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The main ingredient of a great onboarding experience is creating a Wow moment (or "aha" moment) as early in the process as possible. This guide walks through a three-step process to collect the qualitative and quantitative data you need to uncover your product's Wow moment, then covers the techniques and examples that help you shorten the time it takes users to get there.
A Wow moment is that instant when a user realizes the unique value your product or service brings to their life. It's the "aha" experience that transforms them from casual users into loyal customers.
Why does it matter so much? Customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and free word-of-mouth marketing are just three of the ways a great Wow moment pays off. And ultimately, you don't want a user's first time to be their last time.
To offer a Wow experience, SaaS platforms should focus on delivering Low Effort, High Value (LEHV) interactions that exceed user expectations. These moments often arise not just from the features themselves but from the transformative possibilities those features enable.
So what does a Wow moment feel like?
Wow is achieved when a user recognizes, either actively or subconsciously, that your product is a must-have experience that will improve their life. It's something powerful enough to make users say, "Wow, this is awesome." When users churn or never fully adopt a product, it's often because they never encountered their Wow moment.
A few things to keep in mind about Wow factors:
To identify your Wow moment, you'll want to combine qualitative and quantitative data. Here are three things you can start doing right now:
These steps can get messy without the right process, so track your results to make sure you reach the right conclusions. Here's a sample doc to help. You may want to customize it for your use.
The best place to start is with your customers. Talk to them, and find out what they love about your product. Keep in mind that not every customer is the same: longtime customers may value your product differently than newer ones, just as power users may derive value in an entirely different way than infrequent users.
Track your findings separately based on customer type. In the sample doc, we separated new customers from well-adopted customers, but there may be a better cut for your business (for instance, segmenting by the features people use most, or by B2B vs. B2C use cases).
Here's a short email template to kickstart the conversation:
Hey Jane,Thanks for being such a great customer! We're really happy that you love our product, and we'd like to help other customers get the same experience you have. Would you be open to setting up a 10-minute call this week to help us?We're always trying to improve our value to new users, and your feedback would be really helpful.
If the customer says yes, set up a quick call. There are four questions you want answered:
After a handful of these conversations, you'll start to recognize patterns in how people experience and use your product. Document what you hear so you can compare it against other conversations and actual data later. Asking about competitors is especially telling about a user's original motivation for signing up.
Getting feedback from users who never became customers is equally important, and sometimes more revealing. Did they not convert because pricing was too high, or because your product lacked the functionality they needed? Or was there too much friction in their first experience, and they never understood how they could benefit?
Another template:
Hey Jane,I saw that you signed up for an Appcues free trial last month but never had a chance to publish your first user onboarding flow. It happens. I sign up for products all the time that I don't end up using.We're always trying to improve our value to new users, and one of the best ways is to hear from people who never fully adopted. Would you be open to a 10-minute call this week to help us? I promise I won't try to sell you anything. In fact, I'd be happy to recommend another product if you're still looking for the right fit.
These emails tend to have a low response rate, so use your marketing automation software to reach the right people automatically. When you do connect with churned users, ask three things:
The goal here is to learn whether the user ever could have found value in your product. Often the answer is no. They were looking for something different, or a use case you don't yet support (useful input for your product roadmap, too). When the answer is yes, your job is to figure out what stood between them and the light.
Information from customers is insightful, but it only paints half the picture. You paint the other half with real usage data. Every time you speak to a customer, validate what you heard against their actual behavior.
Use an event tracking platform to look into usage patterns for each customer and fill in the rest of your doc. At the highest level, you want to answer:
With the right data, you should be able to compare your well-adopted customers against your churned ones and start to identify your assumed Wow moment(s). What are the major differences in usage? Do successful customers activate a specific feature early on that churned customers don't? How often did each group interact with support?
Everything so far has been based on a small subset of your total user base. The final step is to take your assumed Wow moment and look beyond the people you spoke with.
For every user who has ever tried your product, how was your Wow moment experienced, or not? On an aggregate level, how does behavior change after that activity? What percentage of users get there, and how long does it take them? And what's the upgrade rate (or other key metric) for users who do and don't reach it?
If all your qualitative and quantitative data points in the same direction, you've found your Wow moment. Now the work becomes analyzing the steps users take to reach it, and figuring out how to get them there faster.
Don't worry if nothing's conclusive yet. There are no silver bullets in user onboarding. Customers might say they love something without fully understanding why. Treat this as an ongoing experiment to continuously improve how users discover and derive value. If there's no clear story in the data yet, note the themes you can refine over time with more analysis and testing.
Once you know what your Wow moment is, the next challenge is getting users there before friction or distraction causes them to drop off. This is where your user onboarding best practices do the heavy lifting.
But what if your Wow moment is hard to reach? Maybe it's revealed through a long sales cycle, or hidden behind high-friction steps like installing software, embedding code, or paying (gasp!). Here are four techniques you can use to shorten your time to Wow, with companies that use each one particularly well.
The goal of user onboarding is to get users to their Wow moment before the high-friction steps or distractions that cause dropoff. So why not make your Wow moment step #1? That's exactly what some companies do by building a reverse funnel.
A reverse funnel lets users experience a product's core value before they even sign up. It can be a powerful tactic for lifting signups, because users who have already felt the value have far less reason to hesitate at the form.
Stripe is a clean example. Stripe knows exactly who their customer is (developers), what they care about (easy, secure, reliable payment integrations), and what language they speak (code). So Stripe doesn't make users register an account before they start exploring code. Potential customers can dig into Stripe's APIs and embed usable code right on the public-facing site. In doing so, Stripe makes it crystal clear that stripe.js lets websites collect payment information without storing it or redirecting users. To a developer, that's a major Wow moment that solves two pain points at once. It builds credibility immediately and makes getting started a no-brainer.
Sometimes the real Wow moment only happens after full adoption, and it's genuinely difficult or impossible to reverse the funnel entirely. Most companies fall back on copywriting to describe the benefits in that case.
There's a better option: a Wow moment vignette. This is a lightweight, repeatable version of your Wow moment that requires far less effort from the user. It isn't as powerful as a reverse funnel, but it can still cut your time to Wow significantly.
For product managers, good user feedback can be the difference between a confusing UX and a great one. UserTesting makes feedback easy, but getting started requires creating an account, specifying tester demographics, building tasks and surveys, and paying for each video. That's a lot of friction, even if each step is necessary.
So instead of reversing the funnel, UserTesting built Peek: a vignette that gives users a free five-minute video of someone using their website or app. All you provide is an email address and a URL, and a Peek video arrives within 24 hours. It doesn't deliver the full Wow of getting deep, actionable feedback, but it helps a product manager understand how powerful the tool is, and makes the effort of becoming a customer feel worthwhile.
For some products, especially content-driven ones, the value a user gets depends more on their own preferences than on the product's features. There's no one-size-fits-all Wow moment. When that's the case, personalize the onboarding experience so each user quickly finds what they value most.
Netflix is the textbook example. You might feel like Netflix can read your mind. That's not a cute trick. Creating a personalized, contextual experience is a core business strategy. But what happens when you've just created an account and Netflix doesn't know your viewing history yet? To make sure first-time users get relevant recommendations, Netflix asks them to pick a few titles they like from a short list, then builds a custom interface around those choices. The personalization makes the value land fast, and it makes users far more likely to come back.
One of the best ways to show off your product's value is to put prospective users on the receiving end of it. They signed up looking for a solution to a specific pain point, so show them the pain point no longer exists at your company.
HubSpot does this well. They practice what they preach, and what they preach is inbound marketing. After a user signs up for a trial, HubSpot doesn't just send resources. They show users exactly what data HubSpot has collected on them: a brief history of emails opened, blog posts read, webinars registered for, guides downloaded. That's the moment the benefit of using HubSpot becomes obvious. The product proves itself by working on you first.
These are just a handful of strategies companies use to shorten their time to Wow. There are plenty of others that work, and more that have yet to be invented. The question worth asking your team: what can you do to get users to value faster?
If you're looking for tactical starting points alongside the techniques above, these consistently help shorten the path to Wow:
Every product is different. Here are three more examples of how different platforms get users to value faster.
Thinkific, an online course creation platform, delivers its Wow moment through a dynamic, gamified checklist that appears the moment new users log in. It isn't just any checklist. It's a personalized roadmap that guides users through the essential steps to launch their course or community.
The takeaway: go beyond task management. Thinkific's checklist acts as a personalized mentor that adapts to your level of expertise, turning a daunting process into an achievable, step-by-step one.
Lucidchart once used a 10-step onboarding process. The hyper-involved, lengthy tour didn't sit well with most users, so after collecting feedback, the team rethought it.
Now Lucidchart delivers its Wow moment through a cleverly designed "Helpful Tips" modal that's both non-intrusive and educational. It sits discreetly at the side of the workspace, letting users dive into the software while keeping feature explanations available at their own pace.
Navattic lets users create interactive product demos without coding, which posed a fun challenge: how do you demo a product designed to create demos? They solved it by using a familiar example as the canvas.
Identifying and optimizing your product's first Wow moment is a game-changer in the user journey.
It isn't about feature sets or sleek design. It's about delivering an experience so impactful it turns users into advocates. By combining qualitative and quantitative data, you can pinpoint exactly what makes your product indispensable.
And finding the Wow moment is only half the work. Techniques like reverse funnels, vignettes, personalization, and being your own best user are how you actually shorten the distance between signup and value. The faster you guide users to that transformative experience, the better your odds of keeping them for the long run.
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