p/appcues
User engagement for SaaS
Sujan Patel
User Onboarding Checklists by Appcues — Scientifically proven to boost activation and retention.
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Push users deep into your product with User Onboarding Checklists. Build, design, and target Checklists in minutes, and start increasing user engagement today.

Checklists are effective because they leverage 3 well-researched cognitive biases: bias towards completion, bias towards reward, and bias towards consistency.

Replies
Derek Skaletsky
More good stuff from the @appcues team!
Alex Ting
@dskaletsky Thanks for the support, Derek!
Eoghan McCabe
Solid work!
Tristan Harward
@eoghanmccabe that means a lot, thank you so much!
Alex Ting
@eoghanmccabe Thanks Eoghan, we appreciate the support!
Tristan Harward
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!
Nancy Kopp- Hensley
So far so good with us- I would LOVE any data you guys have on how it helps retention rates and conversion rates from case studies.
Nancy Kopp- Hensley

Can't wait to see what it does for our conversation rates! Far better than trying to buid this on our own, hoping this will really accelerate the on -boarding across all our products.

Pros:

very consumable!

Cons:

needs an internet connection

Jessica Meher
Yaass! Can’t wait to use this. Will help with our new onboarding initiatives.
Tristan Harward
@jessicameher Thanks so much Jessica! Can't wait to hear how it works.
Vinayak Ranade
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?
Alex Ting
@pseudovirtual Thanks, Vinayak! Glad we were able to fill the need! Yes, the content within the checklist is fully customizable. Styling and positioning are also configurable, but for these, the team was a bit more prescriptive about design to ensure a consistent and effective onboarding experience. Once you give it a try, feel free to hit us with feedback. We are always looking to improve our product!
Ty Magnin
Thanks for hunting @sujanpatel! Hope y'all love our checklists :)
Hugo

Appcues builds great onboarding tools and I've used appcues flows at my prior company and use checklist at my current one.

Pros:

Very quick to implement (half a day). The UX is clean and the colors are customizable. I integrated directly but explored using segment.

Cons:

Need to instrument (or have instrumented) the events to progress checklist. But that is to be expected.

Justin Johnson
@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!
Alex Ting
@justinotherjohnson Great question! And yes, once our application's SDK script is installed into your web application, your console will be closely integrated to our API via the script. This allows patterns that you build with our tool to show based on events and actions in your application. Hope that answers your question :)
Wes Bush

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 :)

Fabian Beringer
Do you have a trello integration?
Val Geisler
Dang. It my previous in-house role we spent a solid month building out a custom checklist (too bad we didn't use Appcues!). So excited to see this launching - it's going to be a game-changer for my clients.
Alex Ting
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.
Jason Caston
Oh wow, this is great. I cant wait to check this out real soon
Tristan Harward
@jasoncaston Thanks! Looking forward to seeing how it works for your product.
Hendrik Haandrikman
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)
Alex Ting
@hhaandr Hi Hendrik! That's a great question and a valid concern. While this Checklist pattern is an especially effective onboarding tool, our application offers a full suite of other patterns (eg. modals, tooltips, etc.) that cover a lot of other product use cases such as feature announcements and feedback sampling. So yes, you are paying for all MAU's, but Appcues also allows you to target and engage all of these users through all phases of their customer lifecycle. Hope that helps address your concerns!
Jackie Smith
@hhaandr @alexcting1 Hi Hendrik, Jackie here from the customer success team. This is a great question. I've also seen the check-list used to drive better retention. You could create a 'Become a Pro-User' check-list that includes some of the advanced features/potential up-sells. This will keep your middle-of-the-line customers engaged with hopes to drive product adoption and create more 'ideal' customers. Like Alex said, our product is great at driving long-term product adoption through alternate patterns like tooltips/modals, etc. as well as collecting NPS feedback.