There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing that someone has downloaded your app and then uninstalled it.
However, 80% of users will drop an app if they don’t understand how to use it, which is why usability is key. This is a critical part of the onboarding process, ensuring your customers are comfortable with your app from the moment they open it.
If you do not set up onboarding correctly, though, it can end up causing more harm than good. So, with that being said, let’s take a look at some of the top challenges of user onboarding for mobile apps and how to solve them.
Mobile application onboarding refers to the process of helping a user to get started with your app in an automated manner, enabling them to engage with your high-value features straight away.
You will typically achieve this via a welcome guide, which walks the user through the set-up process and explains the core functionality of your app.
You can read Appcues guide to mobile user onboarding for a more in-depth take on mobile onboarding and how it works.
There are a number of hurdles that you need to overcome to ensure an effective onboarding experience for mobile apps. Here are some of the common issues users face:
Now you know some of the common challenges users face during mobile app onboarding, let’s take a look at how you can perfect your mobile app onboarding process:
The first thing you need to do is establish a clear goal. This will make it a lot easier to measure how successful your in-app user onboarding process is. Make sure your objective is realistic and simple.
If you don’t have a clear goal to measure your efforts against, you are going to struggle to gauge whether or not your onboarding process is hitting the mark.
Once you have established a goal, it is time to start working on your onboarding flow and the kind of mobile onboarding method you would like to use.
Make sure that your onboarding flow is frictionless so that users do not need to think twice when navigating your app.
Your onboarding flow also needs to:
Contextual onboarding enables you to amend paths, so they match the user’s objective. For instance, if a user begins with a less popular feature, contextual onboarding enables them to discover it before they jump onto key features.
This kind of onboarding supports user segmentation and will give you the ability to exchange different messages with various groups of users.
Gather data regarding your first user group, and then you can consider how to make the onboarding process more personalized.
There are a number of different things you can use to segment users. This could be job title or user type. You can also segment users based on behavior patterns.
As mentioned earlier, focusing solely on the features of the app is not the best idea. Instead, you need to concentrate on the benefits and values of the features.
So, highlight the feature, but really concentrate on what value this will bring to the user.
These are the sort of questions you can ask yourself so that you view your app from the user’s perspective and what they truly want and need.
You won’t be able to improve the app onboarding process if you do not collect data so you can understand how users are experiencing your app.
Make sure you gather data on the experience users have and continually assess it so you can make intelligent decisions to improve the onboarding process.
To achieve frictionless onboarding, skippable options are a must. Ensure there is a ‘skip’ button and that it is visible.
We have seen numerous onboarding processes whereby the ‘skip’ button is barely visible. A lot of designers even do this on purpose because they don’t want users to skip through. However, not everyone wants their hand held throughout onboarding, so you need to cater to both options. Hiding the skip button is only going to cause frustration.
There are lots of different reasons why someone may want to skip through the mobile app onboarding process:
Our final piece of advice is to onboard mobile users in the same manner as online games do. If you have ever played an online game, you will know what we are talking about.
Games reveal pieces of information as and when needed. They do not overload people with information. They take people through elements and allow them to explore others on their own.
Also, if you enable the user to experience a product as early as possible in the onboarding process, they will not feel like they are being onboarded at all.
You can also use gamification. This helps to navigate a person through the onboarding process with the satisfaction of achieving goals along the way.
Think of different ways you can make the onboarding process more fun and enjoyable. The approach you use will depend on the type of app you create. However, you can start by brainstorming different ways to make the onboarding process engaging, competitive, and fun.
So there you have it: an insight into some of the most common challenges that people face when it comes to onboarding for mobile applications. We hope that the recommendations we have provided above will help you to create a seamless and effective onboarding experience so that you can reduce the number of instances of your app being uninstalled.
By Kerry Leigh Harrison