Guiding First-time Users Through Core Features

Our goal is to illuminate the core functionalities of your platform, ensuring users not only understand but also appreciate the full spectrum of capabilities at their disposal.

User Type: New and Existing Users

Domain: Tech & Software

Jimo Feature Used: Tours & Hints

Aspect: Education

The Challenge:

First-time users often face a lot of features and settings, which can lead to confusion and a sense of overwhelm. The challenge lies in introducing these elements in a manner that is both engaging and informative, without disrupting the user's natural exploration of your platform.

The Solution:

Jimo's "Tours" & "Hints" features addresses this challenge head-on by offering:

  • Tours: Guide users through a series of steps highlighting key features and functionalities, all while they're engaging with your platform in real-time.

  • Hints: Provide on-demand information and tips, ensuring users have access to the right information at the right time, enhancing their learning and retention.

Step-by-step Guide:

Planning Your Onboarding:

  • Define the primary objectives of your tour, focusing on key features and desired user actions.

    We will use Jimo as an example, with the following key elements to showcase: Experiences, Changelog, Users & Segments, Templates & Settings.

  • Map out the user journey on their first login.

    1. First, always think of the starting point of your onboarding.

      Start by choosing a single URL to start building in context, we advise you to check with your tech team to set up a manual trigger at the end. Your first impression needs perfect timing! 😉

    2. Then, you need to identify when and where to introduce each feature for maximum impact.

      It's an introduction to your core features, not a detailed tutorial. The fewer steps the better.

Using a Template:

  • Based on your planning, choose a template that aligns with your onboarding goals. For guiding new users through your product's features, there's a whole Onboarding category in our Templates. In our case, we recommend starting to build from the "Take users on a product tour" template. This template is specifically designed to onboard new users on a single page.

  • Customize the selected template to fit your platform's unique features and branding.

    You can start by defining the overall look of your onboarding, themes are here to help.

    In our example, the whole onboarding is on a single page.

    The main thing to do is to position each tooltip step on the desired feature.

There are 2 alternatives if your onboarding goes through multiple pages:

  • When positioning your tooltips you can go to another page while in the selector. This will let your user explore your app freely between steps, but you'll need to guide him to reach the next step.

  • Otherwise, you can use Navigation steps to directly redirect your user towards the next step page.

Designing the Experience:

  • Organize the tour's flow, ensuring each step naturally progresses to the next. The structure should build upon the user's understanding, gradually introducing more complex features.

    We advise starting your Tour with an introductory pop-in to greet your new users, it tends to drive more engagement. 🙌

  • Create engaging, concise content for each tour step, incorporating visuals or animations to emphasize key points.

    We'll use only tooltips to emphasize the focus on each feature individually. The stepper is very useful to show users their progression. Also, the onboarding is where adding a human touch with a profile block is the most engaging.

  • At each step, you can provide a secondary CTA or embed links to relevant documentation, enabling users to delve deeper into each topic.

    We used our CTAs to link the associated documentation or open the mentioned feature page in a new tab.

  • It's important to add a closing step to thank your users, acknowledge their engagement, and tell them where to start now.

    It's the perfect occasion to mix CTAs and embedded links to give your users all the resources they'll need to jump-start the mastering of your app.

Ongoing Feedback and Continuous Improvement:

  • Encourage users to provide feedback on their onboarding experience through surveys, follow-up communications, or even a last-step CTA.

    We added a last pop-in step so the "End Tour" button leads to a feedback request step.

You can simply use "mailto:<support@company.com>" in the Open URL action field, use a link to any external form or even trigger your own Jimo survey via a link.

  • Regularly update the tour and hints to reflect any changes in the product, user feedback, or best practices, maintaining an effective and relevant onboarding experience.

Target & Publish:

Utilize Jimo's user-friendly builder and target settings to set up your tour, defining rules for its initiation (e.g., user's first login, navigation to a particular section).

Trigger

  • To finalize your first draft, start with the most practical way for you to trigger, it will help you test.

    The default trigger is perfect for testing from a single URL starting point.

    • We advise for your main onboarding to work with your product and tech teams to choose which action within your app concludes the first-login funnel to set up a manual trigger accordingly.

      You can set up this trigger at the end of your configuration, it overrides the other triggers and, makes the Where field useless, so it may slow down your testing.

      To set up this trigger you'll just have to paste window.jimo.push(['do', 'boosted:trigger', [{ evolutionId : "<YourExperienceID>" }]]) in your code where you can identify that your user is ready to start his onboarding.

Where

  • Use the "Where" setting to specify the URLs or app sections where the onboarding should be triggered. Avoid using Everywhere without a manual Jimo initialization, it will prevent triggering your onboarding on login pages or other bad timings.

    For a focused onboarding experience, you might start with a single page and expand as needed based on user feedback and journey mapping.

    In our example, we will use filtered URLs to trigger the onboarding from multiple pages that the user might visit on their first connection. (We also added our testing environment to the domains.)

Who

  • Define your target audience within Jimo's settings, ensuring that the tour reaches the right users at the right time.

    If you used an advanced trigger or filtered URLs that make your onboarding reachable only via your sign-up funnel, you may not even need to set up an audience.

    To make sure you don't bother your already onboarded users, we advise setting a segment on the fly based on the date of creation of the user.

  • Use segmentation to tailor the onboarding experience to different user groups, such as new sign-ups or users who have not yet explored certain features.

    You can use a few default attributes but segmentation will be limited if you don't first identify your users.

    For the most accurate way to identify new users, we advise you to get in touch with your tech team to set up a custom attribute manually or via our integrations.

When

  • You can schedule the tour to trigger, but in the case of onboarding, it's the recurrence and priority that matter the most.

    Usually, we want the onboarding to trigger only once to not bother our user, but for more complex apps you may want to insist.

    With a recurrence, if the user stops in the middle of your tour it will keep his progression the next time the onboarding is triggered. (But make sure that your user isn't onboarded forever, using the audience or scheduling.)

    Also, the best practice for an onboarding that needs to be the first experience a user sees is to have your rate limiting set to the highest priority on the list.

Testing and Refinement:

  • Test the all URLs you need to start your onboarding from in the test bar of the Where field.

  • You can preview your tour while editing or use a test link once in the settings.

    Here's a tip: Use a Team segment to test in real conditions while keeping it hidden from your users.

    Conduct user testing with a small group to collect feedback on the tour's clarity, engagement, and overall effectiveness by doing a few live onboarding demos.

Launch and Analytics Monitoring:

  • Deploy the optimized tour, ensuring functionality across different devices and platforms.

  • Monitor the experience's performance through Jimo's analytics, focusing on user engagement and completion rates.

  • Refine the tour based on feedback, adjusting content, pacing, and interactive elements as needed.

    You can use the results of your onboarding to segment more advanced experiences or reminders based on the completion of this Tour.

Integration of Hints:

  • After the tour, strategically place hints across your platform to serve as permanent tips, reinforcing key tour steps and providing ongoing guidance.

    -> You can follow the Generalize In-App Permanent Tips use case.

    Ensure these hints are contextually relevant, offering users quick reminders or additional information about specific features.

Benefits:

  • Increased Engagement: Users who understand how to use your platform are more likely to explore its full potential, leading to higher engagement rates.

  • Reduced Support Queries: A well-structured onboarding process can significantly decrease the number of basic support queries, freeing up resources for more complex issues.

  • Enhanced User Satisfaction: A positive initial experience can significantly impact user satisfaction and long-term retention rates.

Conclusion:

"Guiding First-time Users Through Core Features" is more than just a use case; it's a testament to the power of thoughtful, user-centric onboarding. By leveraging Jimo's "Tours” & “Hints," you can transform the way users interact with your platform, ensuring they not only stay but thrive.

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