It was 7pm on a Monday evening and the Google Now alert went off: It’s time to record my expenses. Even though I haven’t recorded business expenses for a long time… I decided that since I probably will in the future: I should switch to a product dedicated to creating expense reports.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as I had hoped.

After a bit of Googling, I found what appears to be the most popular expense reporting software. When I started using the product, my enthusiasm quickly turned into… anxietythen frustration And finally to Anger. Getting started with this new product was so frustrating that after several minutes of trying to use it, I became irritated by this new product and finally gave up.

I decided to just use a simple spreadsheet.

After successfully entering and calculating my expenses using the spreadsheet, I sat down and thought about what had just happened. Why was my initial excitement about a new product quickly replaced with frustration?

After thinking for a while, I realized that the product preparation process was not sufficient. Naturally, I then thought about how to make it better. I decided to look at this problem through the lens of tasks that need to be accomplished. When I did this, I started asking myself new questions – questions not typically associated with designing an onboarding process. After much thought, I came up with an answer to this riddle:

This product did not take into account my understanding of the function and my previous experiences using the function’s solutions.

If product designers can design products and internal processes taking into account the customer’s understanding of the function and their previous experiences using the function’s solutions, the designers will dramatically increase the number of people who convert to their product.

Try the solution

So, what was going on that made using this product so difficult?… When I first started using the product, I was desperately trying to find a simple, straightforward way to enter my expenses – just like I had done in the past when I used a spreadsheet. I started pressing menus and buttons in hopes of discovering something familiar looking or indicative of it Add expenses. The closest things I saw were Download receipts and Create a report. In short, as I clicked buttons and wandered through various application windows, I didn’t see anything as simple as a spreadsheet.

I felt frustrated. I got angry. I fired the producer even before I hired him.

In this scenario, I had a little Try the solution. Solution experience is how familiar a customer is with using solutions (products) to solve a task. It’s a combination of two things:

• How many solutions the customer has used in the past.
• How efficiently they use the solution.

In this case, I had low experience with solutions because I had only used one solution in the past (spreadsheets) and only used it in a very basic way (a few text columns and one numeric column that adds numbers).

The opposite of this is a high solution experience. An example of high solution expertise is if you’ve used a lot of spreadsheet software and know how to use them to calculate expense reports and present them in all kinds of complicated ways.

Thinking of this as a Cartesian level, one can see this:

The X-axis represents the level of solution experience: the more experience they have with the solutions, the further they move from left to right.

Here are some examples of moving through the solution experience axis, using expense tracking as an example:

A. Track expenses, in a very basic way, using one or two solutions: for example, a spreadsheet or pen and paper.

for. Very good and experienced in using one solution (spreadsheets) to track expenses.

C. Expert in using a single solution (spreadsheets) to track expenses in complex ways.

D. Expert in using multiple solutions (spreadsheets, various online and offline accounting software, pen and paper) to track expenses in complex ways.

As mentioned before, this alone is not enough to take into account when designing an onboarding process: we still need to know how well the customer understands the task that needs to be accomplished.

Functional understanding

As I splurged trying to figure out this expense reporting software, I had an undercurrent of anxiety: I didn’t have much experience with the task of creating, sharing, and using expense reports. This lack of knowledge has raised many outstanding questions such as:

What does a correct expense report look like?

Did I miss anything in this report?

What can the customer expect to see?

Does the IRS want to see this…if so, what do I need here…?

In this case, I didn’t know much about expense reports and how to use them, so I figured it out Low functional understanding – How well someone understands the task to be done. Conversely, a high functional understanding may be an accountant who has formal training in expense reports and has years of experience creating them.

Using the Cartesian plane again, understanding the task will be the Y-axis. If a client has very little knowledge of the task and has not done it in many contexts, they are at the bottom of the Y-axis. The more experience they have in solving the task and the more diverse the contexts in which they have solved the task, the further up the Y-axis they will move.

Here are some examples of taking job understanding further, using expense tracking as an example:

A: You’ve never tracked expenses before, or you’ve only done so once.

for. He had a job where they had to keep track of expenses, but it was only for that one job.

C. Responsible for tracking a lot of different expenses for many different employees in a large company.

D. An experienced accountant has been trained to track expenses and has done so in several companies over a long period of time.

Combine the two

When we combine the two variables into one model, we get the following:

Let’s consider an example of this in the context of using expense reporting software:

Q1: I’ve been preparing expense reports for years, in all kinds of contexts: I’ve also used many different products over the years and know them all well.

Q2: I’ve been doing expense reports for years, in all kinds of contexts: however, I’ve only used one product all the time, or tried several different products but nothing stuck with me.

Q3: I don’t know much about what an expense report is or how it would be used: I’ve never done this before – I think someone asked me to use a spreadsheet.

Q4: I don’t know much about what Expense Reporting is or how it will be used: but I’ve been using one or more solutions for a while and when I do, I usually use some feature I know well.

Design an onboarding experience using functional understanding and solution experience

Let’s now take this insight and use it to design the onboarding experience.

The first thing we need to do is learn a little about our customers. Since we can’t interview every customer who tries our product, we can ask some non-intrusive questions when launching the app. So, when your customer opens the product for the first time, instead of showing them a flashy video showcasing all the cool things your product can do, start with some simple questions like:

The first set of questions will tell us about functional understanding. The second set of questions will tell us about the solution experience.

So let’s say a customer like me answers these questions and the result puts him in quadrant three: Low functional understanding and Low solution experience.

In this case, the setup process should be smooth. You might consider starting by explaining why it’s important to create expense reports and what each expense report should contain. Then, when the UI is revealed, it’s very clear and simple. At this point, the producer should guide the customer through creating an expense report template with all the necessary parts mentioned previously.

After this tutorial, the product can then have a template/wizard style when creating new expense reports. Each template is based on situations that expense reporting beginners typically encounter.

Another example scenario is when someone lands in Quadrant 2: High functional understandingn and Low solution experience.

In this case, the customer knows a lot about expense reporting but probably only knows how to do it for one specific product. Let’s say this client is an accountant who only uses spreadsheets.

The onboarding experience for this client can go beyond how and why to use expense reports. Alternatively, you could start by explaining how this product works when compared to spreadsheets (the product this customer is intimately familiar with). Then they should be presented with a user interface which will not look intimidating to them. Of course, your product doesn’t need a user interface that mimics other products; However, you can show them your version of what they might see first in the previous solution. In this case, an experienced spreadsheet user will want to know where to enter expenses directly. So for your product, start it up with a UI that asks it to import or enter its expenses.

Improve your product today

To use To Do to design an onboarding process for your product today, you’ll first need to think about what stage your product is at: introduction, growth or maturity.

If your product is in the introduction stage, there’s a good chance you’re still interviewing potential customers and/or in the process of developing the first version of the product. In this case, you can ask during interviews for the jobs to be done: how long they have spent on the job and what they have used in the past. Think about which quadrant most of these customers fall into and design your UI and onboarding process appropriately.

If your product is in the growth or maturity stages, start reaching out to customers who have recently switched to your product and conduct another round of to-be-done interviews with them. When you have an idea of ​​which quadrants most of your customers fall into, think about how you can segment your current UI to better serve each quadrant. Next, create modified UI designs for your product where certain features are turned on and off depending on which quadrant the UI will serve. When new customers sign up, include simple four-way positioning questions in the onboarding process and then present them with the appropriate user interface.

A potential pitfall

From a software complexity standpoint, it’s rarely a good idea to have different user interfaces for multiple types of users. Even if the code is written in a simple way Toggle featureMultiple user interfaces can become a maintenance headache.

This is why again, it is important to interview real customers and ask them about the products they have used in the past and what their experiences were like when using these products. You will likely find that the vast majority of customers have used the same or similar products. You’ll also likely notice that most clients fall into Quadrant 3 or Quadrant 2, meaning they are either complete beginners or… Improvement of brokers.

Also keep in mind that as Quadrant 3 converters become long-term customers, they will migrate to Quadrant 2 as your tool becomes their solution of choice. To make this easier, consider slowly revealing features to them as they use your product or achieve certain engagement milestones. For example, if your product is an analytics tool, it wouldn’t be helpful to show customers how to perform cohort analysis on day three… because they haven’t been using the product long enough to be able to perform cohort analysis. Instead, as this analytics product is used more by the customer, the customer will get closer to a point where it can perform crowdsourced analysis in the near future. At this stage, the producer can provide the group analysis and instruct the customer on how to do this.

Better setup means more shifts

When a product designer is able to properly gauge a customer’s understanding of the task that needs to be done and how experienced they are with solutions that solve the task, they can create great onboarding experiences that remove fears about switching to your product.

As more customers successfully switch to your product, the discount rate decreases and profits rise.