Revamping our user onboarding

The average app loses its entire user base within a few months, which is why only a few thousand apps keep getting used over time of the millions of apps in the App stores.

The same thing happens in B2B software with free plans. For this reason working on user onboarding is one of the most important areas to invest in while developing a product.

According to our onboarding funnels 80% of our sign-ups are not starting to send us data.

So in the past two weeks we’ve rethought from scratch our onboarding experience to make sure more people get started with our product.

Vinayak, the lead engineer on this project highlighted the most important problems we wanted to solve with our onboarding:

1. Non technical users have to be able to experience June and invite their technical teammates
2. On the first session as data still has to come in all dashboards are empty - how can we deliver value upfront?
3. We had 4 onboarding steps - each new step adds friction, so we wanted to reduce the steps here

The way we approached solving this problem was by building three new things:

1. A demo mode for the product
2. Changing the flow of the onboarding
3. Creating an in-product onboarding experience

Demo mode

If you have a workspace with little or no data we just added a toggle on the left sidebar to enable Demo mode.

Demo mode is a great way to experience what June looks like once you have a great tracking setup in your product!

Changing the flow of the onboarding

We cut a couple of steps in our onboarding inspired by Sentry.

As a first step we ask our users if they’re technical enough to connect Segment or set up our SDK, or to invite one of their teammates.

Creating an in-product onboarding experience

As people can now skip the onboarding entirely, we moved the steps of onboarding into the product.

Some of these steps like starting to send product data to June are blocking - others like setting up Slack event notifications are optional.

Other improvements

We improved the saved audiences feature to allow users to edit their audiences. The next step is enabling uses to select audiences in the report setup.