You are a startup founder who has just spent $1,000 on digital ads. It’s money you can’t afford to risk in those critical first stages. Then, the campaign works. Your analytics show 100 curious visitors landing on your product’s website drawn in by your pitch. If even just 25 of them turn into customers, that spend will feel worth it, right?
At the end of the day, you check your numbers and see the bad news: out of 100 visitors 20 signed up. A whopping 80 percent of those pricey motivated visitors left without even trying your product. The problem? That awkward and messy sign-up form. It asks for too much, gives a terrible first impression, and ruins all the effort and money you spent to bring them in.
This situation isn’t rare. Many entrepreneurs face the same struggle. They pour their resources into filling the top of their funnel but lose loads of potential customers because the onboarding process at the bottom doesn’t work well. The frustrating part? Simple tweaks in the onboarding flow could have saved most of those missed conversions.
Startup founders fight for every new user—and face an even tougher battle to turn that user into a loyal customer. In the daily rush of launching features and trying growth tricks, it’s easy to miss one of your best chances to boost your business: making your onboarding smoother. For new startups where each interaction shapes your company’s future, a smooth onboarding experience can mean the difference between quick growth and users leaving in droves.
Here are five specific ways to fix your onboarding—each based on tried-and-true UX methods—that can help founders boost conversion rates while building a user-focused product from the start:
1. Make the Sign-Up Process Simple and Easy
Sign-up is where every user’s journey begins. This first touchpoint shapes how they’ll view your product. A complicated registration process creates unnecessary hurdles and can make users drop off . The aim should be to keep sign-ups straightforward and hassle-free.
Here’s how you can make it better:
• Keep Required Fields to a Minimum: Ask what you need from the start. Do you need their phone number, job role, or company size right away? not. You can always collect more details later after they’re engaged.
• Enable Single Sign-On (SSO): Let users sign up with one click using accounts they already use like Google, Apple, or Slack. This makes the process much faster and easier for them to handle. Companies such as Miro have used multiple SSO options to simplify logging in.
• Give Clear Instructions: Explain things using straightforward words and visuals. If a password needs to meet certain criteria, show those rules up front and offer real-time feedback as they type.
Keeping the first commitment small lowers the entry barrier. This helps users interact with your product . It raises the chances that they will stick with the onboarding process.
2. Customize the Onboarding Process
Using the same onboarding for everyone wastes potential. Users have different goals, needs, and skill levels. A general tour showing all features to all users often feels unimportant to most. Customization helps highlight how your product benefits each user.
How to improve this:
- Ask New Users : Use a short welcome survey to find out what users want to achieve with your product, like their main goal or “Job to be Done.” This helps you group them into segments and adjust their onboarding process.
- Offer Customized Help: After grouping users design specific onboarding steps to match their needs. You can do this with tailored tutorials, in-app tips, or personalized checklists. For instance, someone using a project management tool to handle a team’s tasks should have a different onboarding path than a freelancer managing their own tasks.
- Study Power Users’ Behaviors: Look at how your most active and engaged users interact with your app. Use that information to map out their successful paths. You can recreate these winning experiences for new users with similar needs to help them succeed on a proven route.
Customizing experiences helps users feel seen and lets them understand your product’s value more . Personalization has proven to boost results. For example, The Room grew its user activation rates by as much as 75% by using custom onboarding processes.
3. Drop Passive Product Tours and Try Interactive Walkthroughs
Old-school product tours often rely on click-heavy slideshows that explain every button and menu. These tours don’t work well. They feel boring, lack engagement, and flood users with more information than they can handle. People tend to grasp concepts better when they do something rather than just watch a demo.
How can you make this better?
• Use “Learning by Doing”: Instead of telling users about the features, create an interactive tour that takes them through important tasks step by step. This hands-on experience boosts both confidence and skills as they interact with the app.
• Highlight Key Actions: Focus your walkthrough on 2 to 5 crucial tasks that allow users to see the benefit of your product. This approach not shortens the time it takes to get started but also makes learning more rewarding.
- Offer Contextual Help: Use in-app pop-ups or hints to guide users right when they need help. Avoid dumping all the details upfront.
Switching from a passive tour to an interactive, task-based guide helps users learn by doing. Research supports this. Attention Insight, for instance, saw user activation rates jump by 47% after replacing their usual product tour with a hands-on walkthrough.
4. Use Checklists and Progress Indicators
Even with a streamlined process, onboarding can feel confusing or aimless. To keep users engaged, they need to see progress and know where they’re headed. Adding progress bars and checklists gives them structure and boosts their confidence.
How to fix it:
- Create Onboarding Checklists: Breaking the process into smaller clear steps helps users understand what to set up. A checklist gives them an easy-to-follow path and keeps them motivated when they see progress by checking items off. To make it work best, highlight the main tasks that guide users toward activation.
- Add Visual Progress Indicators: Progress bars give users a quick clear picture of how much they’ve done and how much remains. Seeing this simple visual can boost motivation and push them to finish what they started.
5. Provide Self-Service Options Alongside Proactive Support
Even the best onboarding systems leave users with questions. If they struggle to find answers fast, they might get annoyed and stop using your service. Depending on a support team to solve every issue can slow things down and isn’t an efficient approach.
Steps to address this:
- Build an In-App Resource Center: Set up one main place in your app to help users get answers on their own. Make sure this support hub is simple to find and offers tools like how-to guides, videos, FAQs, and a searchable knowledge section.
- Let Users Revisit Onboarding Tools: Give users the option to go back to product tours or onboarding steps whenever they want. Onboarding is not something that happens once; users often need it as they learn new features over time.
- Bring Attention to Your Help Center: Don’t just add a resource hub—make sure users notice it. Airtable includes an introduction to its help center during the first onboarding walkthrough so people learn right away how to find their own help.
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