Digital Transformation and Digital Adoption How to craft your most powerful user onboarding experienceHow to craft your most powerful user onboarding experience
When it comes to onboarding new users—be they your customers or employees—in new software, you’ll know that the onboarding process is what defines how users interact and ultimately adopt (or not!) the application.
Now, what we want to know is: Are you still onboarding users the “old school” way? As in, are you still using videos, PDF manuals, how-to documents, or even handbooks?
It’s okay if you are because it means you at least have an onboarding process in place! But what if we told you there was a much better, much faster, much easier (much everything) way to onboard users in software?
Curious? We know you are ????.That’s why we prepared this post, just for you!
So let’s get to it. Here’s how you can perfect the user onboarding experience with a little something called interactive guides!
Table of Contents
Five reasons why interactive guides will guarantee the perfect onboarding experience
Wait, what are interactive guides?
Okay, hold up! You might be wondering at this point what interactive guides are. Well, it’s simple: Interactive guides are (you guessed it!) guides that lead users logically and step-by-step through all digital processes in any software. These guides, which provide just-enough and just-in-time information, appear onscreen and in real-time, helping the user learn-by-doing directly in their workflow. The guides are the main technology of digital adoption platforms, which are designed to maximize software adoption and make using software a delightful experience right from the start.
And how do they enhance the onboarding experience?
The way you do onboarding is about to change forever ????. This is how and why interactive guides significantly enhance the onboarding experience.
They eliminate the need for “old school” forms of onboarding.
Say goodbye to those long, tedious PDFs, handbooks, and yes, even videos! Interactive guides provide all the information the user needs at just the right time. No searching for instructions, no feeling overwhelmed by too much info. Everything the user needs to learn how to use the software is onscreen in bite-sized chunks of information.
They provide a synchronous learning experience.
Synchronicity can be a beautiful thing, and it’s no different when it comes to learning software by doing. With interactive guides, users never have to leave the application (the one they’re learning to navigate) to look for information (which disrupts their workflow). All users have to do is click through the interactive guides, step-by-step, until they achieve their goal. Easy!
They reduce time-to-value.
While we’re on the topic of time, interactive guides reveal the true value of an application immediately. Whether you’re offering a SaaS product to customers or you’ve just added new software to your stack that employees need to work with, interactive guides know how to “show off” any application! If you want to highlight the product’s best features and benefits, then the interactive guides will make that happen.
The first few hours (or even minutes) users spend in any new software are crucial. So you want to be sure that users see the value in what they’re using ASAP!
They significantly reduce the number of support requests.
A confused, frustrated, annoyed, or unproductive user is not what you want at all during the onboarding process (and beyond). And we’re sure you also don’t want your customer support or IT support teams overwhelmed trying to deal with support requests. With interactive guides, users can access them at any point via an onscreen Virtual Assistant. This means that contextual help is available whenever the user needs it, and there is no delay in getting this help.
And, most importantly, they make complexity simple.
When it comes to providing a solid onboarding experience, you want to make complex software simple. It’s not that complexity is a bad thing (some of the best software products are highly complex!), but the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your users, frustrate them, and leave them running for the hills (or another SaaS product). Interactive guides are essentially a form of microlearning. Everything happens logically in small steps with easy-to-digest information.
If you have specific onboarding tasks you want the user to complete, the interactive guides will break these tasks down so that the users can complete them (even the complex ones) in no time! In other words, you can convert these onboarding tasks into onboarding guides, which is essentially an automatic checklist of simple steps users need to follow to reach their goal (quickly).
Making using software simple. That’s our mission at Userlane!
Judging software by the onboarding experience
While the general recommendation is never to judge a book by its cover, it’s not necessarily the same for onboarding! The quality of your onboarding experience sets the stage for how customers or employees will work with a product.
Interactive guides (plus all the other notable features of digital adoption platforms ????) really do make learning and working with software a delightful experience, right from day one, guaranteeing that you will provide your users with their best onboarding experience to date!
Well, what are you waiting for? All you need to deliver an exceptional user experience and make learning software simple is just one click away! Schedule your free demo with us today, and let’s see what we can do for your customers and/or employees.
If you’d like a deep dive into the user onboarding experience, then you can download our comprehensive guide on this topic (it’s free, no opt-in required!).
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