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Onboarding and product tours in SaaS: odds and benefits
Hey everyone,
The question to SaaS services makers:
Do you use any onboarding and/or product tours? What tools do you use for that and how does it help your business and your customers?
And, specifically, do you use videos in those two – and why?
Doing a research on that problem to see if we can make a solution. Cheers!
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Narciana Alburques
I am currently not using onboarding services in saas.
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@narcianaalburques Hey! Thanks for replying :) You don't see a need for that or is there anything that stops you?
Upfront: I'm building a different approach to note-taking & task management (yeah, another one. It's different because it blends bullet journal style journaling with a powerful link engine. Think of it as a journal for notes & tasks with a kind of Workflowy engine inside). The app is very minimalist but built to scale. It quickly became clear that once people use it a lot, they start to get it and suddenly use it intensively. But most new users bounced before reaching that point.
So we've tried various ways of onboarding. At first, to keep it simple, we tried demo content with usage examples. Worked a bit but quickly became outdated when the app changed. Also, user interviews revealed that it was way too wordy. No one wanted to read that much.
Then we tried a full-fledged tutorial, with images & text. Explaining a lot of the main concepts of the app. Also here, people rather wanted to try out the app themselves instead of reading a manual in disguise.
We ended up with short videos on repeat for the mobile app and a four-step interactive tutorial for the web-app. The final vote is still out, but it seems a quick, interactive onboarding tutorial seems to work best.
The biggest lesson learned was to not try to show everything, but rather to spark interest and then let the user explore on their own.
@christianheine Hey! Thanks for such an elaborate reply. That's interesting that mobile and web onboardings are different. Gonna look into that!
Also, I'm checking your app right now! I'm in a dire need of some consistent and useful task-management but so far I did it in an old school way (mostly paper notebook plus some Notion pages for collective tasks)
Looks awesome! Let me know if you need any feedback :)
@marie_dostoewskaya Regarding the onboarding: You're very welcome. Hope it helps.
Regarding Faden: Awesome. Yeah, just give it a try. For most people it only starts to make sense once they use it for a while (e.g. the onboarding does not show you that you can add labels or that you can easily create sub-items. It simply got too much). We are working on a blog post to explain the reasoning behind the zen-like interface and also create a video which explains how to effectively use the app.
And if you'd like a personal intro, let me know. I really enjoy talking to both fellow makers as well as new users. Cheers!
@christianheine I definitely would love that! Add me on fb? It's Masha Dostoewskaya and I'm wearing a red hat there on a profile pic :)
Hi We do not currently use onboarding services in saas but I kwow User Pilot!
@adrian_pradilla_portoles Hey! Thanks for a reply.
A question, then: do you think there's no need for your service to have an onboarding or is there anything that stops you from having one?