User Onboarding Checklists by Appcues - Scientifically proven to boost activation and retention.

Thanks so much for hunting us, @sujanpatel! Hello Hunters! My name is Alex, and I'm a product engineer here at Appcues. We're very excited to announce our brand new pattern, the User Onboarding Checklist. Having worked with hundreds of customers over the last few years, we've learned so much about what makes a great onboarding experience: a sense of progress, clear next actions, and opportunity for natural exploration. Our team has incorporated all these components and more into the development of the Checklist pattern. It gives you the power to identify key activation goals in your product and guide users through achieving them with instantaneous progress updates based on real actions and events. This feature is customizable and works seamlessly with our existing patterns to improve your onboarding and help your users unlock the value of your product. But don't take my word for it. Give it a shot and let us know what you think! A few folks from Appcues will be here to answer any questions in the meantime.

Solid work!

@alexting1 I appreciate you sharing this. Onboarding has been very top of mind for me and my team. I’m not an engineer, but in plain English, does your product effectively connect to our existing admin console via API? I’d love to get an understanding of the implementation complexity so I can share with my engineers, who are working in iOS, Android and Angulae. Thanks!

Yaass! Can’t wait to use this. Will help with our new onboarding initiatives.

This will work (ex-social gaming guy here - we used the same principle to get people to get into the habit of taking desired actions. Remember all those requests to brush people's cows in FB?). I wonder about the pricing though: You price per MAU. It explains that you don't charge for inactive users (thanks), but any established business will have (a lot) more active recurring users than new users (that they need to get through the onboarding process). Am I paying you for all MAU's? (that'd be an issue)

As someone who's entire job is to help SaaS companies convert free trial users into paid customers, checklists are one of my little "hacks" to double conversion rates. To put it simply, if you want to increase your activation rate, start using checklists. :)

Pros:

10/10 - Well done!

Cons:

None :)

This looks like an awesome new feature - as an Appcues customer it's one of the things I was always missing :) - quick question, am I able to customize styling and positioning for what the user sees in this?

Oh wow, this is great. I cant wait to check this out real soon

More good stuff from the @appcues team!

Thanks everyone for the kind words and comments! My name is Tristan and I worked on the design of this new pattern, and I'm so excited to see it out there. We've been researching and hearing about checklists for a long time, and personally I've always really thought they were kind of a magic pattern for effectively guiding people toward achieving goals. That's backed up by several studies, and if you haven't read Atul Gawande's book "The Checklist Manifesto," highly recommend it. We set out with the goal of building a "drastically more effective user experience for learning products." That kicked off months of research with dozens of customers, looking into a wide variety of products and generalizing something that would work well for all of them. We landed on a checklist experience that does a few great things: 1. *It provides clear first steps.* This is so important, and a lot of what we heard was 'users don't know where to start.' This unequivocally solves that problem. 2. *It gives users a sense of forward progress.* The psychology of FOMO is real, and our user testing has shown that people are driven to complete the tasks. 3. *It rewards users along the way.* We worked hard to provide instant feedback to real user behavior, and it's remarkable how responsive it feels. When the user finishes some goal in your product, the item checks off immediately. That translates to clear reward and motivation, and a little delight and fun as well. ✨ 4. *It puts control in the hands of the user.* This is pretty important. This pattern stays out of the way, but pops up when it really matters. If a user wants to ignore it, they can; but they'll still see non-disruptive feedback that they're on the right path. I'm pretty proud of where we ended up. @alexcting1 and the whole engineering and product team at Appcues made the dream a reality, and we're already seeing a promising positive response from our customers. Check ✅ it out, we're excited to hear how it works with your product!