game and product design.
- aytekin 7y agoMake your product so good that it doesn’t need any annoying walkthroughs, tips or checklists. How? User testing, full story, user interviews, detailed product metrics, continuous improvements and giving your designers a lot of power.
- jedberg 7y agoThat's a nice goal, but not realistic, especially for a lot of B2B products. They're just too complicated to understand all the functionality right off the bat. Sometimes I really appreciate a good walkthrough.
- veeralpatel979 7y agoHow would this work for something like Photoshop? Or is that an edge case?
- pc86 7y agohttps://drive.google.com/file/d/103FI07J_lwXwbiqPlEMbQb3B_Umv5e9F/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/103FI07J_lwXwbiqPlEMbQb3B_Um... for anyone who doesn't want to make up a fake email to get the graphic.
- lowdose 7y agoThanks for this!
- gremlinsinc 7y agoAlso created some notes/takeaways in markdown (specifically for Joplin) --if you use joplin works great, but you'll need to fix internal links by downloading the infographic above and attaching it. https://gist.github.com/patrickcurl/2c4386ec7cea7bfd07b18858cd27e8e7 https://gist.github.com/patrickcurl/2c4386ec7cea7bfd07b18858... edit: I'm creating a knowledge source of all I can about SaaS to help me organize/stay on focus when I develop my next side project.
- lowdose 7y agoDoes anyone keep a record of all active SaaS offerings?
- social_quotient 7y agothis is not ALL but it is handy https://www.saas1000.com/ https://www.saas1000.com/ https://golden.com/list-of-software-as-a-service-companies/1 https://golden.com/list-of-software-as-a-service-companies/1 (these guys have a restful api which can be easy to mess with to get raw data) https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/saas-companies-4f45 https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/saas-companies-4f45 (needs an account but is handy for research and data dumps)
- lowdose 7y agoThnx!
- ycombonator 7y ago> sniper link I didn't quite understand
- cm2012 7y agoOne interesting thing is that money invested into a good onboarding flow is money saved by saving salespeople's time. Companies with minimal onboarding flows need a very active sales force to actually close b2b customers. You need some sales regardless, especially for closing big companies, but you need less with solid onboarding. Source: I've worked with the marketing teams of 15+ b2b SaaS companies (https://twitter.com/kevinwlordbarry/status/1222261672636710913?s=20 https://twitter.com/kevinwlordbarry/status/12222616726367109...)
- mikesabat 7y agoPlease expand on the logic here? Do you mean for low $$$ products, if users can onboard themselves they won't need to talk to sales?
- cm2012 7y agoYep. Basically, business owners are super busy. They see your ad or a mention of you, Google you and sign-up in the form. But - they only become paying customers if they take the time to actually use/test your product in the trial/freemium period. Really good automated onboarding can get them to actually set the product up for their business. Otherwise you need sales reps to walk them through it which is time consuming.
- ehfeng 7y agoSpending engineering time to save sales time is only viable at very sales-oriented but lower ACV products and even in that case, onboarding is generally focused on very core product functionality. Because sales deals have to be >$10,000 ACV to be worth it for the business, sales generally spends it time on C-suite focused features (SSO integration, security controls, auditing). Not to negate your point: having a good onboarding helps sales, in the same way it helps customer support. But in practice, I wouldn't use that argument to measure whether or not the onboarding flow was doing it job. Nor should the sales team be able to blame the onboarding flow for low quality leads. Money invested in a good onboarding flow should pay off in onboarding/engagement.
- 4ndrewl 7y agoProblem with this is that it doesn't take into account the profitability of the SaaS. Meaningless saying that x% of SaaSs don't have feature y, when there's no indication that implementing feature y demonstrably drives increase profit.
- danjc 7y agoIn B2B, we’ve found that friction in the form of additional signup questions for a trial account helps filter out poor quality prospects. For reference most of our subscriptions are > $1000/mo - different demographic to what this article seems to have in mind.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoThis was my thought. The "awesome frictionless onboarding experience" may get a lot of trial users, but we want the people who need this product and will pay for it. So making the onboarding with some friction will just weed out the triallers. We'll get less trial users, but a higher conversion to paid.