Great user onboarding experiences are the culmination of a few well-thought-out strategies. User onboarding checklists are essential to that approach because they provide an engaging and structured way for users to begin their journey with your SaaS product.
But how can you build a user onboarding checklist that really connects with your users and drives product adoption, customer satisfaction, and retention?
Read on to find out.
What are user onboarding checklists?
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Before we share our user onboarding best practices and tips, it’s worth defining the meaning and purpose of user onboarding checklists for anyone who is unfamiliar with the topic.
User onboarding checklists are tools that help guide users through their initial interactions with your product. Typically, they consist of a set of tasks or actions the user should take to familiarize themselves with the product and some of its features.
Checklists appear in apps in different formats, such as:
Pop-Ups.
Sidebars.
Progress bars.
Checklists can link to a wide variety of onboarding content, such as product tours and walkthroughs, videos, help articles, or text.
What is the psychology behind user onboarding checklists?
It’s no coincidence that many SaaS products use checklists. Indeed, there is a lot of compelling psychology around why checklists work for onboarding, including:
Cognitive offloading frees up our working memory, allowing us to focus on the bigger picture.
Checklists use the “Goal Gradient Effect,” which describes how our motivation increases as we approach the end of a task.
According to the Zeigarnik Effect, unfinished tasks make us anxious. Checking off tasks, on the other hand, makes us feel good.
How to build a killer user onboarding checklist for your SaaS product
One of the best things about checklists is that they break large amounts of information into manageable, bite-sized chunks. So, it’s only right that we take a similar approach to showing you how to build an effective product onboarding checklist.
Let’s break it down into five simple steps.
#1. Understand your user onboarding goals
Before you start putting together your user onboarding checklist, you need to think about your objectives. In other words, you should be clear about what your checklist should achieve within your SaaS product.
Establish a measurable goal for your checklist. Some common objectives include:
Reducing churn rates.
Guiding users toward your product’s “Aha Moment.”
Reducing customer support costs.
Speeding up time-to-value (TTV).
Increasing user engagement.
Upgrading to a paid plan.
Whatever your particular goal, ensure that it’s at the forefront of your mind when you design your checklist.
#2. Connect objectives to metrics
Once you’ve outlined what you want to achieve with your checklist, it’s time to map your goals to some metrics. The idea here is that you have an objective way to measure the success of your checklist, which means you can adjust or optimize your strategy for maximum effectiveness.
Some of the goals and their related metrics that you can use include:
#3. Know your users
The next thing you need to do is think about the different people who use your product. Some of the questions you need to ask include:
Why do users need your product?
What problems are they trying to solve?
How tech-savvy are they?
What information do they need to use your product successfully?
The answers to these questions, when married to your established metrics from #2, should give you a good idea of what type of content your checklist should include.
Remember, if there is a lot of diversity of goals, pain points, and experience within your target audience, consider using an onboarding solution that allows you to personalize your onboarding content and flow via user segmentation and condition steps.
#4. Designing your user onboarding checklist
Now for the fun part: building your user onboarding checklist. While much depends on your product, users, and objectives, there are a few key things that you need for your checklist.
Let’s break them down by objectives.
Welcome checklist
Onboarding checklists are an opportunity to get things off on the right foot with your users. You can use your checklist to send a personalized message to your user, and help them set up their account.
Some options here include:
Setting up your account.
Verify your email.
Complete your user profile.
Set preferences.
Watch a product tour.
This simple checklist flow is an efficient way to collect user details and ensure they’re ready to use your product.
Setup checklist
Some SaaS products are complex and require extensive setup and integration with other tools in your software stack. If that sounds like your solution, you can build a checklist that gets your users connected.
Some ideas here include:
Integrate other tools.
Upload or connect to data sources.
Customize your dashboard.
Again, this is only necessary if you have a product that relies on integration with other apps or connection to data sources.
Key feature checklist
Perhaps the most common type of checklist flow involves guiding your users to engage with key features.
Again, this checklist involves understanding why your users want your product in the first place. So, try to tie in key features with user needs or pain points.
Some of the checklist entries you can include here are:
Take 2-3 core features of your product.
Link each entry to a product tour or walkthrough.
Ensure your product tours funnel users towards interaction with each feature.
Aha moment checklist
The best checklists shepherd your user toward their aha moment with your product. Building an aha moment checklist requires understanding not just what the aha moment is for your user, but also the shortest, most frictionless path they can take to get there.
Let’s use Figma as an example. It’s an interface design app that allows teams to design and prototype interfaces. However, its aha moment comes when users realize how adept it is at collaboration. So, if you wanted to build a checklist for Figma, it would involve something like:
Introduction to key features.
Prompt the user to start their first project.
Share their project with teammates.
From there, they’ll see the collaborative power of the app and understand the utility of the tool.
#5. Track the metrics that matter
In point #2, we looked at the various metrics that you can use to track the quality of your onboarding content. Closely monitor each metric to see how your checklist is performing, and make adjustments along the way.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and your checklist will be perfect from day one. However, in most cases, the best checklists are a result of iterative, data-driven improvements. So, get out there and get started.
User onboarding checklist best practices
Before you start making checklists a big part of your user onboarding, it’s worth exploring some checklist best practices to get you on your way.
Here are five of the best.
Keep things simple: Simplicity is key when it comes to onboarding checklists. A large, complex checklist can be intimidating for users, even if it’s broken down into small chunks. When it comes to onboarding, more is less!
Use plain copy: It’s not just your checklist structure that needs to keep it simple. The copy you write should be easy to read, and free from jargon or technical terms.
Gradual disclosure: As we said above, the best checklists include essential information only. However, once the user has completed their basic orientation, you can slowly introduce a more complex checklist.
Offer an out: While onboarding checklists are important, they’re not for every user. Always ensure that your user can skip the checklist, should they choose.
Engagement is everything: Spice up your onboarding content with images, videos, product tours, and other interactive elements to boost engagement.
Gamification: Add rewards, badges, or progress indicators to motivate your users to complete the checklist.
How Usetiful helps build next-level user onboarding
User onboarding checklists are a big part of Usetiful’s onboarding toolkit. You can build checklists by combining various product tours or links to videos or your knowledge base. Best of all, you can target and customize your checklists, meaning tailored-made onboarding for all your user segments.
If you want to make checklists part of your SaaS user onboarding strategy, start for free today with Usetiful.