Onboarding & Education

A seamless onboarding experience helps new users understand your product’s value quickly and effectively. Well-designed tutorials, guided walkthroughs, and educational resources ensure that customers can easily adopt your product.

Why it's Important

Reduces customer frustration and abandonment.
Increases product adoption and engagement rates.
Ensures users experience value early in their journey.
Strengthens retention by helping users succeed quickly.
Reduces support tickets by proactively addressing common issues.

How to Implement

Map out the user journey from signup to activation.
Develop interactive product tours and walkthroughs.
Create self-serve educational content (guides, videos, FAQs, webinars).
Personalize onboarding based on user segments.
Automate email sequences and in-app messages to guide users.
Continuously gather feedback and refine onboarding based on data.

Available Workshops

Customer Journey Mapping to identify friction points.
Usability Testing to validate onboarding effectiveness.
Content Creation Sprint for guides, FAQs, and tutorials.
Onboarding Email Sequence Planning to nurture new users.
Customer Feedback Analysis to refine onboarding.
Roleplay Sessions where internal teams go through onboarding as new users.

Deliverables

Onboarding flow and tutorial designs.
Step-by-step product guides and video tutorials.
Automated onboarding email sequences.
Knowledge base and help center documentation.
In-app tooltips and progress tracking features.

How to Measure

Time to First Value (TTFV) – how quickly users experience value.
Onboarding completion rate – percentage of users who complete the process.
Feature adoption metrics – which core features new users engage with.
Support ticket volume – decrease in new user issues over time.
Churn rate of new users – how many users leave after a short period.

Real-World Examples

Slack

Uses an interactive product tour to introduce core features.

Notion

Provides personalized templates to help new users get started.

Canva

Offers in-app tutorials and design challenges to engage users.

Get It Right

Keep onboarding short, simple, and goal-driven.
Use progress indicators to show users how far they’ve come.
Provide personalized recommendations based on user behavior.
Allow users to skip steps or get advanced tutorials if needed.
Continuously test and optimize onboarding based on data.

Don't Make These Mistakes

Overloading users with too much information upfront.
Not guiding users toward a quick win or success moment.
Ignoring mobile users and their onboarding experience.
Creating a rigid onboarding that doesn’t adapt to user needs.
Failing to follow up with users who drop off.

Provided courtesy of Catherine St Clair, Product Marketing Manager, St Clair GTM Consulting