Why Mixpanel's onboarding works with Candu.ai's CEO
The three questions you need to ask
Hey everyone 👋 I’m super excited to share our very first guest post with Jonathan Anderson at Candu. Candu helps product teams build seamless user onboardings (and every experience featured in this post 😉) without coding. If you’d like to learn more, ping Jonathan here. Friends of Yaakov can get early access to the new pay-as-you-go plans starting at $399/month.
Why Mixpanel’s onboarding works: The three questions you need to ask
All great onboardings are alike (seamless and engaging); each broken onboarding is unhappy in its own way. Turning an onboarding that doesn’t perform into one that sings, can feel… daunting.
Thankfully we’ll arm you with a simple framework – three essential questions – and show you how one best-in-class provider, Mixpanel, incorporates them.
The 3 essential questions to ask in every onboarding
These three questions aren’t a hack. They’re a means to start building from a place of empathy: To understand your users’ current state, their desired outcome, and the path they’ll need to follow to get value from your product. By asking three simple questions, you can gain valuable insights and fine-tune your onboarding.
Without further ado, here they are:
Where is our user today? Where is their starting point?
Where is our user going? What are they trying to achieve?
How will our user get there? What do they need to know to be successful in our product?
No need to take our word for it. Mixpanel has long been recognized for its effective onboarding practices, making it an ideal case study to learn from.
We’ll examine their onboarding flow as a practical example of how to do this right. By looking at their approach via the 3 question framework, we draw insights and learn practices that can be applied to any onboarding process, regardless of the product or user type.
Ready? Let’s go.
Where is our user today?
The first question to ask during the onboarding review is, "Where is our user today?" Understanding your users' starting point is crucial in tailoring the onboarding experience to meet their unique needs.
Have they used similar products to ours? What products are they already familiar with? For a technical product, you might want to know if they’re technical prowess (or lack thereof). If your product requires integrating another system, you might want to know if they even have the credentials to log in.
Before allowing users Mixpanel asks its users 3 questions in its onboarding survey:
I already collect data
I need to start tracking product data
I need help with implementation
Genius. Note that these categories may not be mutually exclusive, but they help users choose the right path for them.
Within “I already collect data with a CDP or in-house tools,” Mixpanel gives users a quick overview of the relevant logos, with links to the appropriate docs.
We love a logo for a visual queue, but this experience would be even more seamless if we could log in directly without needing to leave the product experience.
Consider the final dropdown, “I need help with implementation.” For users who can’t integrate a data source and can’t set it up technically, Mixpanel drops relevant resources directly into the experience.
By gaining clarity on where its users are, Mixpanel can deliver the right level of guidance and support, ensuring users feel empowered as they sign up.
Where is our user going?
The second question focuses on the destination: "Where is our user going?" By identifying your users' goals and desired outcomes, you can design an onboarding flow that aligns with their intentions.
Asking this question allows you to do two things:
Tighten the onboarding experience to be as short and tailored as possible – this is the #1 way to improve your activation rate. (See Lenny and Yuriy’s excellent benchmarking survey of 500+ products)
Ensure users understand how they can get value from your product – At this point, users likely only have a cursory understanding of what your product does. The onboarding flow is a perfect moment to open their eyes to what’s possible.
So how does Mixpanel show users where they’re going?
On this, Mixpanel is… mixed. They offer helpful templates that help users understand what value they’ll get from the tool.
But these choices are buried under a secondary CTA ‘Use A Template’ on the homepage. A more muscular approach would pull them up into the onboarding flow itself.
When you understand your users’ goals (and they know how you can help them), you can work backward to find the specific activities each user will need to do. You’ll be able to funnel up which templates, recipes, or use cases will provide the most value to each user.
Tailoring the onboarding experience to their objectives ensures that users feel a sense of progress and purpose right from the start.
How will our user get there?
The third question aims to illuminate how our users will get to success: "How will our user get there?" In other words, what mental model do your users need to understand for how your product works (the map), and what are the steps to get started (turn-by-turn instructions)?
By defining a logical flow and providing clear instructions, you can guide users through the initial steps, enabling them to grasp the core functionalities quickly. If you tailor the path for them to reach a destination they care about (see “Where are we going?”), you’ll help them derive the maximum value from your product.
So how does Mixpanel make the path clear? With a classic checklist, of course.
The simple language and event-driven steps are great ways to show users where they need to go.
What could make this experience even stronger? If this path led our users to their specific goal, such as analyzing a feature launch or reviewing marketing KPIs.
Mixpanel provides a set of relevant demo environments for those not yet ready to implement. We love this because it considers very different personas – a B2B SaaS offering will have a different dataset (and questions) than an E-commerce shop.
Finally, Mixpanel provides a cute, educational carousel to help users understand how the data is stored – an actual mental model. While it could have chosen to show a video, the simple diagrams and gifs provide a quick and easy way to ‘grok’ the material. Well done.
Three questions to rule them all
Understanding your users' current state, desired outcomes, and the path to get there are essential to optimizing your onboarding process because they help you see the world through your users’ eyes.
By asking yourself these three questions, you can enhance the user experience, improve activation rates, and drive long-term success. The answer to exceptional onboarding isn’t complicated. It’s empathy.
Want to have one of the experiences featured for your own product? Ping Jonathan here. Friends of Yaakov can get early access to the new pay-as-you-go plans starting at $399/month
That’s a wrap from our awesome guest, thanks Jonathan!
See you next week :)