Onboarding needs a consultant
New customers cannot start using the product without a consultant or a member of the vendor’s team present, and training is repeated because users forget it.
The cost of onboarding grows with each new customer, and the product depends on people to explain it.
Key facts
- Onboarding and training that take longer each year are a common signal that a redesign is due.
- Business users who need a consultant present for routine tasks are a sign that the interface was built for technical users.
- Users differ in domain knowledge and familiarity with the product. Redbrix tests whether terminology, task sequence, training or missing capability explains the difficulty.
- Users who want the product often stop during setup, before they have seen it work.
- Time to the first completed workflow is a measurable onboarding indicator.
- Onboarding cost per customer limits how fast a vendor can grow without adding staff.
Why it happens
Internal structure became navigation. Entities, relationships and configuration hierarchies map directly onto menus, which makes them quick to build and hard to learn.
System vocabulary. Labels that are precise inside the product mean little outside it, and each needs translating before the user acts.
Feedback comes from technical users. Consultants attend reviews and describe problems clearly, so the interface keeps improving for them.
Setup screens mirror the settings model. New users cannot tell the few options that matter from the many with good defaults.
How it shows up
- Business users need a consultant present for routine tasks
- Training is repeated and forgotten
- Business users keep their own document describing the process in their words
- Support volume peaks during onboarding
- Users ask which options they can skip
- Implementation projects take longer than the sales team promised
Options and trade-offs
Each option moves onboarding effort from people into the product, and each has a cost.
- A simplified mode for business users over the same data model. Two views add maintenance and can drift unless shared behaviour and releases are coordinated.
- Labels based on business outcomes, with technical terms available on request. Consultants lose some precision on screen.
- Working defaults in setup, with the assumptions shown. Their suitability depends on the customer’s setup; Redbrix shows assumptions that need review.
- In-product guidance in the form of walkthroughs and checklists. Guidance helps new users, gets in the way of experienced ones and breaks when the interface changes.
Common mistakes
- Adding training sessions for a screen that needs redesigning
- Hiding fields with permissions and leaving the screen organised around the technical model
- Collecting feedback only from consultants and power users
- Measuring onboarding by sessions delivered instead of by time to the first completed workflow
Where Redbrix has worked on this