| I’m in exactly the same boat with my B2B SaaS — particularly with the champion finding time to onboard the rest of their team. Our app takes a bit of setup time, and I put a lot of work into making a really user-friendly “onboarding guide”, basically a checklist of things to do to set up the account, accompanied by visual call-outs for each step in the UI. Before we had this, we forced companies to complete the full setup before they could use the app… As you might expect, many just gave up. But since adding our onboarding checklist (and changing our platform to assume lots more defaults, reducing the number of actions required to get started, and allowing it to be used “out of the box”), we now have a new problem: more companies are using us actively, but many of them never complete the full setup, so it isn’t fully tailored to suit them. The checklist UI dismisses itself automatically after all the steps are complete (there’s only 5, and honestly it takes 2 minutes, but there we go). I often look at active user accounts over 6 months old, and so many of them are using us daily but with a big “Getting Started” checklist still following them round the site! I guess that’s users for you… Not sure how to improve this, practically speaking — we’ve already reduced the checklist down to the bare essentials — but open to any ideas… |
So no longer do you have docs that say "suppose you want to create a new entry for a sedan, which can be either red or blue", but instead has content from your actual existing table.
It sounds like a small thing, but it greatly reduces that bit of cognitive dissonance/overhead ("why are we talking about cars, I want to update the contact options for this customer") when trying to learn a new system (especially critical for less tech-savvy users), so might be applicable to other products.