How to improve onboarding with a first click test

Here's something that happens all the time. A team spends weeks, sometimes months, and even years designing an onboarding flow, and they're obsessed about every single detail in every screen, every tool tip, every piece of copy. Then users sign up, and they just sit there. They don't know where to start.

They're not confused about what the product does. They're confused about what to do first. That is a first click problem, and it's one of the most common onboarding issues I see and one of the easiest to diagnose if you know the right test to run. That's exactly what we're gonna be doing today. Hey, everyone.

My name is Ramli John. I'm the founder of Delight Path and the author of Eureka! The Product Onboarding Playbook and the Product-Led Onboarding. I spend most of my time helping B2B product teams fix the moments when new users get lost, they sign up, and they never come back. Lyssna invited me to take over their Research Playbook series, and when they mentioned first click tests for onboarding, I said yes immediately because this test is exactly what product teams need.

It's fast, it's visual, the results are easy to understand, and you don't need to be a researcher to run it. By the end of this video, you'll have a template you can use today. Let's get into it.

So what is a first click test? It's simple. You show someone a screenshot of your screen, in this case, an onboarding screen, and you ask them, "What would you click first to get started?"

That's it. Here's why it's so powerful. Research has shown that when a user's first click is correct, they're far more likely to complete the next task successfully. First click sets the direction, and if it's wrong, most people don't recover. In onboarding, that first screen is absolutely critical. It's the moment a new user arrives and asks, "Okay, I've signed up. Now what?" If the answer isn't obvious, if the button, the CTA, the next step isn't clear, you're going to lose them and lose them for good. Not because your product is bad. Because the path forward wasn't clear enough. And here's the thing. You can't always see this in your analytics. A drop-off after sign-up could mean a lot of things.

A first click test tells you exactly where confusion is happening. That's why I love this test for onboarding. It's fast to run, immediate, and visual, and deeply actionable.

All right, let me show you how this works with a real example. For this playbook, I'm going to use a fictional SaaS company called FlowDesk. FlowDesk is a project management tool built for SaaS teams. Think a simpler alternative to Asana or Monday.com. They've recently redesigned their onboarding flow, and the product team thinks it's clearer than before, but signups are not converting into active users the way they expected.

Sound familiar? The hypothesis is that new users land on the dashboard and don't know what to do first. There are three possible first actions on the screen. First, create a new project. Second, invite a teammate. Third, watch a quick start video. The team has opinions. Marketing thinks users should create a project first.

Product thinks that a video gets them their value faster, and nobody actually asks a user. That's a gap, and exactly what we're going to close today. We're going to run a first click test on FlowDesk onboarding screen and let real users tell us where they'd click first. So let's build a study.

Okay, so I got the Lyssna template open here. Let me walk you through it. Now, this template is specifically built for first click. As you can see, I've uploaded a screenshot of FlowDesk here already.

First thing I'm gonna do is, like I said, upload it, and then once you have that, you want to make sure to actually use a real screenshot of FlowDesk or whatever screen you're using. This is the exact screen that new users will see right after signing up. One thing, I want to give you a tip here is not to use a wireframe.

You want to make sure that participants are seeing what they'll see in the real app, not a stripped-down version of it. Now, here's another place where a lot of people make a mistake. They write their task scenario as, "Click the button to create a new project." What you want to make sure to say here is something more open.

In this case, I put, "You just signed up for FlowDesk. You're ready to get started. What would you click first?" That's it. Short, clear, no leading.

Then next I'm going to add some follow-up questions. Now, this is very helpful for you to know more information about why they clicked that specific area. So I would ask, "Why did you click there first?" Second, "How confident did you feel about where to start?"

And I would give a scale here from one, not confident at all, to five, very confident. Now this study is ready. We're gonna go ahead and recruit people for this. In Lyssna, you got two ways to recruit. You can share a link. You can go ahead, go to Recruit, and then Manage Link, and create a link that you can share to your own audience or existing users to reach out to.

You could actually recruit from Lyssna panel as well, get fast, high-quality responses. For this, I'm going to use a panel, so I'm gonna recruit participants. I've already pre-filled some of the information here. I'm going to recruit 20 participants. That's usually enough to see clear patterns in a first click test.

You can also add more if you need a bigger sample, but 20 gives you a solid starting point. I'm keeping my filter simple here. I'm going to select United States, and they are full-time employee at a company that is a company size from 11 to, let's say, 500. That's ideally the right size of company for FlowDesk.

You can expand this out even more. I've also filtered by job. I want to make sure I don't recruit a panelist from a product manager role or somebody who is not specifically, would know about software like this. One other thing that I want to mention in the build phase is that I do have a screener. I want to make sure that they have used a project management tool in the past. So anybody who has never used a project management tool in the last six months, they likely wouldn't know where to click or what to do, so I'm filtering those out.

Once I'm ready to recruit, I'm going to go ahead and select the screener screen-in rate, which is, in this case, I'm just selecting fifty to seventy-five percent. Here are all the information and filter that I've used, and I have the credit. I'm gonna go ahead and submit the order to see the results in about two hours turnaround.

If I had less filters, I can actually get this as quickly as thirty minutes through the Lyssna panel. So let's go ahead and let's submit this order.

That's it. I'll see you in a bit.

So the results are in. Let's dig into what we're seeing. Click on Results. And this is really my favorite part of the click test. You get a visual look as to where people are clicking. No spreadsheets, no pivot table, just a heat map of where the answer is obvious. As we can see here, most of the clicks went into the create a new project, and then the second is watch a quick video.

Interestingly enough, the invite a team wasn't really that important or that high, or there wasn't even any click on that itself.

We can see that create a new project almost got fifty-five percent of the clicks, and then watch a quick video actually got the other fifty percent, so it's fifty/fifty. If we click on just the click map, we can see the distribution of how spread create a new project is versus watch a quick video.

That's really interesting. And then just one on invite a teammate. Let's look at some of the qualitative responses here. Why did you click here first? Somebody said, "Watching a quick start video is a great way to learn about the platform, to see how the site operates. Logical." So there are some things here that people are saying about why people would click here.

And somebody even said that this is logical. This is where I would get started. That's really interesting. That's very encouraging that the CTA is telling us that the people will actually click here Like I mentioned, only one person clicked invite a teammate, so I'm really not surprised with that, because, that's usually not something that first people would click on.

Let's take a look at the confidence score. So we can see with the confidence score, forty-five percent is says they're very, very confident. Thirty-five percent says they're somewhat confident, and the mean score we see is four point one five. That's actually really strong. And what I can tell from this is that this is heading in the right direction.

There is a few things that I would suggest here, though. What this is telling me is usually in the order of importance, you want to start on the left side is the most important, the middle, second important, third is the last important.

So I actually would flip this around and get watch a quick start video second and invite a teammate last. But other than that, this is a very encouraging direction of where this is going, and it is a minor fix, but it should lead to that specific direction that we want to go to. So what do we do next for this?

For FlowDesk, I would probably put more emphasis on create a new project. That's where you really want people to drive them to.

Start a video is a secondary call to action.

Secondly, I would move the invite a teammate to the very last option there. It's something that most users would do after they have already created that specific project. So you don't have to guess. It is pretty straightforward. And once you know that, you can design an onboarding experience.

Once again, this is what I love about the first click tests. As you can see here, once again, within 13 seconds, most people have clicked where they want to go, and the confidence is very strong. So you can use this template, then come back and run it again once you've made those changes.

That's how good onboarding is built. It's that iterative process that you have there.

The template we used today is linked below. It's free to use, and it's ready to go for you to take. If you found this helpful, you can subscribe so you don't miss another playbook on the Lyssna YouTube channel. And if you're working through an onboarding challenge right now, drop it in the comments.

Thank you for watching. See you in the next playbook.