Welcome everybody, great to have you all here. Quick thumbs up, since you can't do it on camera, in the chat if you can hear me, see me, see my screen, see Ramli hopefully, and get the thumbs up from Ramli. Good.

And if you can't at any point, let me know in the chat, I got that open and we'll make sure we sort it out. Sammy back at it with a thumbs up. Awesome. Let's get into it.

My name is Joe. I'm going to be your guide onboarding onboarding guide today. I'm the Design Advocate at Lyssna, and I've worked on a lot of onboarding experiences, both as a designer, a researcher leading some experiences across a lot of different types of products.

So I'm going to try to bring some of that experience in. I got some examples and put together, in a quick presentation, a lot of lessons that I've... I'd say I've learned the hard way from designing onboarding experiences to hopefully give you guys some tools and some guidelines to do that more effectively without having the trial and error maybe that that I had to go through to get it.

My main goal for this workshop is for you guys to leave not only, knowing more about onboarding or having new facts or resources, but actually feeling confident to put it into action, to have some things you can take into your day-to-day work and apply them and feel confident to put them into practice after what we go through today. More important than me, we got Ramli here the onboarding OG. Ramli, I'll turn it over to you to introduce yourself.

Awesome. Hey, thanks, Joe. Really excited to be here. I, as Joe mentioned, I'm a big onboarding guy. Wrote two books on it, Product-Led Onboarding five years ago, actually this month, and Eureka! That came out last year. Both about onboarding surprise. Have been helping companies turn more of their users to happy paying customers.

And when Joe reached out and said, "Hey, we're doing something about how do you improve your onboarding and how, tying all research together," which I'm such a big fan of. I think it's so important now more than ever to really get into the right mindset and get into the minds of your users. So excited to be here. Joe, and if there's any questions I'm active in the chat. I'm happy to answer any questions and kind of chime in if you have any thoughts as well. Awesome.

Thank you. Great to have you here, Ramli. And yeah, I'm going to be going through some of the dos and don'ts. We'll start with a little onboarding, kind of 101 stuff. Ramli, I'm sure, will be chiming in with some some examples or I don't know key tips that I missed out on.

And towards the end of the workshop, we have a really great video Lyssna template, a great onboarding starter kit to test that Ramli created along- Yeah with some other stuff that I'll be sharing at the end. So great to have you here, Ramli. Thank you. Awesome. So some quick tips for getting the most out of our workshop.

Everything is recorded, so you guys will get a recording and all the resources, links, Ramli's video template, everything that we cover here after the workshop, to your email. Keep the chat open and active. You guys always are... do a great job of that.

So keep it open. I'll be sharing some links in there, throwing out some questions to the group. And of course, if you guys have any questions as we're moving along here or some comments, insights as it relates to the onboarding projects that you're working on, drop them in there.

I got it open. Ramli's in the chat, and we'll make sure that we stop and get to your questions. Good to go everybody? Ramli? Check. Nice. All right, so let's start off with a really high level onboarding 101. The topic of our workshop today is the dos and don'ts of user onboarding. So we're going to get into some of the kind of big key aspects of a good onboarding experience.

We're going to look at some of the examples and some of the nitty-gritty tweaks and ways to test an onboarding experience that can really make a massive difference. So we're going to cover the inner workings of a great onboarding experience. But before we do that, just back up and give the high level overview. So onboarding usually happens during a user's first time experience with a product or feature.

Before signing up for this workshop, I'm sure everyone here knows what an onboarding experience is. You download a new app on your phone, you see the little spinny thing, load it, you open it up for the first time, and that starts your first experience.

This could be with a new product, a new feature that's released that, there's a little pop-up that says, "Hey, fill out your profile to do this." It doesn't have to be a totally, first time ever touching that app, website, or product, but as the name suggests, it starts at the beginning or a first time experience with some aspect of that product.

So we all know some of the familiar onboarding patterns, right? You guys have seen stuff like this before. This high level benefit carousel that you can move through. It's highlighting some of the key features or benefits of the product. You may be getting asked to do some things like create an account or to, for Grammarly here, to add it as a keyboard.

Just roughly the idea of onboarding. I got some more old school examples here, but still some good ones, right? We see things like these coach marks that kind of, point to something or direct you to some key features. See like this Gmail one where it's guiding you through some of the important key tasks, right?

Let me know in the chat, what are some other design patterns or just off the top of your head, things that you see in that first time experience, common experiences when you open it up for the first time. Ramli, what are some of ... while we're waiting for that in the chat, what are some of the other big ones that I missed? Yeah this is the common ones.

I also see a lot of ones where they're using product tours and ma- yeah, Joshua made, making you watch a video. The one that I keep seeing is oh, onboarding. What is onboarding? First thing they think about is a product tour where you have to click around. And I think that's what people ty- usually think about when they're in... oh, the quiz experience.

Oh, I m- I know what you mean. I thought you were actually launching a quiz. Yes. Where it's asking you what is your goal with the specific product is what y- you meant by that Melanie, probably. Yeah. What kind of restaurants do you like? Just to make sure that Tell us the kind of places you want to stay.

That's like- Things to tailor your experience. Direct manipulation. If it's a photo app, they have instructions in the photos. Oh, cool. Yep. Yeah. No, the quiz experience that's how that's, I think, the eas- the most recognizable, descriptive way to, to put it.

Yeah. Cool. So we know what these look like everyone? We've all done these as users. Now I want to ask a different question, though, that we've got our, we've got our foundation here. What is the point of an onboarding process? And I just want you to give me a 10-second answer off the top of your head in the chat.

What is the goal of the onboarding process? Or maybe a better way to put it: what should an onboarding process do?

Take a second on that and just drop your first thought in the chat I've seen this issue happen a lot. It's not having clarity of what to expect. Get the user to the aha moment as fast as possible. It's a good one. Get to the aha. Nice. Prepare the user to get the most out of the product.

Help the user decide what to do first  Good. All good answers, and actually better than usually. I can tell you guys have all, read Ramli before. Some of the common answers- Thank you ... when I put it out there for onboarding goals, it's like stuff that we just looked at, right?

Highlight features and benefits, educate users about where things are and how to use them, right? So for this example here, we've got our little carousel highlighting some of the key features. Educating users may be pointing to certain things in the navigation or key features or the next step.

Funneling users towards a conversion or a business goal, right? Getting them on track to create an account, sign up, upgrade purchase something, start their subscription. So these are like the typical answers that I get. Like I said, we got some better ones in the chat here, and while these are not incorrect at all, and we do see them all the time, what

I want to start out with is broadening out the y- definition of onboarding. And if you've read Ramli's stuff, then you've already got you've already got this broader scope. But if not, or if you need a refresher, user onboarding is the process of radically increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.

And we had a couple answers in the chat that I think are pretty, pretty close to this one. Reason I like to show this is to get out of the minutia of an onboarding experience, the idea that it's guiding you, pointing you to something, showing benefits. Those are all just different design patterns, solutions that are commonly used in onboarding.

But if we want to talk about what the real goal of onboarding is, it's not to show someone where something is in the navigation. It's to make sure that they know how to navigate the app, that they can easily get to the things that they want to, that they can accomplish their goal.

For the quiz example, right? If we're asking them about the kind of food that they like, the kind of restaurants or places they want to go to for something like a Yelp, let's say, then the goal there is to radically increase the likelihood that they're going to find restaurants that they like, that their feed is going to be populated with restaurants and places that match their preferences.

So a lot of the more specific examples and the more common things that we just looked at, the actual design patterns and how that's implemented, those can help get you there. But one of the most important things to designing a good onboarding experience is zooming out.

It's not just about showing the benefits, showing people where things are. It's about setting up, setting them up for success in that first visit and every visit after. Quick example of this one.

I did a mock-up of this f- for an article, but it was based on an app, Truebill, which I think has gotten acquired and messed up and changed since then. But basically, it's an app that you put your bank information in, you put your credit card information in, and it tracks your monthly subscriptions. You can cancel them manage them, see everything in one place.

So through the lens of setting your users up for success or drastically or radically increasing the chance that they'll be successful with your app, this is one of many great examples. In the onboarding, it asks you to connect your bank account, credit cards, basically anything that you're going to need to automatically pull those.

It's going to need to automatically pull those monthly subscriptions. So- That's not guiding you anywhere. It's not pointing to a specific place. It's not showing the high level benefits. It's asking you to do a key task, and that task is really important for your success as a user.

If I am a disorganized person who puts stuff on different credit cards and doesn't, need something to help me, an app to help me track my subscriptions, I need to put that credit card and bank information in because if I don't, I'm not going to have any of those subscriptions to show.

I'm not going to do it manually. It's going to defeat the entire purpose of the app. So in terms of the onboarding here and setting up for success, this is not just something to ease you into the experience, it's a really important step that's going to determine if I, disorganized Joe, get to see all of, and manage all of those monthly recurring subscriptions automatically, that's my goal, or if I don't. So the method to get there, the design, the steps, those all depend on what that end goal is.

But keep thinking of it as setting your users up for success in that first time visit and in every visit after. If they don't do a good job of telling me why I need to connect my bank and I skip it, I am not going to get much use out of that app and probably never come back to it again.

Got anything on that, Ramli? Any other examples? I just want to double-click on if you go back to the definition, the most important definition of, part of that onboarding is, it's the word success because, this where success doesn't, isn't defined by the team because often it's oh, let's ask the CEO or the product manager or the director of product what success is for users. It really comes from the user.

What is success for the user specifically? And for if you go back to the example that you showed that success is for that app is getting more or- getting Disorganized Joe be more organized and and really I think that I'm leading this a little bit.

That's the reason why research is so important because that helps you define what is success for the user. One of the big- biggest mistakes I see a lot of teams make is they skip that important part. What is success for a team?

Some people call it as aha moment in the chat. What... Some other people call it the win, but essentially that is it. What is their success and how do we get them there as quickly as possible. Is really the, what we're trying to do with onboarding.

Yeah. And that's important. Yeah, the impact of research on that, and we'll get into it in a couple of the do's and don'ts here, but I'm glad you mentioned that, Ramli.

Oh, yeah. It, especially with onboarding, right? You really have to- Yeah ... understand what a user wants to do, and if any of that influence of, "Hey, maybe we could get them to sign up for our marketing newsletter here," or, "Maybe we could, move them into this flow," any of those things that are going to take away from that end goal, my end goal of not needing to... not getting charged for things that I forgot about, that's really my goal with this, right? If, for this example here. Yeah.

You have to have not only a really clear understanding of that through research with onboarding, but a real commitment to it in designing an onboarding process. Really keeping it top of mind that if we stray from setting a user up for success and showing them how we're going to do that, then we're going to lose a lot of people along the way. Absolutely. All right. Let's get into some of the do's and don'ts.

First thing I want to share with you guys is this guide that I created. I'm going to put this in the chat, and this basically has everything from our workshop today. So I'm going to come back to this. You guys can check it out, but I got some of the do's and don'ts. Let's see.

Did that send? Yes. Go ahead and click on that. Give me a thumbs up if you guys can access it. But I've got some of the big do's and don'ts with some examples that we're going to cover here today.

I've got some ideas to test and improve your onboarding process. Some discount codes for Lyssna. We'll chat on this stuff at the end, and Ramli's onboarding improvement guide and template here. So I want to share this with you guys here. I'll include this in the follow-up email.

But this can be... We'll cover everything in detail now, but this is your field guide for some of the big points, some of the big dos and don'ts, and some of the examples that we're going to cover here today.

And I'm seeing some thumbs up, so everyone's able to access it. Yeah, so keep that open. I'll probably jump back to this a couple times. But everything we're going to cover here is pretty much on this page. All right, so let's start with... We're going to start with the don'ts and share some examples for these.

So I got three sets of dos and don'ts, and this one is directly related to what we were just talking about. If you want to design a great onboarding process, if you want to drastically, or I keep saying drastically radically increase the likelihood that new users will be successful when adopting your product, don't expect users to blindly trust you.

This is one of the most common mistakes in an onboarding process. As you guys all know as users, when you open an app for the first time and you're going through an onboarding process, you get asked to do stuff, right? Chores, tasks. We can probably think of some that you look at and you're, like, cruising along, swiping through, "Okay, I'm going to get to this thing I want," and then you get hit with a sign-up screen.

You're like, "Okay. All right. I guess I got to do this. Ugh, I guess I got to enter my email here," right? There are all these little speed bumps, as I'll refer to them.

But as a designer, as a researcher, as someone creating that onboarding experience, we can't just throw those in front of the users and expect that they're going to willingly complete them or jump through as many hoops as we ask to get them to the next step.

So this is the example. I did like a... in the guide here, I used the example of setting up a Google business page. Just a simple one, but this would be a good example, right? Verify your business, and we're asking for a business, tax ID, legal business name, and address.

Now, this is not the biggest, most tedious form to fill out, right? But if you're setting this up and then have to go find your tax ID and put this in, you might be asking, "Why does it need to do this?" Sure, it says verify your business, right? But there's going to be some hesitation there as the user, some questioning.

If you were just cruising along, setting this thing up and feeling good about it, you might get to this screen and be like, "Wait a sec. Why do I need to do that?" Some other good examples are putting your email in.

If they're not telling you why, maybe you're suspicious. "Is this going to put me on a marketing list? How am I going to use this?" So we have all of these kind of speed bumps, tasks, that are put in front of the user in an onboarding process, and we want to make sure, as we'll get to in our do, that we're not just expecting them to go through it.

Instead, and a star next to this one, if you're asking users to do a task, you have to clearly show them how it will benefit them.

If you guys take one thing away from this workshop, like this is the slide if you're designing an onboarding experience.

If you're asking users to do something, to enter their email, to sign up for an account, to enable their location, maybe those really creepy ones that are like, Uber is watching your, is monitoring your activity for 90 days, right? If you're asking people to accept that, you have to show them how it's going to benefit them, and if you can't do that's something you probably want to cut out of your onboarding experience.

So just using the last example, right? Modifying it. Verify your business. Same form here. We're asking the user to do the exact same thing in setting up their Google page, but in this one, we've got a little extra on the side. Why we ask. Verified businesses earn more trust and more customers. Earn five-star reviews.

Verified pages show a trust badge. Customize your photos and info. Unlock photo hours, con- contact editing. 3X more customer visits. And a little callout here that your EIN is encrypted instead of never being shown and never shown publicly.

So we're asking the user to do the exact same thing, but in this example, we're not only showing them why we're asking them to do it, we're connecting it to things that they presumably care about, right? If you're setting up a Google business page for Tony's Pizzeria, you probably want to get more traffic towards it.

You want to get more customers. You want to appear as a credible reliable business. You want to have your updated hours there.

So asking the same exact thing, but instead connecting it to something that they actually care about, their end goal. Get more online business from this free Google listing that I'm setting up. D- deliver more pizzas on a Friday night because people are finding my Google listing page.

Even though we're asking them to do the same thing, we're giving them-- We're connecting it to their real goals here, and that is going to drastically increase the chance that they go through this step and, getting back to our original golden rule, increase the chance that they're going to be successful, that they actually are going to get more business and deliver more pizzas from this listing I put this article up on LinkedIn last week and I think it's all about this aspect of onboarding.

I know Ramli's got, got a three-year-old. I got a four-year-old. And for anyone else who has or has had toddlers, you know there's a "What's in it for me?" is a pretty pretty common theme about if a toddler is asked- Bet that asked to do something, right? So I won't go through all of this, but it's a good thing to keep in mind, right? If you're asking that user to do something, you have to not only tell them why, really connect it to what they're trying to do.

My example here was setting up a basketball hoop for my son. Okay, so here's an example. Not good, right? Let's say someone's creating a fundraiser on a site like GoFundMe.

They click a button, Create a New Fundraiser, and this app, Fundr, says "Can we access your photos, media, and files on your device?" Asking you to do something, not telling you why, not showing how it's going to benefit you. Not good. Little bit better here. Click create a new tap Create a New Fundraiser, "Allow Fundr to access your photos, media, and files on your device."

Asking you to do something but giving a little explainer. "This will allow you to easily upload photos and media to your fundraiser or your fundraising page."

A little bit better than the first. It's telling you why it's asking for that, but it's still not going all the way there. It's still not saying, "Hey, here's how this is going to help you raise more money. This is how it's going to make your fundraising page even better. This is how it's going to help you reach your goal, your fundraising goal, three times faster than other fundraisers," which this one does.

Maybe we get a little kinda set up permission priming here. "Fundraisers with photos raise over 15 times more money than those without." We get the ask here with the explanation and a little kinda progress confirmation thing here.

The key is that this one gives you the benefit. It connects it to something that you actually want to do and gives you the why and the reasoning behind it, and answers the toddler question "What's in it for me? Why should I give you access to my photos?" It's going to help you do what you came here to do.

All right next one. Don't count clicks. So what I mean by don't count clicks is more generally don't over obsess with metrics around speed, efficiency, cutting out steps in the onboarding process.

Ramli, I don't know if this has been your experience, but many times when I've worked with clients on onboarding experiences and we're trying to improve them, the first the go-to solution is to make them shorter, cut things out. Have you encountered that as well?

Yeah, it is often the first thing that they think about, which, which is like, "Oh, let's just cut as many things as possible." And I think you're leading to this, is it's, It's not, it's the why behind the what, right? It's the reasoning behind the click itself and I do, the whole thing, "Oh let's shorten the time to value." Such a generic advice. Shorten time to value, how do you do that?

For people who don't know what time to value is, it's the time it takes for somebody to experience that aha moment or the value moment or that success moment of the app.

And how do you shorten that? Just reduce the risk, the steps is the generic advice I usually hear. Time to value. Perfect, yeah, perfect metric I guess for what we're talking about here. It's good to have an efficient, smooth onboarding process. You don't want to have extra steps in there.

You do want to make it as smooth, simple, kinda trim the fat as much as possible. But the key in terms of time to value, right? You have to have the value first, and you can't cut things out of it at the expense of that value.

This is what your metrics could look like with this, right? You could see your onboarding efficiency, everything trending in the right direction. It used to take seven clicks, now it takes five to get to it. Time on task, it used to take 20, whatever, 50 seconds, now it takes 36 seconds. Great.

Those are all areas where you're cutting down on the time and making it more efficient. But if you're obsessing over that, and let's say for our Google business example, it is a little hard to see, but there's a survey question, how confident are you that your business profile will attract new customers? And we see, not good as the answer, right?

Not at all confident, not very confident. So if someone just set up their, Tony's Pizzeria set up their Google business profile and it was quick, it took five steps instead of seven, it was easy to complete, there weren't a lot of errors in the process, that's great.

But if they're not feeling confident towards their original goal to generate new business from their profile, if they're not sure if they did it right, if they're not sure what to do next, none of that is going to matter.

So when I say don't count clicks, that's the, easiest way to remember it, I think. What I'm really talking about is making sure that you have that value first, and when you're trying to decrease that time to value, that you're not taking away from the value. You're not make- putting that in second place.

A fast, efficient onboarding process is not going to matter if it's not helping people do something they want to do. And this screenshot I was trying to find this from a past slideshow, but I think I'll explain it since it's a little hard to see.

Imagine if you had a dating app And the onboarding said, "Get started. How old are you? What's your gender? Hey, we've got some people who we think are great matches for you. Here are some highly compatible partners.

Here are people we think you'd love." You're not going to really-- You're not really going to believe that, and there's no way that they could actually do that, effectively.

Short onboarding process, probably the quickest time to actual experience that, that you'll find in a dating app. But it's neglecting the actual goal, which is to match you with people who actually, you know, that you feel confident are a good fit or a good, possible partner based on the criteria that you put in.

So making this shorter, certainly not going to improve that end experience because the value is not there. Okay. Instead of doing that, prioritize setting the user up for success and then make the process as efficient as possible.

When users feel genuine progress, they will be way more likely to complete a longer process. And this is something, I don't know, Ramli, if you've had this, but in, in those client projects where I've been pressured to, like cut, cut cut, cut it's an aha moment for us and stakeholders and clients when they see that a longer onboarding process that actually builds momentum and confidence towards the user's goal is highly preferred to the short one.

The dating profile that actually gets to know you, asks you questions that make, makes you feel like it's going to match you with someone. No one's caring about the steps involved in that.

They're caring about that end result. Am I-- Do I feel like it has the information it needs to deliver on that promise of matching me with someone who's compatible? This example here Ramli, I think I used this on our last last work- or a workshop that we did a while ago together.

But I designed an onboarding process for a a wedding planning app, and we tested two different versions. A was the one where I got all the pressure to cut it down, right?

So it was asking a bunch of questions of about your wedding, reception, and, your partner, number of guests, stuff like that. And then it would lead you into this planning board with some dates and tasks and, guidance of planning the event. We had a short onboarding flow.

Didn't ask a whole lot of questions. Fast, easy to complete, no confusion, no usability issues. About as efficient as you could get. And then we had onboarding B that was basically everything you could possibly ask about the couple and the wedding. It was really a long process. People preferred onboarding unanimously, right? The feedback was on A, just like that dating app example, this doesn't know anything about my wedding.

How can it tell me what days I should send the save, save the dates out if it doesn't know when, if we don't have a wedding date yet?

I remember one woman who said that she was Greek Orthodox, and then that was the religious observation for her wedding, which is, a massive factor in planning, in the ceremony, in the timing of things. And she said, "It didn't even ask me about that. So if it doesn't know that

I'm having a Greek Orthodox wedding, I don't trust this," right? "It can't possibly tell me how to plan this or different aspects of the event or the ceremony there."

So definitely the prime example from my work where I've seen cutting things down really reduce that confidence at the expense of efficiency, and where I've seen a long, detailed onboarding process, not only see people get through it, but actually enjoy it and feel confident in that end result, which is a plan for all these little tasks to do when you're planning a wedding or an event all right.

Let me get to the ne- last one that we have here. Don't assume that you know the speed bumps or the places where users are most likely to drop off. There are a handful, I like to call them usual suspects. Think of like screens, tasks that are annoying that you generally don't want to do as a user, that kinda slow your momentum a little bit.

And that in a lot of cases do actually lead to drop-off. Things like long forms, logins, creating an account, paying for something, granting permissions. These are all generally tasks that can make you kinda say, a decision point, right? Do I want to do this? Do I need to sign up? Kinda slows down that momentum that you might have prior to it.

These can be a source of drop-off, but often again, with clients and stakeholders that I've worked with these get the focus, right? Or it's assumed that we got to do something about that long form. We got to cut down those terms and agreements. People are probably leaving when they have to sign up for an account.

Now, some of that could be true, but if you assume that those usual suspects are the areas where people are dropping off, you might be actually missing out on some areas that are not as obvious that are not tedious tasks either, but that are causing some sort of doubt or hesitation, and really the, are the key areas where people are dropping off, that are really the most important things to fix, understand, and improve if you want users to get through, not necessarily just going right to that sign-up form or something that could, typically could be frustrating. So an example of this, and I'll pull it up from here, right?

Let's see. So here, let me- So if you were getting back to our Google business account setup, right? Add your business website. My pizzeria doesn't have a website. Can I still use this? I'm going to close it and try later, right? This is not a long form to fill out. This is not something that Maria, our participant down here, is closing because she doesn't have the time to do it or it's too tedious. It's causing some doubt. Maybe she's thinking, "Can I put my Yelp page in here?

Hey, I was going to use this as my website. Wait, why do I need a website to, move forward in this?" I've seen this also with naming a project. Let's say you're launching a fundraiser, right? And it asks you to name your fundraiser. If you have that hesitation of "Is this the best name? Is this what it should look like? Is this going to publish immediately? Can I change this after?"

Those can be big points of hesitation and big points of drop-off or I'll come back to this later. So the common misconception is that long, tedious tasks, chores that users don't want to do, are going to be the place where people are dropping off. But in many cases, it's these hidden examples where users hesitate, they're uncertain about something. Even if it's a simple task, often those are the things that are going to lead to them dropping off.

If you assume it's the other stuff, you're going to miss out on things that are probably really high impact and high priority in terms of improving your onboarding experience. So for this one, do test and uncover those hidden speed bumps that can stop a user in their tracks, right? Here's an example for our fundraising one. Let me move my windows here if we're setting up a fundraising page like on a GoFundMe, and we're asked to select a category we've got a couple drop-downs: animals, education, health and wellness, medical costs. Again, an easy task to complete in terms of clicks or making a selection. But if you have people who come across this and say, "I'm not sure what I should put for this.

Can I change this later? This seems really important. I should probably make sure my fundraiser is in the right category but I don't really know how it's used. My fundraiser fits into a few different categories, so I'm not sure which one to choose." Maybe it's about it's a fundraiser for a program to educate children on about animals and wildlife, right?

Is that ... Which one does that fall into here? A good example of that simple task, low time to complete, but hesitation that can come up and throw a user off. These are the important things to find and really the only way to do that is through testing. "Can I change this later?" is a huge user concern. Yes, especially when the user feels like it's an impactful decision, right? If they feel like, hey, this is, ... Or if they aren't sure, "Hey, is this going to affect my ... what should I put as my cover photo? What are other people putting? What should I name my fundraiser? How much money should I set my fundraiser goal for?"

If they're not sure about that and they don't think that they can change it later and they're locked into a decision, that can be a major point of hesitation and drop-off. All right, so I got one little activity for you guys here. We're actually going to improve that screen, and then we'll do a little wrap-up, key takeaways and I'll share some of the stuff from the guide and Ramli's template. Let's go back to this screen here. We've got our step in the onboarding process of creating a fundraiser.

We've got these questions around it. Based on what we've talked about, how would you improve this screen? And I want you to think about it. We'll put minute, two minutes on the timer here. And I want you to drop a suggestion in the chat. We've already got one. That's good.

But how could we improve this screen? If we know that these are the challenges, what are some little tweaks that we might make based on some of these dos and don'ts that could build that confidence, momentum, reduce that hesitation, and most importantly, set users up for success?

Think about that, drop your answer in the chat, and I'll show you my response after.  There's some good examples in the chat already. Yep!  Interesting. Multi-select I'm trying to th- without advancing the slides, I'm trying to remember the one that I had here It's not fair you know the answer or you need, you have a suggestion. I think the clue for folks is the quotes on the left. How do you address those issues? I know, can I change this later? Somebody already addressed that. Yeah But the other ones, I don't really know how to use, my fundraiser's kinda, doesn't fit into this criteria or into this few different categories. Decide later button. All right, let me set this up. Decide later button.

Can you, Let's go to our first our golden rule of if you're asking the user to do something- tell y- tell them how it benefits. What's in it for them? Include the why. Yep. Yeah, and this is just totally made up, simple example, but let's see. Decide later button, multi-select, select a category, you can change this later. This helps us decide X, Y, Z. Awesome, Mel, you got it. Sweet.

Okay, so here, let me show here's what I... This will be a surprise to me too, what I came up with. Okay, so first thing we could do is clearly connect it to a user goal, right? Select a category, raise more money by getting your fundraiser in front of thousands of donors who have, who fund similar causes.

So Barbara, Mel, we've got the why. Leaf, we've got it. Not just saying, "Hey, choose this," and it's, seems like an important step, but here's how it's going to help you towards your actual goal of getting, radically increasing the chance that you're going to successfully reach your funding goal here give users tools to make a confident choice. So even going, we had some of those questions in there that are like, "Mine kind of fits into a couple categories," right? Offering them some guidance, reducing that hesitation, increasing that confidence that, yes, mine fits in this category. Oh, there are a bunch of other fundraisers in like this in animal welfare.

Yep, mine goes in here. Now I can make a confident choice and know the benefit that this is going to help put it in front of donors of similar causes. All right, you guys all got this one right. Give the user an out. Let them know they can change it later. Give them a skip for now. If we do these three things, we're covering a lot of bases on this screen.

And, while I haven't tested this exact example out, I would bet I bet a whole lot that in any metric of confidence, completion rate setting them up for success, that a skip option, showing the why and the benefit to them, and giving them a little guidance as to how to make a selection is going to perform much better than this just ask, asking you to do something without telling you why.

Other reason I want to show this is that these are sim- relatively simple tweaks. It's like a little w- rough example with not a whole lot of design treatment, but you can see that these are not like ... This is not a drastic overhaul of the onboarding experience. Really, the work for something like this comes in the research and seeing that this part, select a category, is hanging people up, figuring out why, actually being able to pull these.

Everything from there we just did in two minutes in the chat in terms of actually solving it. But if you assume that it's another point that they're dropping off or just don't do the work or the research to dig into it and understand where and why it's happening you're going to end up chasing a lot of different directions when there's maybe one or two that could really have a huge impact on it Let me see. Hannah said, "Can we recommend a related category after asking the title of fundraiser?"

That would be even better, right? So then we're getting into optimizing making that experience even easier with the usability, with the efficiency of it, right? If we know that we're getting them to their goal and we need- we're setting them up for success and that value is there, then we can start doing things like that, cutting the time to value, making it easier to get to that setup and that value. Totally. That...

My s- in no way are my my mock-ups there the perfect solution to that. We could refine that way further, but the thing they'll all have in common is they're identifying a point where, of hesitation, which requires talking to users, and keeping that idea of value, keeping the user goal front of mind, in this case, to raise more money for their fundraiser. Cool. Let me show you, Pull up our guide here one more time, and I'm going to let Ramli share a little bit on the research playbook and template. We went through all of this. I'm going to put this in the chat one more time, and I will send this out to you guys in the email.

But I've got the big stuff that we've covered here. So our dos and don'ts with some of the examples that we've looked at. Down at the bottom here, I've got some quick ideas to test and improve your onboarding. These are all things that are outside of just efficiency metrics, completion rates, seeing if users cutting the amount of clicks it takes to get to something. These are some things, all of which you can test in Lyssna, that might spark some ideas for testing and improving your own onboarding process.

So if you're at that point of designing it, trying to improve it take a look at these. They'll give you some ideas that you can test easily and efficiently, and that are going to address the stuff that we're talking about here. Not just cutting out certain steps, but really keeping focused on setting the user up for success and connecting them to their end goal, and giving them that feeling of momentum and progress towards it at every step.

We've got a credit code down here. You guys can just, if you have a Lyssna account, you can open that up, put this code in, and get 20 credits. Good starting point for testing your onboarding experience and some feedback. Most importantly, we got a little hot-off-the-press video and research template here from Ramli. So Ramli, you want to just give a quick overview on what you put together with this playbook?

Yeah. It's something that it's... You mentioned it as one of the tests. It's something called the first click test. Essentially what you were talking about, where you show a screen and how confident are people, n- users know what to click on next essentially.

And if they're clicking on something that's unexpected, that's a good signal from you to that you need to redesign that. Essentially, you upload a screen of a specific onboarding part that you want to improve. You set it up and then you ask a, specific question like, what would be the next step? Something that kind of doesn't lead them. And I'm just excited to bring this out. Pe- people can actually watch the video, they can run it on their own, or there's a template that they can click through in Lyssna that can k- kickstart this for them specifically. Awesome. Yeah, this is a guide, a Lyssna template. This is a great starter kit.

I actually haven't watched the video yet, Ramli. It just got published yesterday. I know exactly. I wa- I watched the rough version which wasn't that rough. I watched the early version, but I did look at the template and stuff so I can say confidently this is a great starting point to not only have Ramli walk you through one method of testing your onboarding, but also give you a template in Lyssna so you don't have to create it from scratch.

So this is here for you guys to check out. As I said, hot off the presses. And between our guide- Credit code and Ramli's playbook here on onboarding. You guys got a really good head start if you want to test out your experience. I see we got some questions in the chat, so I know we got just a couple minutes left here. If you guys want to fire some questions in, there were a couple that I wanted to get to. But drop those in there.

We'll take a couple questions and then we'll wrap up. Ramli, if you see any... Oh, you put those in the- Yeah, I did. I saw one come in. So- My man. Let me get to Joshua's question here. Yeah. You mentioned improving metrics. How do you pick which metrics matter to you? I got an answer for this one, but Ramli, you want to take a first crack at it? Yeah, I was thinking, obviously there's there's metrics that are le- leading indicators.

That means they're kinda showing that the user are more likely to succeed with your specific product. But I think the most important metric goes back to success, and how do you know success? And one of the key metrics of success is the retention, and are they coming back to it? You gave the example with the wedding app Joe, and I'm thinking about that. Like, how do you know that somebody was successful with that wedding app?

If they come back and actually update something or start inviting people to it, that's a good way to do it. For me, th- that, that is the ultimate them coming back and and whatever metric you're measuring, time to value could be short, but if they're not coming back, that doesn't matter. And a bunch of other things like activation rate could be high. Everybody's activating, but they're not coming back. Maybe you picked the wrong activation moment or aha moment- Yeah ... if they're not coming back. So I think that's one important. Obviously you got to... maybe Joe, you're kinda leading towards this, is like mapping out the journey kinda helps you indicate okay, where are they dropping off? I think that's another important metric is the drop-off rate and where they're falling off the journey. I think those- Yeah ... are two ones that I can think of.

Joe, obviously you got some more. You've done a lot of onboarding work too. I think... And that's a great answer. I think it's anything Joshua, that, if our goal is setting them up for success towards their goal, we ha- whether we're testing something or looking at analytics metrics on a live product, the way we measure that has to be directly reflect their goal. So retention is a great one. If people are coming back, if they're using their wedding planner to do this, if they're updating their Google business profile and respo- and getting five-star reviews, right? Those are all, live, live metrics that are showing like, yes, this is working.

For something like a prototype test asking about things like confidence. How confident are you that your fundraiser i- that you've set your fundraiser up as best as possible to reach your goal? How, Sure. If you're getting, let's say, recommendations for restaurants, how out of these recommended restaurants which best describes, the quality of recommendations? These all look great, I'd love to eat at every single one of them, or I'm not sure, right?

Those are all things that ask about that end goal. Did we actually deliver on it? Not necessarily the parts of the onboarding process. Retention any kind of key metrics for usage and success, those are going to be different for every product, but my main thing is keep it tied to the user goal. And maybe a helpful tip for that is don't get too sucked into things like completion rate, time to complete, number of clicks.

Those are important, but you want to make sure that you're measuring are we delivering on what this onboarding says it's going to do and what they came here for in the first place. Let's see. Any other questions? We got Amina. Does the onboarding for services have the same process as a product? Do you want me to take a stab, Joe? Or you got something? Yeah, go for it. I would say the process to improving it would be similar.

Obviously, you would use different tactics, depending on the service itself. Like if you're a consultant or a freelancer I can't imagine you using product tours for... Hey, welcome to my consulting service. Here are some product tours around it.

But it goes back to some of the core principles that Joe talked about today. What is success for that person? And that success could take a while, right? It could take weeks or months for that service to be completed.

But how do you set them up for the next step, whether that's booking a call with you or setting up something specific. If they're setting up their company page or answering a bunch of questions about why, information that you need to service them, it goes back to some of the core principles Joe was talking about that you have to ex- you should explain why. Why is this important? And, this whole process is giving back to what is in it for them.

And I think that's that's how I would think about it. Core principle stays the same, but the tactics might be different in terms of actually delivering the onboarding. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. As you were saying that, Remley, I was thinking, one of my roles here at Lyssna is I work with our enterprise clients and helping them onboard with Lyssna and setting, setting them up, and one of the important aspects of that, and something that I work on quite a bit to get refined is can we... Is giving them the outcome at the beginning like, "Hey, we're working together. I'm going to help you be successful with Lyssna.

Here are some of the things we can do. We can train your team so everyone is able to conduct reliable research," right? It's different. This is a conversation. It's emails back and forth. It's not a product experience, but it is very much the same fundamental of understanding your user, your client, whoever it is, their actual goals, communicating those, and when you're asking for things like, "Hey, we start off with a one-hour discovery session to, meet your research team and f- figure out your goals.

Here's why we do th- here's how that's going to help us launch a, effective research initiative and help you guys do a successful redesign of your app." So always keeping it focused, and the fundamentals, I think, are very similar. Guys, thank you very much for being here.

Did you enjoy this workshop? Let me know. I did. I always enjoy talking about onboarding. So let me know in the chat, and more importantly, how are you guys feeling? Hopefully more confident and maybe a little more prepared on some of the key things to think about with onboarding and some of those examples that you might be able to relate back to when working on it in your own practice. Keep going back to that guide.

It's got everything we covered in here from the workshop. It's... I tried to make it like a quick cheat sheet. It doesn't cover every single thing from onboarding, but it covers the big stuff, and yeah, thanks for pasting that back in there J- Ramli. Cool. Feedback, credits, those are all in there, so I'll leave them since we're over.

Thank you, guys. Ramli, thanks so much for hopping on. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. I'm going to take a 10-minute break and then watch your research playbook back so I can- ... be more informed on it. But great having you here.

Thank you. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge, and thanks to everyone else here. Have a good one, guys. Take care, everyone. Hopefully I'll see you in another workshop soon. Have a good one. Take it easy.