The Abuse of Product Experience Layer & Product Onboarding.

Right now, product experiences and the messages we’re showing inside our products are more important than ever before.

Customers became picky, there’re a lot of similar tools on the market, and customer acquisition cost grew over time.

That’s the reason why a product-first approach in user acquisition, activation and retention must be implemented if we want to survive this cruel times and marketplaces.

Because of that, we should pay attention to our product experience layers — since, soon enough, they are going to be the main drivers of growth.

But, making perfect product experience layers that are able to improve trial-to-paid conversion, increase product engagement, and retain more users isn’t easy.

There are a lot of rules and user onboarding best practices you should follow.

In this article, we’re going to see how different companies are abusing product experience layers, and what they can do better in order to improve their conversions and activation rates.

But, before we see the actual example and learn from it, let’s see what are the main aspects of user onboarding.

This will help us to better understand the mistakes behind these product experience layers and learn from them in a more efficient way.

Let’s get started.

How to deliver a perfect product experience with user onboarding?

User onboarding is the process of onboarding your trial users and making them adapted to your product.

In other words, user onboarding is using different product experience layers and in-app events to drive engagement and activation rate with your trial users.

The era of “long tailored product tours across the entire product” is gone.

No one should use that as the “user onboarding” tactic anymore.

People became less interested and picky about everything. There are 100s of solutions for each tool type, so they can choose whatever they want. Even if your product is better than others on the market, people can choose your competitors — only because you didn’t catch their attention at the beginning.

Long product tours across the entire product are dull and boring. No one wants to take them.

Even if someone goes through them, chances that they will remember more than 10% of what you said is almost zero.

Instead, the era of subtle user onboarding is here.

Subtle user onboarding is the process of onboarding your trial users through the subtle and non-intrusive way.

In other words, subtle user onboarding doesn’t force users to “take the onboarding tour” and it doesn’t have long tailored product tours.

Instead, it uses the subtle ways of engaging with trial users and adopting them.

What does that mean?

It means that, instead of the long product tours, subtle user onboarding consists of a set of smaller 2–4 step product tours that are dedicated to some particular features, not the entire product.

It also means that product experience layers are triggered by the user’s behaviour and context.

Let’s take an email outreach tool for example.

At the moment when you create an account, some email outreach tools will take you across the entire SaaS product — in a couple of minutes, they will show you how to import lists, how to write emails, how to use templates, how to send emails, how to schedule them and a bunch of other things that are not relevant to the user’s behaviour and current context.

Instead of this, the subtle user onboarding may look like this:

1. The first thing the user will be “taught” is how to import the list of contacts.
2. After he uses that, then is the time to show them how to write an email
3. After that, it’s time for sending an email outreach campaign.
4. After the user tries to create the second campaign, it’s time to show how to use email templates (so they can be more efficient).
5. If the user tries to create multiple campaigns at the same time, only then, product experience layer about “scheduling campaigns” should be shown.

This is the process of subtle user onboarding. Do you see the difference?

It’s triggered and attached to the user’s behaviour and current context.

Now when we know how product experience layers in 2019 and beyond should look like, let’s see some bad examples of user onboarding, and learn from them.

How Salesforce abuse the product experience layer

Everyone knows Salesforce — it’s big company old thousands of years and it’s making millions of dollars in revenue.

Without a doubt, it’s a great product. But, honestly, it’s product experience layers are really bad — and I’m not even considering its 90s product design. I’m considering only the in-app experiences they’re giving to their new and trial users.

I decided to include Salesforce in this article since a lot of people told me that Salesforce frustrated them with their tooltips. So, I decided to check that.

From the moment when you create an account, Salesforce will ask you a couple of questions.

This is good practice since it’s helping companies to personalize their product experience layers. But in the Salesforce, it wasn’t able to do that.

Three steps? Okay, that’s not bad at all.

Okay, I completed all three steps. What’s next?

Okay, another pop-up modal window asking me for information. Why this isn’t included in the previous three steps? It should.

But okay, I choose from 7 options — even if it’s not so clear what all of them mean. What are my contacts? What relationships I should track? How can I collaborate with my teammates inside Salesforce?

This should either require fewer options (so I can be more certain on what should I choose), or better explanations of each option.

Pro Tip — How to ask questions to your trial users in the right way and understand their context more. More information on context-based onboarding:

I really like Venngage’s user onboarding flow. Venngage is the poster maker that allows you to easily and quickly create stunning infographics. From the moment when you land on their product, they will ask you a couple of questions in order to personalize your user experience during the trial — and unlike the Salesforce, they’re really doing that.

Here’s how it looks:

First, they’re asking me what would I like to create — which is great.

Since I choose infographic, Venngage shows me dozens of different infographics to choose from. Later on, this helped them to understand what style I want and personalize their product experiences. This is a great example of how to collect customer’s data in order to deliver personalized product experience layers.

Now, let’s go back to the Salesforce’s story.

There is a psychology bias called Paradox of Choice — that shows how people have a tendency to make better decisions when there are fewer options to choose from. A lot of companies are using this bias in their user onboarding to deliver the perfect user experience.

But Salesforce obviously doesn’t know about that.

So, what happens after I choose the reason I’m here?

Huge modal pop up and interfere with my first look — I didn’t even have a chance to look at the UI and the product overall.

Again, there are 6 different options to choose from on the right, and the video on the left — that makes 7 options again.

Where should I click right now? Should I watch the video or click somewhere on the right?

This is another case of not implementing the paradox of choice.

At this moment, I’m already frustrated too much — but anyway, I decided to click on “Keep track of what’s most important” on the right.

But that’s not the end of my frustrations.

Okay, I see a big demo data in the middle of my screen — and a 7-step product tour. As we talked at the beginning, people have a tendency to skip long-tailored product tours and explore the product on their own.

A vast majority of people will skip this product tour — so, it isn’t helpful.

The best way to keep user attention here is to delete the product tours at all and focus on triggered and context-driven user experiences (subtle user onboarding approach).

But if you badly want to have product tours, then it’s the best practice to keep them short, with 2 or 3 steps. So instead of one big product tour, you can create a couple of smaller ones with a few steps.

But in Salesforce’s case, this isn’t the only product tour.

Let’s see what happens after I go through all 7 steps.

Really? Big slide outs with a bunch of text are popping up?

Salesforce, I want to see the value and benefits of your product as soon as I sign up — not to read a bunch of useful texts and remember nothing at all.

After I finished one user onboarding sequence, another one starts. I don’t want this!

First of all, their slide-outs are full of text — someone who’s starting to use the product for the first time and wants to see it action really doesn’t want to read a bunch of 400 words tips and tricks.

They’re not contextual and relevant to my current onboarding stage.

Instead of this, Salesforce could reuse those “help articles” into smaller pieces of content and show them to me when they’re relevant — i.e. when I want to use those particular features.

So, brace yourself, because another Salesforce’s product tour is coming.

The worst part? It starts in completely the same way as the previous one. As you can see:

But, the middle of the product tour is a little bit different — now it forces me to actually do something:

It wants me to filter “Big Deals” inside this demo data:

The problem? I can’t do that.

It’s frustrating. Salesforce wants me to do something that I can’t because of either their UI/UX is broken or the demo data is bad.

But, this isn’t the end of my frustrations. After I skipped this step, the fifth one is frustrating me even more:

Now, in order to find the “big deals” inside my demo data, I need to filter them and search for the deals bigger than $5000.

Okay, let’s do that.

Wow! Salesforce wanted me to filter deals bigger than $5000, while actually, there isn’t any deal of that size in their demo data.

To be even worse, their modal says: “Your biggest deals are ready for action’’ while actually there are no deals at all.

Okay, I clicked “finish”.

Let’s see what happens next:

Again!?

I just passed through 2 boring and frustrating product tours and onboarding sequences that teach me nothing.

Now I need to go through 3 more?

Really? This is the moment when I, frustrated user, decided to leave Salesforce and never come back again.

The worst part — Salesforce’s agents became a little bit spammy:

Your product frustrated me too much during the first 10 minutes inside it. No, I don’t want to open it again or hear about the Salesforce ever again.

How Aeroleads abuse the product experience layer

Aeroleads is another great example of abusing the product experience layer.

From the moment when you create an account, you will see a huge modal in the middle of the screen:

Three different CTA button (not including the live chat that pop-up immediately).

Should I watch the video, install the chrome extension or take the product tour?

I’m not quite sure, but let’s install the chrome extension.

As soon as I did that, I’ve got the following:

It’s a quick explanation of how Aeroleads works and what are the icons in the dashboard. The design is so 90s, but it’s not a problem. At least I know how to use the product.

Oops. After I already got an explanation of how the product works, now I’m forced to take the 10-step product tour, even If I know how to use the product.

Pro Tip — how to explain your product without product tours

Sometimes, some products can explain how they work by themselves. For example, when you create an account on Trello (a product roadmap tool), there are no product tours at all. Instead, Trello is using its own product (kanban board), to onboard it’s users:

What can we learn from Salesforce’s and AeroLead’s abuse of product experience layer?

As you can see, using long-tailored product tours and user onboarding sequences that are imposed on the users doesn’t end well.

Even more — it frustrates the users and makes them create a negative image and attitude towards the brand.

Even if I never had a chance to use Salesforce (because of its crappy user onboarding), I will never recommend it to anyone.

But, if Salesforce and Aeroleads created better, more intuitive and personalized user onboarding, perhaps I will have a better image of the brand and the product overall. Who knows, perhaps I would even start using it.

So, what are the key takeaways we can learn from the Salesforce’s and AeroLead’s abuse of product experience layer?

• Never impose product tours and user onboarding flows to your users — they want to explore the product on their own. They don’t want to take long product tours that will only take their time, efforts, make them frustrated and from whom they will learn nothing.
• Use Paradox of Choice whenever you can — offering too many options to your users will result in unsure decisions and poor user experience
• It’s important to show the value of your product as soon as you can in the first-run.
• You need to lead your users to the “aha!” moment from the moment when they land in your product. If they don’t reach the “aha!” moment fast, their motivation and attention will break down and they won’t be interested to come back to your product.
• Don’t use long product tours. The best thing would be to not use them at all — but if you really want (or must), keep them short and simple. It’s always better to have multiple product tours with 2–3 steps that are triggered by users’ behaviour or context (not imposed) than one 100-step product tour. Long product tours will frustrate the users and they will skip them. Instead, focus on 2–3 feature adoption only.
• Modern product experience layers must be subtle and user-driven. Don’t force users to do anything. Let them trigger the in-app event by themselves.

If you want to learn more about how to do better onboarding. We run SaaS Onboarding Teardowns, you can subscribe to check out a new SaaS onboarding and signup teardown every week or you can sign up for our product adoption school to not make those same mistakes.