How Product Managers can Use the EMBED Framework for Mobile Onboarding
By Margaret Kelsey, content marketer at Appcues
Did you know that you only have 3 days to get people hooked on your mobile app and prevent them from abandoning it altogether?
If you want people to stay, you have to get them to an aha moment within those first few days. This is why onboarding users effectively is such a critical element in your product’s success, and why Appcues is dedicated to making that process a lot simpler.
Over the last 5 years, Appcues has helped more than 5,000 businesses onboard more than 25 million users. We know the pain. That’s why we distilled the essence of all that we know and created the EMBED framework. Today, we’ll explore how you can use it to onboard your mobile users.
What’s the EMBED framework?
At Appcues, we’ve spent a lot of time studying user onboarding techniques. The EMBED framework is a distillation of all that we’ve learned. EMBED stands for:
- Establish: Establish user onboarding in your company
- Map: Map your user onboarding journey
- Brainstorm: Brainstorm solutions for potential problems
- Execute: Execute the onboarding process
- Do It Again: Improve and repeat
Each step is essential to understanding your users’ motivations, your product’s aha moments, and your team’s ability to work holistically. We’ll cover a light overview of the framework here, but if you want to dive deep, check out the Appcues User Onboarding Academy.
Step 1: Establish user onboarding
You can’t have a great onboarding plan without a great onboarding team. So the first step in the EMBED framework is to establish a foundation within the team. This involves establishing 2 things:
- The importance of onboarding: You might be a believer in onboarding. You might know it’s importance in retaining users. But that doesn’t mean everyone in your company is on the same page. For effective onboarding, it’s important to align your team and educate them about its importance.
- An onboarding team: Many teams have a marketing team, a technical team, and a design team. But who’s in charge of onboarding? You should establish a team that includes important members from all three domains. While it’s good to have a single owner, it’s important to have a cross-functional team for more diversity of thought, skills, and buy-in. If your product has both a mobile app and a web app, make sure the onboarding team is equipped to tackle both.
Note: Lack of an onboarding plan can be catastrophic. A bad onboarding plan can be even worse! You have to establish the difference between good onboarding and bad onboarding early on. For example, while tooltips can really help new users learn your app, if the design is bad, it can actually turn out to be counterproductive. For example:
Step 2: Map your user onboarding journey
Mapping your user journey can be an incredibly powerful exercise for your team. A user journey refers to the complete timeline of actions your user would make with respect to your app — from getting to know the app to using it regularly and later, to upgrading their plan. In this case, you only need to concentrate on the onboarding aspect of your user journey.
Write out every touchpoint a person has when starting with your app. As you map, it’s important to find the aha moment — that lightbulb moment when a user realizes the value proposition of your app. Mark that with a big star.
All your onboarding efforts should be geared to get your users here. Use analytics tools for more granular tracking to truly understand your user journey and make sure your map lines up with the path they are taking. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
Note: Usually, the user journey of a mobile app will start with the App Store and move on to downloading, permission to access camera, and more, depending on the app. Since there’s no URL change to track in mobile apps, map the user journey through screen changes. For example:
Step 3: Brainstorm solutions for potential problems
The third step of the EMBED framework is to brainstorm potential solutions. To do that, you’ll first need to know the problems.
You’ll need to look at both qualitative and quantitative data:
Quantitative data: In the previous step, we talked about using user analytics tools to extract important numbers. Armed with this data, identify things like where exactly most users drop off. Quantitative data tells you what kind of problems you are facing.
Qualitative data: The why of the problem is harder to measure. But tools things like user recordings and touch heatmaps are make it a whole lot easier to figure out why users are dropping out of your app. When surfacing qualitative data, ask users open-ended, non-leading questions like:
- Why didn’t you complete the task?
- Why did you sign up for our product in the first place?
- How have you done this task in the past?
See how Bynder uses a feedback form at the end of their onboarding tour:
To put it into practice: First, use quantitative information to find and focus on the biggest problems. Then, use qualitative data to “zoom in” to the level of the user to round out your understanding and solve the problem.
Once you’ve nailed down the problems, it’s time to brainstorm for potential solutions. While brainstorming, it pays to keep these 4 psychological principles in mind:
- Goal gradient hypothesis — says that humans tend to complete things they’ve already started. A good example is the use of progress bars to show how much users have completed.
- The choice paradox — tells us that humans are more likely to make a decision when fewer choices are given. Using multiple choice questions with fewer options is a good example.
- The Zeignark effect — explains how humans shift their focus to tasks they’ve not completed. A simple checklist can incentivize many users to complete a process.
- Familiarity bias — humans prefer familiarity over something new.
Step 4: Execute your plan
Now that you have a clear idea of your user onboarding journey, along with ideas to improve it, it’s time to put your plan into action.
We suggest you divide the execution into two categories:
- Things that happen inside the app — tooltips, in-app messages, etc.
- Things that happen outside the app — emails triggers, push notifications, etc.
When done right, things that happen inside the app create a good in-app experience. These things require need a team of talented developers and/or tools like Appcues that don’t require coding.
Things that happen outside the app can bring people back again and again.
But remember: Even if you do both thing well, users can become frustrated if there is no synchronization between the two.
For example, if what you say in your push notification doesn’t match what you show inside the app, people might feel confused or cheated. So even if you have great ideas, if the execution falls short, you’ll easily lose trust of your users.
Step 5: Do It Again
When you arrive at a solution that works, don’t stop — keep on improving. For constant, consistent improvement, you’ll need to revisit each step of the EMBED framework again and again. Even the first step — establishing your idea of onboarding — should be repeated so that it becomes part of your company’s culture.
It’s not a map, it’s a compass
Appcues understands that mobile user onboarding is a science in and of itself. Don’t treat the EMBED framework as a formula to find the perfect onboarding plan — it is a process that’s designed to improve your onboarding. It’s not a map, it’s a compass that will point you in the direction of better UX and higher retention rates.
