Why Adding Friction to Onboarding Boosts User Engagement

Discover how adding friction to user onboarding can enhance product understanding and user experience. Learn from our experiment and see why making users take an active step might lead to higher engagement and better first impressions. Stay tuned for updates!

Why Adding Friction to Onboarding Boosts User Engagement
Created time
Jul 15, 2024 11:44 AM
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Publish date
Jun 3, 2024
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We Made It Harder for Users to Get to Their Aha Moment

Let's see how this goes...
From watching hundreds of user onboarding videos on Hotjar, we found that people signing up would click through our onboarding, almost mindlessly at times.

Observations

  • We had an option to add some example documents they could ask questions about (our docs).
  • What we found was that this meant people weren't being educated on how our product worked or its value.
  • Some users just saw the example docs as a CTA to get started and asking questions about their content, without having uploaded it!

Decision

We decided we would make them take an active step to find what they wanted to add (e.g. their company blog or a Wikipedia page).

Rationale

  • It goes against convention in that, not only are we adding friction, we are also giving them a chance to navigate away from our site.
  • Our hypothesis however is that those that do go to the effort have higher intent and will gain a better understanding and have a better 1st experience.

Conclusion

We'll keep you posted how our little experiment goes!

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Written by

Mike Heap
Mike Heap

Mike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.