Stop Losing Customers: How Self-Serve Onboarding Can Improve User Adoption

4 min readMay 22, 2023

As a business owner, have you ever struggled with the user onboarding process that is overly complicated and time-consuming? Do you find that your customers are dropping off before they even have a chance to see the true value of your product? If you’re nodding your head in agreement, then self-serve onboarding might just be the solution you need!

Introduction

The purpose of onboarding is to walk new users through your product so that they can get started using it quickly and easily.

You want to make sure your users are getting everything they need from the start, but you also don’t want to overwhelm them with information or features that aren’t relevant at first glance.

The right onboarding experience will help your product be adopted by more users and make them feel confident in their decision to use it.

The right onboarding experience can help your product get adopted.

Onboarding is the first experience users have with your product. It’s also a crucial part of user experience, as it allows you to introduce the value of your product in an organic way that encourages adoption.

If you’re building an app or SaaS tool, onboarding can be an opportunity to show off everything it can do–even if it might seem like overkill for someone who just signed up for a basic account.

For example, if someone signs up for Basecamp (a project management tool), they may not realize how powerful its collaboration features are until they see them demonstrated during onboarding or by someone else in their company who already uses Basecamp regularly.

In fact, companies like Dropbox have made this one of their key differentiators: The company focuses heavily on making sure new users get value out of their free tier right away by showing them how they can use Dropbox to share files and folders easily with colleagues or friends through email links provided directly in the welcome email sent after signup.

It’s important to know what users expect when they’re first getting started.

If you’re building a product, you have to know what your users expect when they’re first getting started. You can’t just guess or assume, you have to study the user experience and find out what they want from your product.

There are a few things that will help you with this:

Understand the user’s journey from beginning to end, including any common pitfalls and roadblocks (like bad onboarding) that might get in their way along the way
Find out how much time people spend on each step of their journey, as well as whether there are any points where they tend to drop off entirely

You need to find the right balance between ease of use and guiding users through the journey.

When you’re designing your product’s onboarding, you need to find the right balance between ease of use and guiding users through the journey.

Make sure users don’t get lost
Don’t make it too complicated, but don’t make it too simple either
Don’t overwhelm them with information (remember, they haven’t seen this before!)
Don’t let them get stuck in one section for too long if they don’t understand what to do next.

Don’t make it too complicated.

The goal of onboarding is to help users get familiar with your product, so don’t make it too complicated. Keep in mind that users will have different levels of experience with the product and different needs, so keep your onboarding process simple by using clear language and design elements that can be easily navigated.

For example, if you’re building an app for people who have never used one before (like me), then your onboarding should focus on teaching them how to use the app rather than explaining all its features or showing them what they could do with it down the road.

You can also use visual cues like buttons or arrows to guide users through each step–this helps keep them engaged in learning how things work instead of getting lost in an overwhelming amount of information at once!

Onboarding is a chance for you to show off your product’s benefits.

Your product’s onboarding is a chance for you to show off its benefits.

Onboarding is the first experience a user has with your product, so it’s important that this experience be positive and engaging. If users don’t feel like they’re getting value out of their time spent using your product, they will quickly abandon it–and this can lead to high churn rates and low customer lifetime value (CLV).

When creating an onboarding flow, think about how the user will benefit from using your app:

What problem does it solve?
How will they save time?
How much money will they make?
Will this make them feel good?

A good onboarding experience will make users feel confident in your product, increasing adoption rates and overall user satisfaction.

It’s important to make sure the onboarding experience is intuitive. Don’t assume that users will understand how to use your product without any guidance; instead, give them clear instructions on how things work so they don’t get frustrated trying (and failing) on their own.

Make sure users can get started quickly: if there are too many steps involved with setting up an account or installing an app, then many people will simply abandon their attempts altogether rather than getting stuck at step one for hours on end!

Finally, if possible show them what they can do with your product rather than just how — this way newbies won’t feel lost once they’ve learned all there is about using it effectively

Conclusion

If you’re looking to improve your product’s onboarding experience, then these tips should be a good starting point. Remember that onboarding is a crucial part of your product’s success, so don’t skimp out on this step!