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"Samuel Hulick\u00A0is a long time UX consultant with an intense focus on user\u00A0onboarding.\u00A0This article originally appeared on Inside Intercom.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWant more people to adopt your product? Make sure you know what progress looks like in your user\u2019s life, not just on their screen.\r\n\r\nHaving a stellar user adoption rate is a beautiful thing. Converting users at a higher rate drives down your cost of user acquisition, which in turn stretches your marketing resources even further. It also increases the likelihood that people stick around longer, driving up average lifetime value, and letting you invest your product resources more strategically.\r\n\r\nThe secret to getting there? First, identify the\u00A0must-have experience\u00A0that keeps people coming back, and then make sure new users experience it.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nEnsuring your new users get that experience is a responsibility put on onboarding, but onboarding itself is rarely designed to deliver it. Rather than relentlessly focusing on progressing the user to success, onboarding workflows seem content to simply introduce the interface and then call it a day.\r\n\r\nThis is a shame, because in order for an onboarding experience to answer its higher calling, it has to go beyond moving people through a product tour. The story you build your onboarding experience on shouldn\u2019t be about your user interface, it should be about your user.\r\n\r\nIn order to be building on solid ground, that story\u200A\u2014\u200Athe one beginning and ending with the user\u200A\u2014\u200Aneeds to be thoroughly understood.\r\nSetting the stage for successful onboarding\r\nWhen you boil it down, onboarding is really all about changing people\u2019s behavior. Your signups are frustrated with the way they\u2019re currently doing something and are hoping your way of doing things is better (or else they wouldn\u2019t be signing up).\r\n\r\nOnboarding strives to make that behavioral switcheroo a successful one for as many people as possible.\r\n\r\nOnboarding experiences, when working well, are less like instruction manuals for weight benches and more like personal trainers: they don\u2019t stop at merely showing you how the equipment is used, they make sure you get all the way to attaining your fitness goals.\r\n\r\nSo it goes for user onboarding: in order for it to be successful, it must ultimately engender success in others.\r\n\r\nSo, long before you begin to weigh your interface options (\u201Cshould I go with an intro video or a series of tooltips?\u201D), let\u2019s make sure you\u2019re super clear on what your users are trying to get away from, where they want you to take them, and all the twists and turns in the road from one to the other.\r\nWhy are people 'hiring' your product?\r\n\r\nLet\u2019s begin where your users begin: the situation they don\u2019t want to be in anymore. In the \u201Cpersonal trainer\u201D metaphor, this is the last time the person stares in the mirror poking at their flabby gut before finally deciding to do something about it. It\u2019s the specific, burning motivation that\u2019s driving them to adopt a new way of doing things.\r\n\r\nClayton Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator\u2019s Dilemma, calls this motivating situation the \u201CJob to Be Done.\u201D The essence of the concept is that products are acquired from a viewpoint very similar to a company opening up a position in their organization: recognizing that there\u2019s a need to grow or adapt, and addressing that need by making a \u201Chire\u201D to fix it.\r\n\r\nFor example, someone may encounter an \u201CI need to unwind\u201D situation after a long day at work and \u201Chire\u201D Netflix to help relieve some stress, or a startup may find themselves in a \u201Cwe need to be better at talking to our users\u201D situation with their product and \u201Chire\u201D\u00A0Intercom\u00A0to get the lines of communication flowing freely.\r\n\r\nFrustrating situations open up new \u201Cemployment\u201D opportunities, and intimately familiarizing yourself with them helps make sure your user onboarding nails the \u201Cinterview.\u201D You can\u2019t discover them through demographic research or behavioral data, however\u200A\u2014\u200Ain order to fully understand what drives your users, you have to go straight to the source with interviews.\r\nWho should be interviewed, and when?\r\n\r\n\r\nWhenever possible, interview people who have just crossed the finish line to becoming highly-engaged users. Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta, Jobs-to-Be-Done practitioners and co-founders of the Re-Wired Group, refer to this as the \u201Cswitching moment.\u201D\r\n\r\nIf you charge for your product, it\u2019s the moment people start paying. If you don\u2019t, you may need to come up with your own engagement indicator and use that as the point of introduction.\r\n\r\nWhy is the timing important? If you\u2019re approaching users before they\u2019ve made the switch, you run the risk of interviewing a lot of people who won\u2019t actually stick with your product.\r\n\r\nApproaching them too long afterward, though, means they\u2019re likely to have already forgotten what drove them to change things up to begin with.\r\n\r\nPeople who have recently switched are proven customers but still have the emotional memory of the whole process readily available for recall, which is exactly what you\u2019re looking for.\r\nWhere does their story actually begin?\r\nWhen conducting your interviews, try to keep the participants focused on their actual actions and feelings when making the switch. People are notoriously unreliable at predicting their future behavior and attitudes, so framing everything around what really happened (not what\u00A0usually\u00A0happens, or\u00A0could have\u00A0happened) during their onboarding experience keeps your emerging story tethered to the realm of reality.\r\n\r\nAsking for specifics also helps transport people back into the actual moment, which brings up lots of super valuable accessory details. Rather than asking them if they had an easy time with setup or not, get to specifics by asking which part was the trickiest, and deeply explore that moment.\r\n\r\nBy way of a real-world example, while someone might not have a lot to add to \u201Care you a safe driver?\u201D, asking them to specifically recall the last time they were pulled over would immediately thrust them into a story rich with emotional details.\r\n\r\nAlso, be sure to track every story\u2019s breadcrumb trail as far back as you can get your interviewee to remember. The narratives that lead up to our decisions can be surprisingly long\u200A\u2014\u200Amuch longer than the surface would show.\r\n\r\nA journey to a car dealership may at first seem to begin with seeing a newspaper ad, but after even a little bit of digging it could turn out to have really\u00A0started with a funny noise in the engine two months before. Onboarding always begins with the motivation to change, which always takes place before the user ever pulls up your site.\r\n\r\nIf your user onboarding story was a movie, your product itself wouldn\u2019t appear until long after the action was already underway (remember, the\u00A0user\u00A0is the star of this show, not you). Retracing their steps\u200A\u2014\u200Aespecially the ones before your product comes into the picture\u200A\u2014\u200Aprovides you with the context you need to kick the transition off right.\r\nWhat has to happen for the adoption to succeed?\r\n\r\n\r\nNow that the starting place is so well-explored, have your interviewee recount their steps forward all the way to the moment they became fully up and running with your product. It\u2019s very unlikely to have been a direct path, so encourage them to meander or head off on seemingly-unrelated tangents\u200A\u2014\u200Amany times, those provide the richest insights of the entire conversation.\r\n\r\nFor example, if your product\u2019s setup process needs the user to import a bunch of data for everything to be fully up and running, urge them to take the scenic route in describing every little detail of how they accomplished it.\r\n\r\nDid the numbers come from a spreadsheet? If so, was it in Excel or Google Docs? How many sheets did it have? Did they import the data by uploading the file or by pasting it in by hand? How did the numbers even get into the spreadsheet to begin with, and how long did it take to be populated?\r\n\r\nCataloging the external tedium involved in getting set up with your product not only provides you with plenty of low-hanging fruit for making the transition much easier for your new users, it also gives you a clearer picture of all the pressures they\u2019re dealing with that surround the (probably rather small) time they actually spend inside your product.\r\n\r\nIn fact, there\u2019s one kind of pressure that stands heads above the others, and goes criminally overlooked in most product strategies:\u00A0people\u00A0pressure.\r\nWho else has to be successful for the adoption to succeed?\r\nWhile it\u2019s crucial to understand what makes your \u201Conboardee\u201D tick, there\u2019s no need to stop there. People are social animals, and understanding an individual\u2019s motivations often requires understanding the motivations of those that surround them.\r\n\r\nNowhere is this truer than in the land of business software. Budgets need to be approved, technology needs to be reviewed, processes need to be changed, and colleagues need to be trained. Understanding what motivates the budget-holders and technology-reviewers in your user\u2019s life can help you ensure things get past all those surrounding parties as quickly and easily as possible.\r\n\r\nIf it comes up in interviews that their higher-ups wanted an explanation of why it\u2019s worth the investment, arming future users with a professional and credible PDF outlining the ROI of your product will beat leaving them to come up with reasons on their own every time.\r\n\r\nIf you frequently hear that the IT department nearly scrubbed the deal with their technical review, you can save untold others from the chopping block with a well-timed offer for a guided tour under the hood.\r\n\r\nAsk as many questions as possible about who applied pressure to the process, and what pressures those people were dealing with themselves. Teeing your user up for success doesn\u2019t\u200A\u2014\u200Aand shouldn\u2019t\u200A\u2014\u200Ahave to exist solely within the confines of your product\u2019s interface.\r\nGo forth and listen!\r\nThe insights for the basis of an exceptional user onboarding experience are out there, but won\u2019t fall into your lap from a Google Analytics chart or an open text box tacked onto an NPS survey. To uncover the real story\u200A\u2014\u200Athe powerful, driving, emotional one\u200A\u2014\u200Ayou have to access the person behind the user.\r\n\r\nIn fact, I want you to do this so much I\u2019m sharing a time-tested email of mine so you can get started right away. Send this to people the day after they become customers (or cross the engagement proxy):\r\n\r\n\r\nNot everyone will reply, of course, but I guarantee that some will, and the hardest part of interviewing\u200A\u2014\u200Agetting people to talk with you\u200A\u2014\u200Awill be covered. Once you have them on the line, make sure to remember these points:\r\n\r\n\tIn order for your onboarding to succeed, it has to make your users successful\r\n\tPeople sign up for products because they\u2019re frustrated with their current situation\r\n\tThe frustrations are the key early motivators, and are uncovered by interviewing people who have recently made the switch\r\n\tThe interviews should always skew towards real events and feelings, rather than abstract or presumed ones\r\n\tTrack the initial motivations back as far as possible, then move forward with as many specifics as possible\r\n\tTake the scenic route\u200A\u2014\u200Acolor commentary is a very valuable resource\r\n\tCatalog &amp;amp;amp; overcome outside stumbling blocks and hurdles, be they software or people\r\n\tThe story starts at \u201Cfrustrating situation\u201D and ends at \u201Csuccessful situation\u201D\u200A\u2014\u200Amake sure the dots all connect!\r\n\r\nInterviewing isn\u2019t easy, but it\u2019s a heck of a lot more enjoyable than pouring tons late nights and hard-earned dollars at a product that\u2019s sucking wind. Here\u2019s to your onboarding (and your users\u2019) success!\r\n\r\nFor more on how to approach your user\u00A0onboarding\u00A0design to maximize throughput and delight your users, check out the e-book\u00A0The Elements of User\u00A0Onboarding.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nRead next:\u00A0Effective Web messaging: How to say the right thing at the right time"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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