Onboarding Optimization: Engaging Users From the Get-Go

By Noa Dror

The main challenges website owners and e-Commerce entrepreneurs are faced with can be broken down to a cycle of 3 stages: traffic (grabbing users' attention), user-engagement and conversion. While the first is a job best left to the marketing team - the second and third stages are tightly bound to each other: there is a high correlation between users who have a successful onboarding and good conversion rates. This makes a lot of sense: users who are fully aware of all of the webapp's capabilities and are confident in their own ability to navigate in it - are far more likely to commit to it.

While conversion is a goal, there is no way to improve its rates by targeting the conversion action itself. Users will not be convinced to register to a service or purchase a product if you simply shout at them more loudly that they should do that. The only way to go about acquiring better conversion rates is to optimize the navigation flow leading up to the point of conversion.

Engaging users from the get-go is a key objective, in this regard. The statistics are adamant on that: most users establish an opinion on a website within the first 2.6 seconds of browsing. It goes without saying that a professional, eye-catching design for a website is a critical part of initial user-engagement. Clear, simply put yet intriguing content is just as important for successful onboarding. A third, essential aspect of user-engagement is navigation.

User experience (UX) has a central role in onboarding optimization: the ease with which a user navigates the website determines how comfortable he or she will be, which, in turn, determines how likely they are to keep using it. We don't like doing things that make us feel uncomfortable - and feeling clueless and lost usually has that effect.

There are various ways to tackle this issue. One UX approach that is rapidly gaining popularity is the use of walkthroughs and site tours. Using on-page guidance tools like tooltips and overlays, the user can be introduced to various features on the website and get more comfortable with his or her virtual surroundings through self-service methods, without having to go through a complex and time consuming training session.

There are other ways to deal with navigation challenges: most webapps sporting the lean approach go for Flat UI - a design concept that minimizes the need to browse through multiple and relies on endless scrolling. This works for a front end site that merely needs somewhere to showcase its functionality, while the service itself is downloadable or rendered on a separate system.

Web designers do a lot of testing before launching a final version of the website and then keep making changes while it's up. A/B testing (displaying different versions for two sets of users and gathering data based on clicks and conversion goals) - is very popular on this front.

But more complex sites with multiple uses and multiple conversion goals are more difficult to navigate intuitively and may require some guidance tools to help users get where they need. Fortunately, there are some excellent solutions out there for such challenges.

Please visit https://iridize.com for more information on onboarding, customer experience optimization, walkthroughs and integrated help solutions.

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