What is Continuous Onboarding?

Onboarding is usually considered to be the first 5 minutes of the user’s experience in the App. But successful Apps always have FEATURE #2. This needs onboarding too!

Scott Middleton challenged this perspective in our recent Onboarding Best Practices webinar. Scott has his own “Aha” moment about why onboarding is really “Continuous Onboarding”.

We can simply break down user onboarding into:
  • “DO NOW” (the journey to the “Aha” moment which is the user’s primary JTBD discussed here).
  • “DO LATER” for secondary important features that will deepen engagement and increase retention.

Here is a couple of examples from Google mobile Apps: 

In the first, a new button is announced with a simple tip: “A new way to customize Discover”. Its a secondary feature but powerful to announce as it allows the user to simply tune their news to their preferred topics.

The second coachmark, is a more agressive modal element that blocks your attention until you deal with it. Google clearly wants to get stickier with your searches.

The animation below shows a couple of familiar launchers you can use to announce new features or target specific users/segments to:

a) help them out

b) trigger action towards a goal

They are:

  1. Little Red Gift. This is Slack’s way of letting you know about new things.
  2. Glowing Hotspot. This the pulsing effect is handy for attracting attention that you want action on.
  3. Tooltips are the silent unobtrusive helpers. 

The latter 2 were once upon a time hard-coded into the application. Now its easy to deploy these:

i) without writing code

ii) target specific users or segments

iii) measure the analytic engagement or improvement on a goal that you want the user’s to complete.

Click to see the animation

    More Posts

    Contextual & StreetHawk Inc 2023.