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User Onboarding

User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product. You need to balance the user experience of onboarding with the friction of necessary steps such as account creation, user education, and data gathering.

Definition of Success
A successful onboarding process can be defined as making the user successful not only within the scope of using your product but in whatever grander mission you have promised.

Sections:

Pre Onboarding 
Onboarding
Post Onboarding

1. Pre Onboarding

The users experience starts the second they have contact with BlikBook. That can be classed as landing on our website or the initial email if they’ve been cold contacted. There are some key questions to ask that can determine the eventual direction and success of the onboarding process.

Where has the user come from?
What have they done prior to this experience being initiated?
What device are they using?

As always, our situation is slightly different to the average user acquisition process.

Home Page > Value Proposition > Sign Up > Product

Our users come into the application via a multitude of ways and this is something that we have to keep in mind from the start. It’s also important we segregate our users into their respective groups.

Students
We know that the majority of our users are students and that the majority of these have come from either the lecturer importing them automatically or they've followed a sign up link from an email. This presents it's own problems as they are now essentially blind users. They have no previous knowledge of BlikBook, our perceived value, branding etc.

Lecturers
With lecturers, over 95% arrive on the site after some initial contact with the business development team. Often a lecturer hasn’t seen the website and will arrive at sign up after being sent an email with a link. Under 5% actually arrive at the site and self sign up without any involvement from the business development team. Another case of a blind user but the majority should have a notion of what the application is about after some interaction with the business development team.

Key Issues

Landing on sign up with no idea what the app is
Unsure why we need certain information from them
Coming from mobile devices as well as desktop

Proposals 
Reinforce the core of BlikBook on sign up
Split the value proposition for students and lectures at their respective sign up
Explain clearly why we need certain bits of data in the sign up
Align all copy from home page to emails to sign up


2. Onboarding 

Let’s presume that we have refined the sign up to include our key value proposition for users that have come to the app with little knowledge of the product. On entering the app, first time users will have some key questions;

What is this page?
What is this product?
What do I do now?

We need to answer these questions while educating the user on the core actions that provide the best experience for them while also allowing us to collect the necessary data to drive our product forward. Again we need to clearly define our two users here…

Students
The most important onboarding aspect from a business perspective is having a complete academic profile and a connection to their social network, specifically Google+ or Facebook group. From a product perspective the main actions that will allow them to be successful will be posting, replying and commenting on questions.

Lecturers
The most important on boarding aspect from a business perspective is importing students. From a product perspective we also know that having content by the lecturer is crucial to the success of a module.

Assuming they now have a high level overview of the values of BlikBook it’s now imperative that we define the value proposition alongside the key actions that we want to demonstrate. For example...

High Level Value Proposition = ‘Get help from your peers’ =  What does that actually mean?

Demonstrable Action = ‘Share an article’ = Ok, but why?

HL Proposition + Demonstrable Action = “Share an article to promote discussion within your module” 

Key Issues

User has a high level idea of value proposition but no immediately tangible benefits
Finding the right balance between our data needs and a creating a successful user
No immediate connection with how an action will provide a tangible benefit
User lands on the dashboard, not within a module, so onboarding splits over 2 states
User not always coming into an empty app. They could be joining a busy module.

Proposals

Define any differences between onboarding for mobile and for desktop
Define the core actions for a student and a lecturer
A mix of different onboarding processes such as welcome copy, hotspots and completion tasks
A static personalised welcome message, reiterating the value propositions and an explanation of the dashboard
Student - Create a post that either introduces themselves or a test post that only appears on their board and disappears after a set time
Lecturer - Make them create a welcome post or share an article. Provide stats to encourage them to post. 89% engagement rate if you post an article etc.

Student Key Actions

Complete academic profile (Business)
Link social network (Business)
Add module (Business. Also linked to academic profile)
Post/Embed (User)
Answer (User)
Comment (User)

Lecturer Key Actions

Import students (Business)
Post/Embed (User)
Answer (User)
Comment (User)

**I need to sit down with Stefano and map out the possible cases of entry for students and lecturers. What state they arrive in will determine the steps and hot spots.



3. Post Onboarding

There is a crucial period after a user has joined a module room that we need to utilise and transition them into a regular user. This relies heavily on the lecturer having some sort of activity within the room. 

Key Issues
They understand the app but there is no content
They forget about the app 


Proposals
Key actions to complete in follow up email
Action to complete a step if they have missed out
Student - A new post they could answer
Student - Statistics to entice back. 80% of your coursemates replied to this
Lecturer - Statistics to provoke a post. 75% of your module has viewed this question with no answer