If you, too have experienced this confusing stage trying to understand more about a product as a user, this should tell you something about what users expect and want during this process. Driven from this perspective, you need to understand how to give these users a sense of direction while they're interacting with your product and experiencing their initial user onboarding process.
And how?
The answer is a Product Onboarding Checklist.
Let's go if you're ready.
What Is a Product Onboarding Checklist?
A Product Onboarding Checklist, at its core, is a way of enabling your customers to understand your product better and appreciate what it offers.
Basically, what you do here is show your users the advantages and key benefits of using your product every day.
With the help of step-by-step tutorials, brilliant guidance, and milestones along the way, your product onboarding is meant to become informative, innovative, and effortless.
This is why you have checklists. To make sure this continuous process works smoothly and doesn't lack any crucial aspect, it makes sense, doesn't it?
If you ignore or choose not to go with product onboarding materials, your process is likely to become difficult to navigate or be found too complicated by users. Speaking of which, let's elaborate on this a bit and talk about why exactly you should use these checklists in your onboarding flows, shall we?
Why should you use checklists in your onboarding flows?
A checklist is exactly what it sounds and seems like. It's basically a list of things to do that you create and assign your users to complete. The way it works is quite simple as well; your users need to complete these onboarding tasks as a part of their onboarding process, and as the checklist items included get marked off the list, they become completed, and each user is now able to see their progress.
So, what are the key takeaways?
Well, the most obvious benefit of a successful onboarding checklist is that it demonstrates the process and provides efficiency in that it has a positive impact on users, employees, clients, whoever the subject is. It increases engagement, encourages participation, creates a sense of involvement, and informs on an interactive level.
It also helps minimize mistakes as it creates a more organized way of working and helps get things done efficiently, reducing the chances of wasting time and distraction caused by workload-related stress.
4 Examples of Product Onboarding Checklists That Work
1- Asana
Being one of the household names in project management tools, Asana manages to win hearts by offering a certain advantage -it’s adaptable in a way that fits in exactly with your needs – and several key features and training materials:
- Board projects
- Detailed reporting
- Progress tracker
- Personalized inboxes
- A dashboard and search engine
and more.
So, how does a successful platform like Asana practice product onboarding checklists?
In a very efficient way, I guarantee you.
With their project onboarding activities, which include several key steps to inform and educate the users about the product, the platform once again proves the importance of the exploration and adoption processes of new features and how they can be transformed into a positive experience that leads to improvement in retention.
Here's a quick look.
With this engaging onboarding checklist that instantly pops up with the first task being already marked off as complete, Asana encourages and motivates its app users to adopt the feature, learn more about it, interact with it, and appreciate it, rather than bypassing the whole onboarding process and jumping right into using the feature without having an idea about what it is and what it does, thus failing to reach the 'aha moment'.
2- Skedsocial
Skedsocial is an all-in-one visual marketing tool primarily created for brands, agencies, and businesses to help them create and share aesthetic content with the help of social media marketing.
Their target audience mostly consists of Instagram bloggers, content creators, and influencers, so as you can imagine, they're quite fun to work with.
Like everything else they do, the way they provide their checklist is also engaging and a joy to be a part of. They're great providers of personalized checklists that manage to reflect the company culture or the overall company mission and soul; you can see what I mean once you take a look at this:
Do you see how they use emojis to insert a bit fun elements into their checklist? And pay attention to how fearless they are when it comes to using informal language to make their checklist user-friendly and as welcoming as possible.
I also find it worth mentioning that they pick and use words efficiently instead of bombarding them with many texts that are hard to read and follow because that is actually all it takes to inform and engagingly educate your users.
3- Evernote
A problem with checklists is that they are usually found overwhelming by the target viewers and are abandoned in the middle of the process because of the same reason. This is because people are usually experiencing troubles and hard times getting started with complex tasks from scratch simply because they find them time-consuming, valueless, or simply difficult.
And this is why it's important to offer your users a quick takeaway from the beginning. For motivational purposes, you know.
With this way, you will be providing your users with that tiny bit of driving force they need to carry on working through the rest of the assignments given on the checklist.
Let's see what Evernote did to make this happen.
As can be seen above, from the very beginning, Evernote shows a ''Create your first note'' as the first item on the checklist, then makes it extremely easy to complete this first task.
This kick-off with a quite simple and easy-to-complete task is actually more than it seems since it allows Evernote users to become informed and introduces them to the platform's primary and most important feature: note-taking.
4- Storychief
Before going further, let's talk about what else should a proper checklist needs to include.
We have talked about how it needs to provide a clear direction of actions that will help your users understand how to interact with your product. What I would like to add here is that product onboarding checklists have a deeper psychological impact on your visitors as well.
How is this possible?
First of all, product onboarding checklists provide an indication of how well your app users are doing in terms of experiencing your product. As a result of this, they're provided with numbers and percentages of their continuous process, understanding and psychically tracking their progress and how much they have completed so far.
Similarly, it demonstrates progress, showing the progress bar steadily moving closer to the end and motivating your users to keep going until there. Seeing instant reactions to their actions will encourage your users to keep going forward.
Let's see Storychief's practice of what I have been talking about just now.
If you too have a lot of information to expose your users to via your onboarding checklist, you can also make use of progress bars just like Storychief and insert them into your checklist, preventing your users from ignoring the list simply because it is overwhelming or difficult to handle.
Now that you have a clearer idea of what to expect from a product onboarding checklist let's now get to the part where you learn how and where to create them.
Best Tools to Create Product Onboarding Checklists With
1- UserGuiding
With UserGuiding, at an affordable price, you can benefit from fully customizable and non-tech-friendly onboarding checklists that will help you improve your overall customer experience and offer brilliant service as a result.
With a 14-day trial, you can now join 9,000+ teams in their journeys of creating better experiences for their users and achieving business goals every single day.
Here's what others say about it:
2- Appcues
And it's also one of the great providers of onboarding checklists, making them efficient enough to guide new users through complicated and detailed onboarding processes.
What makes Appcues special is that the tool actually manages to motivate users by offering rewards in exchange for progress and makes sure all the results and performance statistics are tracked and shared with each user.
With Appcues, you can customize your checklists and make the necessary adjustments to create a relevant experience that reflects your product and keeps being informative in the meanwhile.
Here's what others think about it:
3- Userflow
With this tool, you can give your users a sense of progress, devotion, and fulfillment, which are all essential when it comes to getting them to interact more with your product and take more part in its processes.
In the platform, visitors are instantly provided with a 'how-to' guide that explains how to get started with creating checklists.
Here's what it looks like:
4- Userpilot
It's a cloud-based product experience platform primarily designed for customer success and product teams to onboard new users and boost product adoption with the help of convenient results gained from close observation.
This tool is specifically great for creating efficient and to-the-point checklists since it makes it easier than ever to form, utilize, store, and share them. The platform opens with a detailed guide that shows the definition of checklists and continues with their creative process.
Users interested in creating these checklists will be more than satisfied with the results they get once they encounter this tool!
