When building product tours or any other onboarding content for your app, it's important to begin by defining a goal. Ask yourself the following questions to help uncover the true motivation for building a tour:
What do users need to understand about my app before realizing it's value?
What key activity or milestone do users need to reach in order to gain that understanding?
After answering these questions, you should be ready to define a goal and build a tour that effectively drives users towards it. Let's walk through an example on a website called Vidyard. Vidyard is an online video platform for business which allows you to increase leads, accelerate your pipeline and delight your customers.
So, what do new users need to understand about Vidyard before realizing it's value? Well, the value of Vidyard is baked into all of the wonderful video customization, delivery, and analytics offered by it's various features. However, there's one common barrier that a user faces before unlocking the ability to use these features and truly recognize their value: They have to upload a video.
It's really that simple. For Vidyard, uploading a video is a clear goal that can make or break a new user's onboarding experience.
Now that we've defined our goal, let's build a product tour that drives users towards it. This is what the homepage of Vidyard looks like for a new user.
Here, users can upload a video by clicking the 'New' dropdown button and selecting 'Upload'. Instead of leaving that up to the user to figure out, we've built a short tour that makes it impossible to miss.
Now that we've created a tour, let's start tracking how effective it is at getting new users to upload a video. All we have to do is create a new goal called Uploaded Video that is completed when a user triggers the event: 'Uploaded Video'. If we use Segment for our analytics tracking, then we're most likely already sending this event to all of our analytics providers. In that case, we can simply enable Lou's Segment Integration and create our goal.
If we're not using Segment, we can still trigger the 'Uploaded Video' event from anywhere in our platform by calling the Lou track SDK function:
LOU.track('Uploaded Video')
With our goal created, we can simply attach it to our tour and begin receiving advanced insight into how effective our tour is at driving users towards uploading a video.
A few days later, we can check back in and see how our tour has been performing. There are four key metrics to focus on in the dashboard when goal tracking is enabled:
Completed Goal - The total # of users who have completed the goal associated with a tour.
Viewed Tour then Completed Goal - The # of users who started the tour and went on to complete the goal at a later time.
Completed Tour then Completed Goal - The # of users who completed the tour and went on to complete the goal at a later time.
Average Time from Tour to Goal - The average time it took users to go from starting the tour to completing the goal.
The following metrics are for demonstrative purposes and they do not reflect an experiment run with real user data.
In this example data, we can see that our onboarding tour has been really effective at getting users to upload a video right away! For instance, 150 users who uploaded a video did so after viewing our tour while only 15 got there without it. We can also see that users are going from signing up for a new account to uploading their first tour in roughly 2 minutes on average. If we had past data from before implementing our tour, we could even compare these metrics to see how much our activation rate has improved.
These insights are important in making sure that our new onboarding strategy is effective and they can also help us determine how to improve our strategy further. For example, if a large number of users are completing the goal without viewing a tour first there could be an opportunity to drive even more users towards the goal with a second tour that begins on a different page.
Before investing more time into your user onboarding strategy don't forget to set clear goals that will help you track it's effectiveness and identify new opportunities to improve on.
Published on December 21st, 2020
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