In SaaS products, onboarding is a key part of helping users get started quickly and reduce churn rates. However, the design and implementation process of newbie guidance often faces many challenges, such as low user conversion rates and poor content quality, which often lead to product teams falling into the dilemma of “backstabber”. From the perspective of data products, this article delves into the core objectives, practical steps, and common pitfall avoidance strategies of beginner guidance.
You obviously do the novice guidance, but once there are customers who don’t know how to use it, someone will come and say that there is a lack of novice guidance. You have done a lot of relevant research, once the user conversion rate is not good, some people will accuse that the newbie guidance is not in place, and the user will not use it. You have seen a lot of novice-guided plans, but in the end you will still be dumped……
As a data primary school student who has been in the data product industry for many years, in my daily work, especially SaaS products, I often come into contact with the demand to be guided by novices. The purpose is to hope that after successful registration, users can enter the product through some guidance to let users follow the expected path and complete several goals for novices to come in.
There are many different carriers for beginner guidance, such as introductory pop-ups, task guidance, page hovering, Toturials, intelligent AI Q&A, etc. Many products often learn about the different solutions guided by these novices when doing research, but after the final launch, they will still be complained that the effect is average and still needs to be strengthened. This is probably something that many backstabbers often encounter. Today’s article wants to break down with you in detail how to do a good job in novice guidance, and how to solve and respond to various problems for novice guidance in the team.
What is onboarding?
The purpose of novice guidance is to allow users to be inFirstQuick establishment during useAwareness of the product, and get startedFunctional operation, reducing user churn in the process.
The newbie guidance core needs to solve three problems:
First: what we want to convey: That is, what information needs to be passed on to the user.
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Usually in the novice guidance scenario, the conveyed message will includeThe core value and core function of the product、Built-in best practice sampleinformation, etc., are all hoped to be conveyed to users, so that users can use product functions with a lower threshold.
Second: How to guide to reach the target scenario: How to complete the corresponding task process after the user sees the conveyed information.
That is, the guidance from the landing scene to the target functional scene. Here it is necessary to combine the different information conveyed to make corresponding guidance.
Third: How to use the target function with a low threshold。 When users reach the target scenario, let users use the product with a low barrier to threshold.
After thinking about these three questions, we can get into practice
Novices guide practice
Step 1: Define your user demand scenario
All product design is inseparable from the three elements of the product: user, demand and scenario. In practice, when defining users, you can define them with two layers of policies
Level 1: Generalized users, that is, suitable for most products. Here we only need to define some user characteristics for a new user, and combined with the user characteristics, we can define what we want for this type of userWhat message to convey
For example:
The second level: that is, to do role-based user scenario breakdown based on your product positioning. The main purpose of this layer is to use the how, after clarifying what message needs to be conveyedto guide users to target scenarios and lower thresholds to use products.
For example, for data development products, there will be many target roles. For example, it can be split into development roles, data source management roles, operation and maintenance roles, etc., and if enterprise attributes are added, it can be further divided into individual development roles, enterprise development roles, etc.
For the development role, the focus is on how to create development tasks, test, and submit scheduling into the product; The Data Source Management role focuses on how to create a good data source link.
The meticulousness of user role splitting determines whether the product manager’s coverage of user scenarios is wide enough. Here everyone can sort it out in combination with their own products.
Step 2: Research, research, research
There are too many product designs guided by novices, such as pop-ups, page floats, tips prompts, document bots, etc. I won’t talk about them one by one here, I believe there are a lot of articles like this. In this step, what I want to tell you is the logic behind the research, which is the so-called teaching people to fish is not as good as teaching people to fish.
Product research is not simply about understanding the product mentality, but more importantly, understanding what is the driving force behind this product form, that is, pushing it backwards to the user demand scenario. This is exactly the same as the first step, that is, when we finally design the product plan, how to match and optimize the design one by one with the researched form.
For example, the most common pop-up window in newcomer guidance is the entrance pop-up, which is usually perceived by users in a relatively strong way. Therefore, the target user group behind it is aimed at those who do not know what the product is, let them know the core capabilities of the product, and guide users to perform corresponding operations.
Step 3: Product plan
After defining the previous ones, you can directly design the solution based on your own scenario. I won’t introduce too much here, you can design it yourself. If you have any questions, you can leave me a message.
Pitfall Avoidance Manual
Resolutely don’t be a backstabber.
Novice onboarding seems to be a small demand scenario in the product, but there are often many characters who want to come and mix in, which is probably the biggest headache for daily SaaS product managers. Especially when the product team is in a relatively weak position, it often falls into a situation where others do what they say.
At this time, how should we respond?
Before doing novice guidance, you must align with several characters to clearly define the goal, and resolutely do not commit to novice guidance. Several typical scenarios must be avoided:
Big pit 1: The low user conversion rate is due to poor novice guidance
This is the longest debate scenario in SaaS products, whenever the user conversion rate is low but the operation department does not have a good idea, it often pushes this pot to the novice guidance. It is undeniable that for SaaS products with thresholds, novice guidance has played a positive role in allowing users to quickly understand and use the product. But whether the guidance is done well or not is not directly related to conversion. It can only be said that the novice guidance is done well, the user experience is excellent, and it can intervene in user decision-making. It’s just a small link in the user’s conversion path.
Big pit 2: The content quality is not high
If your onboarding involves content information, such as guiding users to a scenario-based function (such as toturials), or guiding users to watch a video, etc. All you do is the guidance framework you are responsible for, and if the specific content quality is not good or the preparation is insufficient, it needs to be optimized by the corresponding role based on the user buried data.
Of course, if you are responsible for making content, then please combine the above practical steps to think clearly about the content, guidance to use, and ensure that every link is effective.
