Can The ‘Jobs-to-be-Done’ (JTBD) Framework Help With User Onboarding?
User Onboarding is the process of radically increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.
The Gartner Group studied that most of the SAAS platforms today lose 75–80% of customers while Onboarding. Furthermore and according to Wyzowl, 86% of users say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content and experience.
This means all the hard work you do with user acquisition like Ads, content, Search, SEO, etc will go down the drain if you don’t focus on Onboarding.
The Art Of Onboarding
If you decided to go on a cruise vacation, what would your first and most important expectations be?
You wouldn’t like to learn about the trip during the cruise, rather before it, right?
Would you like to wait in a queue for hours to get a ship tour, or would you prefer having a flyer — or even better — an interactive tour app?
What would you think of your vacation if you needed help after the tour but couldn’t get it?
We’re talking about: User Onboarding. The very base of success. The first impression. The warm welcome. The first checkpoint. Or whatever you might want to call it.
User onboarding is a system that actively guides users to find new value in the product you are creating. User onboarding encompasses the initial experience in the application, online or offline training, goal-setting, and the organization’s customer success process.
What Make A Successful Onboarding Process
A successful user onboarding flow gets new users to perform tasks that have signalled long-term use in the past. Here are the major three phases your users will go through
- The User downloads the app
By this time, the users know what they are signing up for, and reach peak excitement. Their expectations are high and you have to meet them.
- Valley of disappointment
The Users sign up and go through the valley of disappointment after looking at the number of steps they need to do before they can actually use the product and solve their problem. Most of the users drop off at this stage.
- Slope of enlightenment
A few users get into the product and start trying it. This is where the users get engaged.
The job of good onboarding is to get the users to skip the valley of disappointment, and take the users from downloading to enlightenment. The user who makes this jump is an activated onboarded user and potential loyal users.
If You Know The JTBD Framework, You Know Onboarding
Let’s combine the two, and see the magic happening! When you onboard a user, there are two things you should answer:
- Who is signing up? You determine that by researching the Ideal customer profile. The ideal customer profile defines the perfect customer for what your product solves for. The ideal customer profile helps you to understand who your customer is.
- What is this user trying to do? If we’re trying to understand what a customer’s trying to do, The JTBD framework provides you with three ways to do it: Look at the flow through the customer journey map OR understand the user’s job to be done!
JTBD Techniques To Use Befoe Planning The Onboarding
- Set up a Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is what a user goes through before deciding if they want to purchase the product. This will tell you a lot of information about what is the customer’s expectations, where are they trying to go, and what are they trying to do inside your product right now?
- Figure out ICP’s Job to be Done
The second best technique to figure out why a user is signing up is to understand the job to be done. Now, the JTBD is an extremely famous framework that can be used a lot. But when used for onboarding, it’s particularly very effective.
Let’s go through an example of how to onboard users through the JTBD framework:
Andrew started a company centered on medical travel. He expanded his company over time and now he hired five people. He was out one day at a coffee shop with his pal James. James brought up Basecamp during their chat with Andrew. Andrew was unfamiliar with it. He wanted to know more, of course.
James described Basecamp to Andrew as a project management tool that assists small firms in being more organized. By this, Andrew was taken aback. He was aware of sophisticated project management tools like Microsoft Project, but smaller businesses like his could not use them. Andrew was currently managing his business using Google Sheets, Google Docs, and email. He simply believed that was how businesses operated.
After enjoying their coffee, Andrew and James said goodbye. Andrew looked up Basecamp on his smartphone as he rode the train home. He also learned about and looked at Basecamp-like products. He ultimately made the decision to use Basecamp. He registered for it, started utilizing it, and for the first time expanded his business beyond five personnel.
A job that has to be completed looks like this. For users, finding the right job for your product is critical. The question you need to answer is why?
- Categorizing User Goals
When you onboard users for your product, keep in mind that users have a functional goal, a financial goal, a personal goal, or a social goal.
Let’s understand these goals through an example. Let’s think about the goals of users coming on a Security newsletter:
- Their functional goals: Know about the issues daily.
- Their personal goals: Stay aware of the ever-updating security tech
- Their social goals: Users should know about the issues, and can keep up to date with the knowledge when other security professionals are around.
- Their financial goals: Earn more by being a better Security professionals
By knowing these goals, you can tweak your product, and hence make it extremely smooth for your ideal customer to onboard. The better you onboard users, the more engaged users you get. More engagement leads to more revenue.
How leading SaaS brands use JTBD
Let’s take a close look at some JTBD-focused onboarding flows.
- Airtable
In this Jobs to be Done example, Airtable starts its onboarding flow by getting to know each user a little better. They ask questions to try and identify a user’s JTBD and their process for doing that job before launching the right set of features to them.
Once Airtable has a better understanding of a user’s JTBD they tailor the onboarding and workspace according to needs. In this example, we’re met with a ton of Airtable resources to help build better products.
- Miro
Miro takes things a step further and explains to their users why they’re asking these JTBD questions. Not only are a user’s answers helping to build a tailored experience, but they’re also supporting new features and improvements.
Final Thoughts
Customers don’t purchase things because the aim of the product is the product alone. People engage with it to fulfill the requirements of a hidden “work.” That “job” is a circumstance in life that has to alter. A working professional beginning their hour-long morning commute might purchase a strawberry milkshake from the drive-through before the highway onramp; an athlete looking for more motivation during their workouts might buy Beats headphones. The Job-to-be-Done framework and an examination of these circumstances in the lives of customers can help product designers create goods that will benefit customers in the long run.
A great onboarding experience also helps overcome inertia by guiding new users through complex, cognitively demanding tasks, and reduces anxiety by giving new users ways to preview better what happens when they take highly visible action.
The JTBD helps new users deeply understand your product's value and overcome the emotions that stand in the way of moving forward, no matter how complex it is.
