Onboarding employees or clients to your products, services, and processes can quickly become overwhelming due to all of the options available to create and share content for so many different types of users.

When I joined Net Health, the onboarding process for clients to learn how to use their product involved nearly 40 hours of long, interactive eLearnings where users followed along with a pre-defined path that may not have even applied to their workflows. Access to these activities were locked behind a separate learning management system with unique registration and login requirements.

Because of the experience’s high barrier to entry, less than 2% of users ever engaged with the content. Only 0.5% of users ever completing the provided onboarding content. This means longer implementations, increased support calls, lower adoption rates, and a poor customer experience.

By better understanding what’s important to users during product adoption and determining the behaviors that make a happy and successful user after reviewing usage data, content was shifted away from locked down eLearnings in favor of micro-content like help screens, in-app tours, walkthroughs, and contextual help that happen in the product when users are ready for them. While this may be a simple change, it had a tangible impact on user satisfaction and conversion to core application functionality.