Comment by bibliographer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bibliographer | Hacker News Reader

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We are working on a B2B application right now and we're seeing 2 linked patterns we're looking to overcome:

-- one strong champion in the customer organisation that uses us actively, then changes jobs / goes on maternity leave / retires -> customer churns

-- a champion in the customer organisation does not find the time to onboard other users in their company, so the value of what we offer is smaller than it could be.

For us, getting more users onboarded and introduced to the value offering (we're calling it engagement) seems like a perfectly valid challenge to address — does not feel like a dark pattern at all, but is "useful and meaningful to the end users".

We're also tracking "engagement" with different features in the platform to help us decide on 1) onboarding gaps, 2) whether the features are any good (both, of course, then researched further with interviews). Here it also feels like our work qualifies under the author's core tenets.

I’m in exactly the same boat with my B2B SaaS — particularly with the champion finding time to onboard the rest of their team.

Our app takes a bit of setup time, and I put a lot of work into making a really user-friendly “onboarding guide”, basically a checklist of things to do to set up the account, accompanied by visual call-outs for each step in the UI.

Before we had this, we forced companies to complete the full setup before they could use the app… As you might expect, many just gave up.

But since adding our onboarding checklist (and changing our platform to assume lots more defaults, reducing the number of actions required to get started, and allowing it to be used “out of the box”), we now have a new problem: more companies are using us actively, but many of them never complete the full setup, so it isn’t fully tailored to suit them.

The checklist UI dismisses itself automatically after all the steps are complete (there’s only 5, and honestly it takes 2 minutes, but there we go). I often look at active user accounts over 6 months old, and so many of them are using us daily but with a big “Getting Started” checklist still following them round the site!

I guess that’s users for you… Not sure how to improve this, practically speaking — we’ve already reduced the checklist down to the bare essentials — but open to any ideas…

I'll reply to you, though there are a couple others in this comment chain that it seems relevant (but possibly not...) to - Airtable has one of the best API guides I've seen, because you can load it up in a table you already have, and it creates examples _with your table_.

So no longer do you have docs that say "suppose you want to create a new entry for a sedan, which can be either red or blue", but instead has content from your actual existing table.

It sounds like a small thing, but it greatly reduces that bit of cognitive dissonance/overhead ("why are we talking about cars, I want to update the contact options for this customer") when trying to learn a new system (especially critical for less tech-savvy users), so might be applicable to other products.

Personally I hate those getting started checklists. They tend to be full of a bunch of stuff I observably do not need to do to use the product for my job, because I never have to do them to do it.

I know in the past I've just ad blocked the UI elements for those lists because they contain things which don't matter - or worse, which I can't do because the organization has disabled that feature for regular users in the company.

I'd be pretty curious to know what's on your list - I bet even with 5 items, your data is probably actually telling you you might not need it at all.

Curious to know whether that checklist is framed in terms of things to do or benefits they would get. I would guess they would perceive it as less daunting if you present them with what they would concretely gain from doing the thing.

No idea what you'd do beyond that though... Maybe I introduce some competitive aspect, like "you're already more involved than 60% of our users. You can get to 90% with this"? Or translate it in terms of real value gained from finishing the onboarding? Idk

I noticed that you scare-quote "engagement", rightly so imo. Delivering value to the user is the end, engaging them to enable them to extract value is the means. "when means becomes an end" is a good description of the toxic dynamic of that occurs when engagement metrics are optimized at the expense of value delivered which plagues our industry today.

Maybe expanding the term to allude to this dynamic would justify dropping the scare quotes; 'valued engagement', 'value delivered engagement' or something.

We have the same issue in the B2B company I worked at.

Currently we're implementing strategies to reduce the barrier of entry by making the product onboard the new customer. We just started and we still have a long way to go but I think it's the right solution.

Reducing the cost of onboarding for the customer and making it easy to invite other member should help avoid churn.

I'd say it's about trying to design it in a way where they get maximum utility without any "onboarding". Of course there's a fine balance where a tiny bit of "onboarding" is helpful and feels natural, but examples of that are very rare.

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