How to improve onboarding experience and feature adoption?

Problem

We updating Snob's blog part of the website. Blog's pages are obsolete, mostly editor design. And the overall visual design is not compatible with the design of the main page.

Our users are mostly seniors and not necessarily tech-savvy. They may not make out the new design. We were afraid of user drain, because of new features.

Finding a solution

We understand that we should make users familiar with the new website. So, we need a great onboarding, that explains new features

We started to find a solution. First, that came to our minds it's made it by ourselves. But it's expensive and if we want to create a flexible solution, that anyone, even not coders, can edit its time and money expensive.

What we want from onboarding solution

• Onboarding of more than 200 users;
• Product tours;
• Checklists with gamification;
• Responsive (looks good both on mobile and desktop)
• Design customization
• No service branding
• Edit without coding
• Onboarding analytics
• Can be integrated painlessly;
• Be cool if has a support chat (integrated intercom)

And we made a list of possible solutions-services.

Variants

1) 🏆 HelpHero

Pros

• At its price it is a great solution;
• No pricing plans. Just pay and use all the features
• Good documentation
• Developer-friendly.

Cons

• Not the best editor
• Markdown editing. Not everyone knows how to use markdown.
• Need to host photos and videos.

2) Usetiful

Pros

• All the features that we need
• Convenient editor

Cons

• The product is new and quite buggy.
• Strange pricing

3) Expertto

Pros

• Service localization
• All the features

Cons

• Bad editor

4) Intro.js

Pros

• Cheap, pay only once.

Cons

• It's more javascript library than service.
• Need to improve the editor manually, so not so cheap.

4) Intercom Product Tours

Pros

• No checklist and other features.

Cons

• We do not use the Intercom products, so it's not our case.

Making a scenarios

So, we choose a HelpHero, it's a great solution for us.

After that, we wrote down the main scenarios. What we need to show our users.

First of all, it's an editor (it's more complex and unusual for users)

So, on an editor page we have to notify users on:

• Text formating
• Add new blocks (photos, links)
• How to publish an article, where they can find drafts. And how to edit them again.
• Tell them that their stories are saving automatically

And profile page:

• How to edit an about information.

Then we move these scenarios to Helphero. We make basic hints for users. One important point that we shouldn't interrupt users from their flow. It's only a hint, it's not necessary.

Then we started testing our solution. How it will improve their flow and most importantly for us it's the adoption of the new features.

Results

We made an onboarding that helps us to improve the adoption rate of our new editor and other updated pages.