How to Improve App Onboarding Experience

A study by Appcues finds that 50% of user retention can be increased by an effective app onboarding experience. Onboarding is the process of introducing new users to the app and explaining the app navigation. It simplifies usability and offers a welcoming note.

Creating a smooth onboarding process requires adequate brainstorming. Much of it lies in analysing behavioural science.

Sounds complicated? We have made it easier for you. As a trusted mobile app development company, we have taken it on ourselves to elaborate on some of the best practices for designing a glitch-free and engaging app onboarding experience. Read the blog to the end to find all about it.

Enhance Your App Onboarding Experience: A Detailed Outline

Enable Personalization

If your app caters to a wide audience (say, from different parts of the world) or contains numerous aspects, you may want people to select their preference. For instance, they can select their preferred language or items they are interested in.

Suppose yours is a music app that contains different genre and folk songs from different places. Enabling the users to pick their favourite genres will help them to personalize the feed.

Through this onboarding element, you can also be enriched. It will help you to collect users’ data and get an insight into your audience’s preference. You can realize which aspect of your app interests the most audience, what are your users’ preferences, and so on. Later, if you consider engaging professional digital marketing services, you may utilize these insights to appeal to more audience.

Simplify the Process

Onboarding is the process of introducing people to your app. If it is complex in itself, people will simply bounce. To avoid such a scenario, it’s highly recommended that your app onboarding process is simple.

Make sure that the process can be accomplished within a minute – yes, that simple it should be!

Collect Only the Useful Data

In the first pointer, we mentioned how the app onboarding process helps you collect users’ data but don’t go overboard with it. Make sure that your app collects only useful data. For instance, if yours is a photo editing app, it may ask access to a camera at the beginning but asking for the users’ location is irrelevant.
You may also feature additional access like social network login later when the users are done editing their photo but the onboarding process need not introduce that.

Let Them Opt-Out

Today’s tech-savvy users are often familiar with app features and functionalities. Therefore, they may not be interested in wasting time in the onboarding process and dive right into the app.

Therefore, you can include a skip button so that the users can easily opt-out of the onboarding process.

Encourage Activity

Passively showing how your app works may not be the ideal option during onboarding. Instead, encourage the users’ activity by enabling them to interact with your app right from the beginning.
For instance, the app may request the users to drag an element, swipe a feature, tap on an option, and so on. It will give them a hands-on experience of getting introduced to the app. This also helps in improving user engagement.

Remove Friction

The onboarding process should be as smooth as possible. Even signing up is an introductory element and can be considered as a part of onboarding.

If the signup procedure takes a long time and effort from the users, they may invariably bounce. Try to optimize your app with a one-tap sign up with social media / mail login credentials or OTP verification. Your objective should be to offer a seamless user experience right from the beginning.

Indicate Progress

Today’s users are impatient – let’s get that straight. The last thing they would want is to wait a long time before they can get started. A progress bar indicating how many steps to finish the onboarding process will encourage them to stay hooked to it.

Many apps use dots to indicate the progress at the bottom of the screen. You may try that for your app as well.

A/B Testing

The best way to find out what appeals the most to your users is to listen to them. This is why the experts of mobile app development services recommend A/B testing as the optimal way to make any changes to the app.

It will help you to find out which variation is driving the most interaction from the users, whether they find the onboarding process easy, and more. You can also keep an eye on the users’ activities on your app. If you find most of them are overwhelmed at one point, consider showing a tutorial of it in the onboarding steps.

While A/B testing is a great way to analyze the users’ preference, you may learn more about how to track user behaviour on your app here.

Embrace Multiple Channels

We know the onboarding process is specifically about your app but you can always use additional channels to support it. For instance, welcome emails, in-app messages, push notifications, etc. will be great accompaniments for introducing the users to your app.

However, make sure not to overwhelm people with lots of messages or push notifications.

Wrapping Up
The app onboarding process can be a make or break deal when it comes to enhancing user experience. It may take some time to brainstorm the right onboarding experience for you. If you need professional help, consider engaging a mobile app development company. Their experience and expertise will surely direct you towards the right way.