There are theories about the best way to onboard users to mobile apps, but ultimately, there is no right or wrong way, and on-boarding needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis.
With our app, we’ve tested a couple of different experiences. In this post, we’d like to share with you some of the lessons learned in the process.
There are two leading options for on-boarding:
#1 – Keep it straight forward
Count on the product to be self-explanatory. This will reduce distraction for your new users and provide the fastest flow towards your main content and any calls to action (CTAs). This approach delivers a fast and straightforward experience.
#2 – Nice and slow
Start the app with an on-boarding flow and showcase the app’s main “claims to fame.”
This will enable you to educate your new users and help them understand what’s so cool about your app and how to best use it.
The first approach counts on existing user habits and knowledge, as well as curiosity, in hopes of providing a less distracting experience. The second approach is more supportive and helpful but requires more time and may distract some advanced users. Here’s how we approached on-boarding at Fiverr.
Our experiment:
At Fiverr® we launched our iOS & Android apps with our own interpretation of option #1. We created a Welcome screen, which showed different services popping, using a cool animation and a ‘Get Started ‘button to get users right into the marketplace.
We wanted to give our users a glimpse of the variety of services offered by using the animation (as seen below) and also to serve our brand needs with a slick UI. It worked nicely and delivered pretty good initial numbers. Our users apparently didn’t need too much explanations, at least we assumed they didn’t.
We also got some nice compliments from industry evangelists for the cool animations. All and all we felt good about and it worked nicely for our target early adopters, which were mainly existing users from the web.
After a few months, in which we were mostly focused on stabling our app and learning user’s behaviors, we finally got to the point where we could start thinking of optimizing main flows and test some of our paradigms.
We decided to A/B test a new on-boarding flow:
We created three views, which showed and explained the app main value propositions. We also added two buttons to these views: ‘Sign Up’ and ‘Sign In.’
The results were:
~35% increase in Registrations.
This shows that the benefits of option #1 weren’t that important for our users after all.
Lessons learned:
The increase in Registration is most likely connected to the fact that we offered the option to register right from the start. We were afraid that this might intimidate users in some way, but it didn’t.
Going for option #1 for on-boarding, or #2 is mainly a question of your target market. When we launched, the focus was on our existing users. They didn’t need too much information about Fiverr to get started with the app.
When we changed our focus to growth, it was the right time to add the new on-boarding, as new users require more guidance. There’s a time and place for each methodology.
Test!
We tested this extensively and are still testing it to see what works best. Be bold and test even when you’re not sure.
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