How to Cut User Onboarding Time in Half (with UserGuiding)

Why on earth is onboarding so time-consuming?

Onboarding is critical for businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. 

A smooth onboarding process sets the foundation for user success, especially in a product-led growth environment. 

However, traditional 1:1 onboarding is time-consuming and quickly becomes unsustainable as your user base grows, particularly when scaling with freemium models, free trials, or a PLG strategy.

• The workload drains your CS and support teams, 
• The time-to-value becomes so long that it starts to hurt your activation rates, and
• You slowly start to withdraw from user onboarding, which leaves your users more prone to getting lost, feeling frustrated, and even churning.

What are the best practices of user onboarding? 

If you’ve decided to give your users some kind of onboarding instead of tossing them straight into the deep end with no life vest, nice work. That’s step one.

Now, let’s discuss what you should pay attention to while creating your onboarding flows and materials. 

Both for your sake and your users’ sake. 

#1 Keep it short and segmented

If onboarding feels like a never-ending tour of everything your product can possibly do, you will probably lose a good amount of your users’ interest. People don’t like generic product tours, too detailed walkthroughs, or long videos. 

It’s not a university lecture. 

If you want to keep people interested in your onboarding (and thus, your product), you need to offer them quick wins and manageable onboarding tasks. 

You should:

• Break your onboarding into small, digestible steps. Like checklists. 
• Avoid auto-triggering endless guides and let your users complete onboarding at their own pace. 

#2 Focus on “aha” moments early

“Aha” moments are when users realize the (potential) value they can get from your product, moments when they say, “Hmm, this could actually work.” 

Contrary to popular belief, there’s no one, singular, magical aha moment that just makes everything clear in your users’ minds and turns them into paying customers.

Throughout the user journey, there are several small value realizations (aha moments), each building on the other and bringing the user closer to the purchase decision. 

But, as they are relatively small and a user requires a few of them to happen for a full value realization that will lead to conversion, you need to start building them fast. 

Like, as fast as you can, fast. 

 To do that, you can:

• Eliminate non-essential steps in your most common user flows, like your signup flow, so that users can do something meaningful in the product within minutes of signing up.
• Personalize onboarding based on user goals, expectations, and pain points, so that users don’t abandon the onboarding flow and/or lose interest in the product.
• Show real, relevant data or example use case scenarios in your blank state so that users don’t need their imagination to see the possibilities your product offers. 

#3 Make onboarding interactive and contextual

With onboarding, your purpose is to ensure your users/customers learn how to get the most value from your product for their use cases.

So, it’s not about you showcasing and bragging about your product features, but about your audience understanding and embracing your offerings. 

That’s why you should always control your onboarding flows and materials from your users’ perspective and check whether they’re really useful. 

👉🏻 One way to increase the usability and helpfulness of your onboarding materials is to add interactivity, such as interactive in-app tutorials, friendly animations, and gamification.

Interactivity ensures the information and guidance don’t feel like a package insert.

👉🏻 Besides interactivity, you should also keep contextuality high, too. 

You can ensure contextualty by triggering materials, like tooltips, slideouts, or pop-ups, only when the user is on the relevant page and has taken a relevant action.

For example… 

• Explaining how to share a saved post only after the user has saved a post. 
• Or, showing a user how to invite teammates right after they’ve created their first project, when collaboration naturally becomes their next step.

UserGuiding can help you!

Scaling onboarding means one thing: automation.

Automation is key to freeing up your CS team while giving new users a smooth and tailored experience.

With UserGuiding’s no-code platform, anyone on your team can create, optimize, and update onboarding flows.

Compared to building onboarding in-house, this means no waiting on your dev team, faster updates, and more flexibility to test and improve.

Let’s take a look at what you can create with UserGuiding:

1) Interactive Guides for step-by-step onboarding

If we want interactive, contextual onboarding that’s easy enough for anyone to set up, we’re basically talking about automated interactive guides.

An interactive guide walks users through key actions in your product step-by-step so they learn by doing. In this case, tooltips and modals show what your sales or CS team would show to users in a demo or onboarding call.

Here’s an example:

With UserGuiding’s no-code, drag-and-drop builder, you can create guides like this in minutes. No CSS, no HTML, no Figma mockups first.

All you need to do is choose a customizable modal or tooltip template, or you can design from scratch:

• decide on what you want to highlight on the UI
• write your microcopy
• connect the steps, and you’re ready to go!

⚠️ To improve engagement with your onboarding guides, you should turn long flows into multiple guides and add them separately to checklists.

Automated in-app onboarding is not mandatory onboarding; you should leave flexibility in your flows and allow self-discovery. 

Keep your guides ready and accessible (through checklists and resource centers) for people to come and trigger them anytime they want to. 

2) Checklists to track progress and encourage completions

As we’ve just said, checklists are perfect for breaking onboarding into smaller, achievable steps so users can move at their own pace, and still feel progress from the very first interaction.

Here’s an example checklist:

For initial onboarding, you should keep your checklists short, with no more than five items, so they feel achievable. 

And to add a little extra motivation, you can add checkmark animations or progress bars. These small touches gamify the experience and encourage users to keep moving toward the next step.

You can also use checklists to:

• Make guides easily accessible from the resource center, so users can revisit onboarding content anytime.
• Provide continuous onboarding that supports users at different stages of their journey, not just new signups.
• Highlight relevant features, settings, and use cases for different user segments to personalize learning.

⚠️ You can trigger interactive guides from checklists, whether the checklist is in its own widget or inside the resource center.

3) Hotspots to point out new or underused features

For your users, hotspots offer contextual and timely guidance. 

They show up at the right place, at the right time, pointing to the exact feature or action that matters in that moment. This keeps users from feeling overwhelmed, shortens their learning curve, and helps them acclimate to your UI faster.

For you, on the other hand, hotspots drive feature discoverability and make announcing new features effortless. Instead of sending users to release notes, which they might never read, you can highlight updates directly inside your product.

Here’s an example hotspot:

As you can see, your hotspots don’t need to be static; they can be interactive, too. 

You can trigger tutorials, forward users to relevant links via CTA buttons, or even launch mini product tours.

Like interactive guides and tooltips, UserGuiding allows you to add visuals, such as GIFs and videos, to your hotspots. 

By combining these elements with your hotspots, you can create a more connected onboarding experience and support different learning styles and preferences among your users.

4) Resource Center to centralize support content

A resource center is a 24/7 accessible help center that is accessible within your product. 

You might say, “Well, aren’t help centers accessible 24/7, too?”, yes, but a resource center lives in your product, which means that users don’t need to go and hunt for help articles scattered around your blog, knowledge base, and YouTube channel. 

An RC unites and offers all training material across different platforms in the app. 

And it’s not just for listing purposes, you will not be directed to different pages to access the content, you can actually read or watch it right where you are, IN THE PRODUCT.

Within your resource center, you can add:

• Interactive guides, checklists to centralize in-app guidance
• Help articles, videos, and external knowledge resources
• Surveys to collect in-app feedback
• Support ticket links, product updates, and knowledge base created with UserGuiding
• Demo calendars, webinar registration forms, or other external links

Here’s an example resource center:

✅ When your users can search for help materials right where they are….

• You lower possible frictions and distractions.
• You create a hub for all of your unjoint onboarding materials and support your interactive in-app onboarding with your normally off-app guides and tutorials.
• You decrease the number of support tickets resulting from user confusion and errors (because your RC will help users pretty quickly and contextually).

Pro usage tips for successful onboarding flows 

1️⃣ Keep your guides under 6 steps, divide your lengthier guides into meaningful sections, and offer them separately. Shorter flows boost engagement and completion rates.

• On average, a company uses 15 interactive guides.

2️⃣ Avoid overloading new users with too much information early on. Not every setting or capability is relevant to new users. Start from the basics and keep the advanced tips for later stages and engagements. 

3️⃣ Let users explore at their own pace. Protect the natural sense of discovery and avoid forcing users through every step. Instead of linking all onboarding materials together, place them contextually so users can encounter them organically as they explore.

4️⃣ One user persona = one checklist. Optimize your onboarding by focusing on user personas (their goals, needs, use cases, etc.) and highlight only what’s relevant to that specific user persona on their initial onboarding checklist. 

• On average, a company uses 3 checklists.

5️⃣ Segment users to provide a more personalized experience. Not just for checklists, but for tooltips, hotspots, surveys, and all other in-app communication.

• 74% of companies use segmentation and offer personalization. On average, a company manages 15 user segments at the same time. 

6️⃣ Use surveys to gather feedback and improve onboarding over time. When users feel that they’re listened to and their opinions matter, they trust your business more. So, if you respect them, they respect you back. 

👉🏻​ Check out our product adoption report to see how 500+ companies across 50+ industries are onboarding their users.

What positive outcomes can you expect with UserGuiding?

Companies using UserGuiding to create, optimize, and automate their user onboarding have significantly improved efficiency, user activation, and team productivity. 

Here are some highlights:

• Unico → Product tours reduced onboarding time by 70%.
• Logcomex → Product tours cut time spent on onboarding creation by 95%, and freed up their developer team.
• Forvis Mazars → Product tours and checklists saved countless hours of interdepartmental work across design, development, and product teams
• Flowla → Product tours boosted activation rates by 24%.

Final words…

Onboarding doesn’t have to be a time sink. 

With UserGuiding’s interactive guides, checklists, hotspots, and centralized resource center, you can both save your internal teams’ time and offer more engaging and effective onboarding experiences to your users.

If you’re ready to boost user activation through seamless and personalized onboarding, start your UserGuiding journey today!