Immersiveness is an essential part of the best onboarding experiences. While popups and overlays work well in certain scenarios, seamlessly embedding onboarding elements directly into your product or webpage interface creates a natural and organic user experience. In fact, embedded guides generate 4x more engagements compared to other onboarding content, and users complete an average of 7.5 steps with an onboarding checklist—more than double that of overlaid content.
This article will explore what embeddables are, how they differ from other onboarding elements, and how you can leverage them to drive deeper user engagement.
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| Example of an embedded checklist from Microsoft Clarity |
What are Embeddables?
Embeddables are visual elements that sit directly inside the UI. Unlike overlays or widgets, these onboarding elements appear as if they are part of the program. The result is a user experience that feels natural, leading to better engagement and completion rates.
While widgets like modals and tooltips have their place in your onboarding flows, embedded elements offer an interesting option that doesn’t disrupt the user experience.
How do Embeddables compare with traditional widgets?
Embeddables and widgets have lots of similarities. However, they are distinct onboarding elements that you can use for different purposes.
What are widgets?
Widgets are UI elements like tooltips, modals, and popups. These visual tools float or overlay on top of products or apps to pass information to your users. Some of the use cases include making in-app announcements or guiding users on how to use features.
💪Strengths
Speed: Widgets are a great way to grab a user's attention. For example, you can use a tooltip to draw attention to a new feature and share some bite-sized information about how it's used.
Simple to implement: Widgets are typically quick and easy to add to your onboarding and often require minimum customization. Most onboarding platforms feature some ready-made elements that you can simply drop into your product.
Efficiency: Finally, widgets are a great option when you need to communicate something simple to your users. For example, you can use them to send one-off messages, such as “click here to get started.”
😞Weaknesses
Disrupts user flow: Widgets can interrupt the user's flow because they appear on the screen and require immediate action to clear from the interface. If your users are in the middle of completing a task, this situation can be frustrating.
Visually different: Depending on the platform you use, widgets can feel too external and visually distinct from the product. When UI elements look out of place, it can harm UX and reduce trust.
Limited scope: While widgets are ideal for sharing simple messages, they struggle with more complex engagement or guidance scenarios.
What are embeddables?
Embeddables are UI components that are integrated directly into the structure of your webpage or application. Some examples include embedded banners, checklists, inline guides, or progress trackers that feel like they are part of the product itself.
💪Strengths
Integrated design: Embeddables blend into your interface and match things like color, fonts, and layouts. This process results in a more immersive user experience that feels native to the platform.
Less intrusive: Embeddables offer a less intrusive type of user interaction. For example, you can design an embedded checklist that stays visible on the side as users work through their onboarding tasks.
Customization: Tools like Usetiful allow you to build embedded content that matches the look and feel of your product, thanks to high levels of customization.
Long-term engagement: Embeddables are a good choice for onboarding flows or ongoing campaigns because users can interact with them at their own pace.
What problems do Embeddables solve?
Embeddables are a solution to many common user onboarding problems.
User onboarding friction: Users engage with your app because they want to solve a problem or achieve an objective. Ironically, onboarding can temporarily get in the way of those objectives, even when you’re trying to give users the skills they need to engage with your app. Embeddable content doesn’t disrupt the user flow, giving you the best of both worlds.
Overwhelming onboarding experience: Another common onboarding issue is that users are met with an avalanche of information and features, meaning they become overwhelmed. Embeddables are part of a more subtle experience that allows them to learn at their own pace.
Better engagement: Embedded content results in higher engagement. Because they sit within the interface, users can engage with them on their own time without feeling rushed.
Low feature adoption: Many apps have underutilized features. The problem with these scenarios is that users don’t realize the full value of their app, which can result in user churn. Embeddables are a reliable way of promoting new or underused features.
Why can Embeddables give you an edge?
Using embeddables as part of your onboarding content offers a few distinct advantages. Let’s take a look.
#1. Deeper integration
Embeddables blend perfectly with the design and layout of your app or website. By comfortably sitting inside your solution, your onboarding content is essentially indistinguishable from the broader product, ensuring a more holistic user experience.
#2. Better engagement and user adoption
Embedded onboarding content feels like another part of your product. As such, users are more likely to engage with the onboarding material, which helps them become more familiar with your product.
Indeed, research from the onboarding tool Bento suggests that embedded guides outperform tooltips, modals, and overlaid content in a few different domains.
Firstly, embedded guides produce 4x more engagement when compared to other onboarding content. Additionally, the average steps completed with an onboarding checklist is around 7.5, more than double when compared with overlaid content.
#3. Personalization and customization
Finally, embeddable helps brands offer more tailored onboarding experiences because they are flexible enough to work around different apps.
Embeddables in Usetiful
Unlike most other digital adoption platforms on the market, Usetiful offers two different types of embeddable onboarding content to wow your users.
Let’s take a look at what they are and how they work.
#1. Embedded banners
Embedded banners are discreet, integrated visual elements that slot neatly into the user interface. They are an alternative to pop-ups and models because instead of disturbing the user experience, they blend right into the page layout and feel like a native part of the program.
Some of the benefits of embedded banners include:
Allow teams to communicate important messages without disrupting user flow.
When users are trying to achieve goals within the app, they have a tendency to dismiss overlays. Contextually placed banners are more noticeable, leading to more engagement.
Banners can remain a permanent feature that can’t be removed until users interact with the content, ensuring critical messages are received.
The right onboarding tool allows you to customize banners so they fit with the app, giving your users a consistent look and feel.
💡Ways that you can use embedded banners to improve onboarding
Promoting features: If you have underutilized features in your app, you can trigger banners in relevant sections to urge users to try out (and hopefully adopt) these features.
Campaign announcements: If you have promotional campaigns, discounts, sales, or more, you can announce them in your app without excessively disrupting the user experience.
Nudges: Nudges are a subtle yet effective way of getting your users to complete desirable actions. For example, you could use a banner to push users back toward an onboarding flow if they’ve gotten off track.
#2. Embedded checklists
Embedded checklists are integrated step-by-step guides that sit inside the user interface. These UI elements can guide users toward setting up accounts, learning workflows, or using particular features.
Let’s look at some compelling reasons to use embedded checklists.
Guided user onboarding: Checklists help break down complex onboarding flows into more manageable, bite-sized chunks.
Better task completion: Checklists use psychological principles like the Zeigarnik Effect to encourage users to finish what they’ve started. The result is more task completion and greater familiarity with the features that make each product worthwhile.
Contextual help: Teams can tailor checklists around particular workflows that help users reach their objectives or achieve their aha moment within the product.
Seamless integration: Embedded checklists appear as a permanent part of the product, which gives them an edge over traditional external widgets or overlays.
💡Ways that you can use embedded checklists to improve onboarding
Onboarding new users: Checklists help provide targeted and precise onboarding flows that you can use to encourage signups or trigger product tours that help teach users how your app can give them value.
Feature adoption: You can use checklists to bring attention to various features in your app. This process means your users see the full value of your app.
Flexibility: You can also build your checklists around reaching particular goals within your app, especially tasks that are associated with long-term user adoption.
Both embedded banners and checklists use visual elements and progress tracking to help users navigate your product. When done right, you can create onboarding experiences that feel natural and intuitive while boosting user satisfaction, retention, and feature adoption.
Final thoughts
Great onboarding flows result from understanding your products, users, and the overall design of your app. They require a mix of approaches, like walkthroughs, tooltips, knowledge bases, and embedded content like banners and checklists.
Usetiful stands out from its competitors because it offers highly customizable embedded content that looks and feels like it’s part of your app. To find out more, get started for free today.