Aligning Teams for Effective User Onboarding Success

Key Points

• Team collaboration is essential: Effective user guidance process requires product managers, customer success teams, copywriters, quality assurance teams, marketing and brand teams, customer service teams, and law, privacy and security Representatives and other relevant team members work together.
• Break down departmental barriers: Avoid information silos between departments and promote cross-departmental collaboration, which can simplify the guidance process, improve user satisfaction, and drive business growth. This can be achieved through regular communication, shared goals and shared guidelines.
• Focus on long-term indicators: Successful guidance strategies should not only focus on short-term indicators, such as free trials or website visits. Pay more attention to user retention and activation rates, and these indicators can better reflect the user's long-term participation and product success.
• Associate guidance with product goals: Studies have shown that effective user guidance is positively correlated with user retention and engagement. A smooth and educational guided process can help users continue to use the product and participate in its functions.

This article will explore the best user guidance conditions to ensure that the new product has the best start and truly serves the end user as expected.

User-guided Challenge

To form a team with different skills is essential to ensure that users have a good start. This team includes planners, designers, copywriters, user experience experts, client success people who directly help users, data analysts, technicians and project managers. When everyone works together, it helps to create a smooth and friendly start for users. Regular communication, shared goals and shared guides ensure everyone is in a consistent manner, making it easy to adjust and improve the first experience for users.

In most companies (usually large companies), there are either independent UX guidance teams (as an extension of the product team) or "diamond teams" composed of cross-functional teams. I was a member of HSBC WACAO’s world-class guidance team and had the honor of working with some of the world’s best designers and product staff. I also had the opportunity to work on the Michelin team and our mission was to guide dealers to use our new “Motorsport Forecast” product.

Working for these two brands, I have the opportunity to participate in the B2C and B2B scenarios. In both cases, the working mechanisms of guidance are very different. However, the following views of team members are very common:

• "Let's post first, and then we can learn user behavior because we're in a tight time."
• "Our products are very intuitive and do not require user guidance policies."
• "Our competitors do this, and we should do this, too."
• "We can better utilize our resources and make a quick video tutorial."
• "We don't know how users will use the product, so give them a complete product tutorial."
• "We will solve this problem in our next PI plan."

When the product team is in delivery mode, it has a subtle impact on customer experience, user experience and user guidance. This impact is more obvious in user guidance. Although everyone is guiding the work for users, there is no common understanding.

The consequences of departmental island-style user guidance

Silent operations of different departments within the company will hinder innovation and slow down the creation of effective user guidance processes. Usually, each department focuses on its own tasks: the marketing department creates user-guided emails, the product department makes UI adjustments, the sales department tries to upsell, the support department waits for users to contact, and so on. This fragmented approach can lead to incoherent user experience and miss opportunities for improvement.

Recently, I interviewed the internal product team to see how they guide new customers to their platform. Their products are a licensing as a service tool. The next day, after collecting all the notes from these discussions, I had a conversation with the product owner. I realized he had communicated a new user boot process to the team in an email.

By avoiding information silos between departments and promoting cross-departmental collaboration, companies can simplify user guidance processes, enhance user satisfaction, and ultimately drive growth.

To create a truly successful user-led experience, a cross-functional team must be convened, including representatives from all relevant departments. This collaboration allows everyone to share their insights and expertise, ensuring that the user guidance process is consistent with user needs and business goals.

User guidance requires a team culture that brings cross-functional stakeholders together, such as user experience professionals, customer success teams, product managers, user researchers, engineers, and others responsible for the day-to-day construction process of the product— Krystal Higgins, "Better User Guide"

Composition of user guidance team

The following is a detailed description of the role, purpose and goals of the user guide team:

1. Product Manager

   • Objective: Help new users quickly experience the value of the product.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Coordinate the in-app user guidance experience.
     • Set the user boot workflow.
     • Measure the user's feelings during the user guidance process.
     • Provide valuable user feedback to enterprises.

2. Customer Success Team

   • Objective: Ensure that customers can use the product successfully.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Contact new users who are having difficulties in the user guidance process.
     • Provide support and guidance for new users.
     • Collect feedback from new users to improve user guidance process.

3. Copywriting writer

   • Objective: Create clear and concise copywriting to help new users understand the product.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Compose user boot emails and in-app messages.
     • Develop a consistent tone and style for user-guided experience.
     • Ensure that user-guided copy is easy to read and understand.

4. Quality Assurance (QA)

   • Target: Identify and fix errors in user boot experience.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Test new user processes to ensure they are functioning properly.
     • Identify and report errors to the development team.
     • Provide feedback on the usability of user-guided experiences.

5. Market and Brand Team

   • Goal: Set realistic expectations for new users and ensure brand consistency.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Develop marketing materials that accurately reflect the product.
     • Set product expectations for new users.
     • Provide feedback on user-guided experience from a marketing perspective.

6. Customer Service Team

   • Target: Provide support for users who are having problems.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Answer new users' questions about the product.
     • Troubleshoot problems encountered by new users.
     • Provide feedback on user-guided experience from a customer service perspective.

7. Legal, Privacy and Security Team

   • Objective: Ensure that the user guide experience complies with all applicable laws and regulations.
   • Responsibilities:
     • Identify and review any legal, privacy or security requirements that may affect the user's guided experience.
     • Provide guidance on how to comply with legal, privacy and security requirements.
     • Approve any user-guided experience changes that may affect legal, privacy and security requirements.

Incorporating these people into your design process can help avoid unexpected needs – and may even lead to new advocates coming up to help you state your point of view.

As a UX designer, if you interview various stakeholders before the project begins, you will find that there are some different vested interests in the project. The same is true for user boot. People may have different ideas about how to design user guides, and that's OK. But what is really good for new users to get user-guided is that everyone on the team agrees with the most important goals.

Organization to start the meeting

Internal coordination is necessary so that you can get support from your leaders and guide everyone’s attention to the user’s guidance plan and goals. It is best to organize a workshop (in person or remotely) for all stakeholders at the beginning of product development to ensure that everyone agrees on a common goal.

The following are some questions to ask:

• How do we define user boot?
• Why is user guidance so important to the growth of our products?
• When will the user boot begin?
• Is it after the user has registered our product?
• When will the user boot end?
• How do we define a team or user that is successfully led?
• What are the biggest opportunities and challenges in our product user guidance?

Beyond the short-term vanity indicator

You are too focused on addressing short-term indicators when you ask users to read or watch any guiding content. These metrics are usually measured by the number of free trials, the number of independent visitors to the website, or the number of new people who have introduced the experience (often called "gets").

Others will measure the success rate of task completion for setup and process to tutorials to determine if the user experience meets the criteria.

All the above measurements cannot indicate that the user guidance process is healthy. They may be used to measure the effectiveness of their marketing or optimization of processes, but they fail to capture a larger picture of user-led—retention and activation rates.

Product teams may start by urging new users to sign up to increase acquisitions, but then they will see a sharp drop in overall retention because the requirements are beyond what people are willing to take. Typically, about 20% of users will pop out on the forced registration wall when the app first launches.

The following are some more specific examples:

• In 2012, Quora asked users to register before reading or writing answers. This change resulted in a 10% drop in traffic and a 5% drop in participation.
• In 2016, Medium asked users to register before reading more than two articles a day. This change caused traffic to drop by 20% and participation to drop by 15%.
• In 2017, LinkedIn asked users to register before sending more than 50 InMails per day. This change resulted in a 10% drop in traffic and a 5% drop in participation.

Connect user guidance with larger product goals

Repeated studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between user guidance and product success goals. Methods to measure user guidance success should be linked to a larger context of product goals—i.e. retention and engagement:

• Retention rate. How much people continue to use your product over time (days, weeks, or months).
• Entermination. How much people use your product’s features. It's like the time you spend playing your favorite video game.

The following are some findings from different studies:

• 80% of users said they deleted an app because they didn't know how to use it. (Source)
• 86% said that if the business invests in the guided content that welcomes and educates their users, they are more likely to be loyal to the business. (Source)
• 74% of potential customers will turn to other solutions if the user boot process is too complicated. (Source)

You may want to sell various things to your leadership:

• Invest in redesigning your user guidance process
• Switch from manual guidance to self-service guidance
• After successful pilot adoption of the sample market, expand your product to consumers
• Another item assigned to you

In these cases, the coordination of the team and the establishment of user-guided thinking are crucial to the success of the product.

Summary

When designing user-guided experiences, internal coordination of team members can proactively avoid unexpected needs and may win new advocates who support your career.

No team would appreciate the addition of late-stage screens to their tasks or the entire set of change requests that reflect carelessness in demand collection. The united front can prevent information silos between departments, thereby enabling simplified user guidance processes, enhancing user satisfaction, and ultimately promoting company growth.

Enlightening everyone to a common goal is essential for a successful and cohesive user guidance strategy.

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