Ultimate UX Design Guide to SaaS On-Boarding, Part 4: First Login
- Sign up Form
- Welcome Email
- Drip Campaigns
- First Login & Product Tutorial
- Data Import & Notifications
- Check up calls & Swag
First Login
I cannot stress the importance of crafting a first login experience to delight your customer enough. The first login experience is where you should be looking if you want your churn rate to go down.Rules of Thumb:
- Do not present your user with a UI that is empty. You need to keep that in mind because with a SaaS product that is B2B oriented, the user isn’t going to have everything in front of him from the beginning. Services requiring extant data to function will need that step to be performed after first login.
- Give clear directions to users for what they should be doing first. They are completely new to the interface so they would need a nod in the direction of the first step.
- They have gotten to this point—it would be great to thank them again and tell them of how cool it’s going to be, once they have set up everything.

Product Tutorial
An initial tutorial can be a great way to start building a rapport with your customer, now that you’ve gotten your first login. Depending on how you design your tutorial, you can quickly familiarise them with the interface of your app so that they can get down to using it.Rules of Thumb:
- Users have to be able to skip it. Going through a tutorial that cannot be skipped can really turnoff your user. If they don’t want to see it just yet, they should have the choice of opting out.
- It should always be something that users can revisit. It is very common to skip any pop up or notification upon logging in for the first time; users just want to start getting their hands dirty. Just ensure that it can be easily located.
Making the Experience an Improvement
A famous programmer called Kathy Sierra says that the app should be able to make its users amazing at something within the initial five minutes of using that app. Ultimately the user should be taking an action that causes a result relevant to your business. Try to generate an experience that would be bound to bring the user back.User Communication
You want to establish a relationship with the user that is of mutual benefit to both of you. That happens when you begin to communicate with them frequently and that too in the initial stages. The product tutorial is one of the easiest ways to establish that channel of communication. Ideally a product tutorial should accomplish:- Basic Guidance on how to use the software
- Allow the user to do something really cool
- Do this within as limited a time frame as 1-2 minutes





Analytics
You can analyse the effectiveness of your first sign in and product tutorial. The sign in and product tutorial can be grouped into an experience called the first run experience. The series of steps that need to be taken can be defined and then you can do something called funnel analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of the experience. Tools I would recommend in order to build and measure your funnel are Mixpanel or Amplitude. The idea of funnel is that many users enter the beginning of the user experience and a few come out at the end. Measure user progress through the experience by observing the completion rates for each step. So usually, you’ll get rates of completion that look something like this:- Step 1: 1,773 people
- Step 2: 1,701 people
- Step 3: 1,399 people
- Step 4: 1,211 people
- Step 5: 1,152 people

Aleksander Góra
Aleksander Góra is enhancing user experience by crafting beautiful and intuitive interfaces since 2006. He is the co-founder & CEO of www.5next.io the first application for strategic networking based on UK accredited business networking program. Aleksander is the author of upcoming book The Open Heart Website Surgery—Ultimate guide for leads generation for medium and small businesses. Recently featured in Rafael Dos Santos book “100 Inspirational Migrant Entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom.” Currently working in London as a Product Manager and Lead UX Designer in one of the lead­­­ing conversion optimization platforms Convertize.io
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