Mastering User Onboarding with Bite-Sized Experiences

Onboarding is the art of integrating a new employee, client, or customer into an organization. During this time, these people are provided with information to familiarize themselves with the company’s products or services.

Onboarding, also known as organizational socialization in the business world, is very important. It is a crucial part of helping new members or employees understand their positions, duties, responsibilities, and everything required of them.

However, onboarding, if not done properly, can lead to mistakes and errors. In this article, two examples will be used to show you how.

Example 1

Imagine being invited to a buffet. Your company has just signed a major contract, and as a way of rejoicing, they decided to throw a party for their employees. You went to the party, and of course, you had a nice time. However, there was just a lot of food from different delicacies, and you wanted to try them all.

You went from one table to another, trying out different foods. They were delicious, but then you were full and yet still had quite a lot of dishes you hadn’t tried. So you kept at it. The result? You started feeling very sick, developed a stomach ache, and ended up throwing up.

In short, it is possible to have too much of a good thing, especially when you’re cramming a lot of goodness into a compressed amount of time. The same rule applies to onboarding.

A lot of the time, the user onboarding experience is based on the all-you-can-eat model. We see this all the time.

Example 2

A few years ago, a particular company had to recruit new employees since most of their old ones resigned. After recruitment, the company proceeded to onboard them.

During the onboarding process, the human resource manager fed these new employees a lot of information in a very short time. At the end of the day, even after the onboarding process, these new employees still made quite a few mistakes, some of which were dire and cost the company a lot to fix.

Some apps do this as well. They force users into consuming large chunks of information quickly and in a very little time. This often leads to frustration for many users, and some might even abandon the app.

Now, you might be wondering, how then do we carry out the onboarding process efficiently and in such a way that the user onboarding experience yields better results?

Be assured that there’s a better way, and it is quite simple: You can break your onboarding process into bite-sized servings.

Mastering User Onboarding With Bite-Sized Experiences

Bite-sized is better. Take a look at this scenario:

You are a gourmet chef who has earned 3 Michelin Stars. Having come up with many tasty dishes, you can’t wait to serve your cuisine to your eager customers. This is a 15-course meal.

Now imagine that in all your excitement, you begin to serve this 15-course meal too quickly without a pause. Your diners will be left feeling confused and unable to enjoy each dish.

As a Michelin chef, you are supposed to understand the need for pacing in a good meal— that time between courses when you allow your customers a moment to bask in the joy left from the taste of the last meal still fresh on their tongues. Then, just as they begin to get bored, you send out the next course. This allows them to leave your diner feeling satisfied.

However, if your user onboarding experience resembles cramming a 15-course meal down the users’ throats, then you’re doing it wrong.

Understandably, you have a lot of information to share, and you want to share it very quickly. But trying to do so all at once is not the right approach.

Since the end goal of sharing the information is so that the user can understand without fail and avoid errors or mistakes, you can do this by breaking down your onboarding process into small, bite-sized, easily understandable segments.

This approach allows you to carefully curate and pace your delivery well to ensure that your users can fully— to a great extent— absorb and savor each step of their experience. Through this approach, you will be allowing new users to experience the “A-ha” moment of your product.

Let us look at three ways through which we can use this bite-sized user onboarding approach:

1. Bite-Sized Checklists

If you remember the second example that was cited about the company, after the whole ordeal, they had to develop a better technique for onboarding new employees.

They created an onboarding checklist. The checklist contained everything that was required to be done during the entire onboarding process. Then they split the onboarding checklist into parts.

Separate lists were created for each phase, with one list focusing on only the basic information and the other focusing on the more important duties. After this, they observed better results from new employees during the first week of performing their duties.

A bite-sized checklist is a powerful tool in the user onboarding experience. A company, after splitting its user onboarding checklist into two parts, saw a major rise in the signup completion rate. The rate moved from under 2% to about 25%.

Their initial checklist consisted of all the various steps for all user groups. However, the Director of Customer Enablement decided to create a separate list for each phase.

This design then triggers a second checklist that covers the remaining tasks, like creating a flow and tracking events, thereby making each task into small, manageable steps.

“The goal is to daisy-chain the checklists together so users don’t face a massive to-do list,” says the Director.

2. Bite-Sized Sign-up Forms

This method is highly effective for sign-up forms as well. Having bite-sized sign-up forms increases the completion rate and makes the sign-up process enjoyable for users. So, instead of having all the fields on one page, which could end up looking burdensome and tiresome for users, the fields are broken into smaller sections and spread across multiple pages. Using this approach simplifies the user experience.

Based on a case study, it was revealed that the implementation of a new streamlined sign-up page led to an impressive 52.9% increase in conversion rates. Many online retailers make use of multi-step forms during checkout.

This multi-step form helps to break tasks into separate and simpler forms, allowing a user to fill out simple fields completely without getting frustrated.

Shopify is a great example. They have a two-page sign-up process featuring two fields on the first page and six on the second. This creates a simpler flow, which makes the sign-up process less daunting and improves the completion rates.

3. Bite-Sized Product Tours

Engaging the bite-sized approach when performing simple tasks is vital, and product tours are not left out. Many tours fail because, instead of providing necessary context, they focus solely on highlighting features. This often leaves users feeling lost and without a clear understanding of the benefits of these features.

A more effective approach would include providing smaller, context-focused tours that provide the context that the user needs.

Grove HR effectively employs this approach by offering separate user-paced tours for different tasks. They have enhanced their onboarding process by making available interactive tours that highlight crucial settings and account setups.

This method not only encourages higher onboarding completion rates but also ensures that the process is manageable, streamlined, and user-friendly.

Ready To See How Less Really Is More?

While it is always tempting to share all your knowledge at once, breaking processes into smaller, simpler steps will make tasks easier to do and boost completion rates. We can also apply the bite-sized approach when it comes to UX. This approach can improve many elements in UX, leading to more streamlined processes and higher completion rates.

Instead of overwhelming users with a plethora of information, choosing to present content in bite-sized portions will ensure a better understanding and a seamless onboarding journey.