BlinkistšUser Onboarding Teardown: 4 Lessons to Replicate in Your Product
šĀ Hi, Iām Harkirat Singh. I write Inside Startup, a newsletter to help Startup founders and Product growth managers to accelerate their product growth through GTM strategy, growth and marketing experiments.
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Acquiring users takes a lot of effort and time. You expect these users to get retained for a long period so you can extract maximum value from them.
But what if these acquired users get churned within 2-3 days?
You would be frustrated, right?
Using your product for the first time is a special moment for a new user.
An excellent first impression of your Product will get them excited to use it again and again!
However, a bad one will frustrate and confuse them to the where they stop bothering.
Thatās why smooth user onboarding is important for your new users.
Last week, I tried the Blinkist app ā A product that offers users quick actionable insights from the book in the form of text & audio bases summaries.
In this case study, Iād focus solely on the lessons we can learn from the Blinkist User onboarding journey.
But before we deep dive, Letās understand the ideal customer profile of Blinkist!
š¦š» The Ideal User of Blinkist
Shrey (aged 28) is a Software Engineer living in Delhi, looking to improve his information diet during his free time.
For the last few days, Shrey has been struggling with the guilt of not reading books because of his tight work schedule. While commuting to his office, he spends his idle time distracted by social media.
Shrey wants to spend this idle time more productively instead of wasting it on social media. One day while watching a book review youtube video, he got introduced to Blinkist. He liked the concept of delivering key ideas from books within 15 minutes and downloaded the app.
Let us understand from the lenses of Shrey (User) and Harkirat (Product Manager) the Onboarding of the Blinkist app.
š±4 Onboarding Lessons from Blinkist
1. Showing Core Benefits
Whenever possible, be clear about your user goal. Focus on what makes sense to the user about the problem he wants to solve, not what we want him to do.
The initial screen set clear expectations for the user ( Shrey) in 6 just words "Powerful ideas for users in 15 minutes" ā the value that the user is looking to get out of the product.Ā
The visual of a popular non-fiction book communicates the quality of the summaries, different genres & content categories included inside the Product.
For example, Science (A brief history of time), Atomic habit (Personal growth), Becoming (Biography) etc.
2. Customizing user experience
A Product can have multiple user segments with different goals.
So, itās better to understand āwhat job the user is hiring your app forā by customizing the journey within the product.
Blinkist did the same by asking Shrey about their topic and category interests during onboarding.
A user may doubt the app's intent behind asking for such information before they experience the core value. For such a situation, the app gives a brief reason behind the customization to build trust and confidence.
Shrey invests some information into a product in anticipation of future benefits i.e Personalized feed and book recommendation in this case.
Another obvious but powerful thing Shrey noticed during the customization steps is the Progress bars.
The progress bar reduces friction and prevents users from dropping off because it gives them a sense of certainty.
3. Getting users to the āAhaā moment fast
Shrey was expecting that Post-Onboarding, he would be taken to a huge library of book summaries where I had to find and pick one.
Honestly, he was afraid of the cognitive load of discovering the ārightā book summary for me.
But, Blinkist surprised him!
The last screen of the Onboarding flow showed me a short list of book titles he might be interested in.
Once Shrey like a book title, it adds to his library (or Bookmark) to consume later.
Boy, that was a smart move! Here is why:
If Shrey skipped this step, he ended up being confused āabout what to readā (More option leads to hard decisions) & this may delay his Aha moment.
The Product Manager understood this and made sure that Shrey found a relatable title during Onboarding ā Bookmark it ā Consume it ASAP after Onboarding ā Experience the core value of the product or āAhaā moment quickly.
All in all, The Product avoided unnecessary decision fatigue for the user that shortened their time-to-value journey.
4. Celebrated the Success with the user
When new users have a positive experience during first-time usage, it increases the chances of opening the app again.
The moment Shrey completes reading their first book summary, the Product celebrates his progress by acknowledging it, as shown below. That creates a positive emotional connection between the user and the Product.
Plus, it also asks Shrey to take the next steps by picking another book summary to keep the momentum going. It ensures that users keep using the Product more.
One last thingā¦
Not every Onboarding is Perfect. And so is the case with Blinkist.
I noticed that the Product asks the user for an upgrade before the Aha moment strikes.
Letās say a new user wishes to read a summary of a specific book once he downloads the app ā¦but the chances are higher of that book being not available for FREE.
It dilutes the user's motivation to navigate the product further.
Even though the Product offers free blinks, not all of them would be relevant for a specific user.
Instead of just showing popular book titles during Onboarding, Blinkist can show some free summaries that could be available for reading once users start using the app.
It will help users to experience the value of the product + help them decide whether they want to switch to the premium version or not.
Thatās all from this post!
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