There are many factors that contribute to an effective user onboarding experience. Clarity, focus, and personalization are some of the most important and most talked about elements you need to help your users understand how your product can solve their problems.
However, another essential factor that often goes overlooked is user onboarding time. Long onboarding processes risk boring your users and extending time to value (TTV).
A frustrating onboarding experience is also a terrible first impression of your product, and it can lead to decreased engagement and, ultimately, product abandonment. In other words, it's the exact opposite of what you or your users want from the onboarding process.
So, what can you do to reduce onboarding time and allow your users to get stuck into your app to achieve their objectives?
Thankfully, there are three psychological principles that every product should have up its sleeve to move the process along and secure loyal users. In this article, we'll share three strategies that you can use to get onboarding time down and product adoption up.
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#1. Hick's Law
Hick's Law is a psychological principle that is popular in user experience design. It's sometimes known as the Hick-Hyman Law because it was named after experiments in the early 50s by British psychologist William Edmund Hick and American psychologist Ray Hyman.
Between them, they discovered that:
The more choices you offer a user, the longer they will take to reach a decision.
Now, this feels totally intuitive to us. After all, who hasn't been paralyzed by choice? But how can we implement this knowledge in onboarding flows to make them quicker?
Applying Hick's Law to product tours
The big lesson from Hick's Law is that too much choice can overwhelm users and leave them struggling to make decisions. In the context of quicker onboarding, each second spent frozen by indecision adds unnecessary time to user activation. One of the best ways to implement this learning is through product tours.
Here are three key applications of Hick's Law that can inform your product tours:
1. Limit product tour features: While your app might be full to the brim with great features, showing them all at once expands the time and actions required for onboarding. The best approach is to list the essential features that deliver the most immediate value for your users.
2. Progressive disclosure: Another way that you can limit the possibility of your users being overwhelmed is by using progressive disclosure. As the name suggests, this involves building product tours that cover the basics of your app and slowly adding more complex interactive walkthroughs or other onboarding content as the user becomes more comfortable.
3. Contextual guidance: Reducing choice paralysis involves reducing options. However, there is only so much that you can strip back before you start excluding information that some users absolutely need.
Adding contextual guidance to your onboarding means that helpful content doesn't need to be in their face, but it does need to be within arm's reach. So, provide information and explanations in the spots where users need them most. It keeps your onboarding lean and quick but accommodates users of different levels of experience and competence.
#2. Fitts' Law
Next up, we have another law that was developed in the 1950s. This time, the name behind the law is psychologist Paul Fitts.
The concept was originally developed as a way to look at human motor behavior, particularly with an eye on airplane cockpit design. Fitts took the position that many accidents driven by human error involving aircraft were a consequence of poor user design.
Fitts wanted to find a way to measure human performance when operating this complex machinery. The simplified version of the law states that:
Larger targets are easier and faster to select than smaller ones.
Targets closer to the starting point are quicker to reach than those farther away.
While the law is simple, it has huge implications for many applications in interface design, such as:
Frequently used buttons should be large and placed in areas that are easy to reach.
Well-placed navigation and menu buttons make things easier and quicker for users.
Input fields, checkboxes, and submit buttons in forms are sized and positioned to optimize user interaction.
Tap targets on touchscreen interfaces should be well-spaced and large enough for easier navigation.
It's easy to see how this research has shaped UI principles because they are present in the products we all love and use.
Applying Fitts' Law to in-app notifications
Under Fitts' Law, the size and distance of a target define the user's speed and accuracy. From a design perspective, you can use this principle to make essential elements more accessible and noticeable. However, if you have a number of important elements, you could easily eat up screen real estate and overwhelm your users with clutter.
In-app notifications like tooltips and modals are an elegant solution to this problem. They allow you to communicate essential data without hurting your onboarding with information overload.
Some key tips for using in-app notifications in accordance with Fitts' Law include:
Think about the placement of tooltips and modals and ensure they're close to the UI elements that relate to the onboarding content.
Consider the size of your models and ensure they're big enough to grab your users' attention without obstructing the interface.
Use visual elements like color, contrast, bold text, pictures, or animation to ensure your content stands out.
#3. Zeigarnik Effect
The Zeigarnik Effect is another valuable piece of UX psychology thinking. It describes how unfinished or interrupted tasks seem to stick in our minds more than completed tasks. The phenomenon was formalized in the 1920s by the Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.
The story of how the Zeigarnik Effect was discovered is fascinating. The psychologist Kurt Lewin observed to Zeigarnik that waiters tended to remember unpaid orders better than orders that had been settled. This phenomenon intrigued Zeigarnik, who set off to find a formal explanation.
She devised a series of experiments involving puzzles that were deliberately interrupted. Subjects were almost twice as likely to remember the interrupted puzzles as they were completed puzzles. Additionally, the closer the puzzle was to completion, the more likely it was to be remembered.
This research has impacted a wide variety of fields, like marketing, task management, and, of course, education. But what can it tell us about user onboarding?
Applying the Zeigarnik Effect to Checklists
Checklists are one of the most interesting applications of the Zeigarnik Effect. Here are some of the reasons why:
1. Onboarding checklists are a proven way to break down complex tasks into manageable chunks. Using them for your onboarding flows anchors the checklist in your users' minds. It also, thanks to the Zeigarnik Effect, creates some tension from being incomplete, which compels users to finish the final steps.
2. Another common application of checklists is their ability to be structured toward an aha moment. You can think of them as a set of steps that funnel users toward seeing the value of your solution. Again, the human desire to tie up loose ends can work for your onboarding as it propels users to tick off each step and start solving problems with your app.
3. Checklists can also motivate users with the inclusion of progress indicators. As you might remember, one of Zeigarnik's observations was that the closer test subjects were to finish an interrupted puzzle, the more likely it was to stick in their minds. In other words, using progress bars in your checklist can help motivate your users to finish onboarding.
To pull all of this together, if you want quicker user onboarding, you can use the above to create a scenario where your user is keen to avoid the friction of an interrupted onboarding flow and, instead, get to the end.
Final thoughts
When users download your app, it's because they have a clear goal or a project they need to solve. Onboarding is necessary to help them solve that objective efficiently; however, if you're too thorough, you risk adding needless friction to their journey.
Popular UX psychology approaches like Hick's Law, Fitts' Law, and the Zeigarnik Effect can tell us a lot about human-computer interactions and how we can make things easier for users and accelerate onboarding speeds.