Crafting Effective Onboarding for Healthcare Apps

✅ Longest Onboarding Ever: I spent hours looking over 96+ screens from a company making $750m/yr Here are 14 takeaways from Noom: Give users context on why you’re asking all these d*mn questions ▪️ Common approach: “We’ll ask some questions to personalize your experience” 🤖 Be human ▪️ Use a natural conversational style in your copy ▪️ Act like you’re speaking to one person 🔁 Follow up with positive reinforcement ▪️ “Thank you! That’s an important (and hard) first step!” ▪️ Important for sensitive questions like weight Don’t just ask questions, clue users into why you’re asking questions. ▪️ It can be hard to step into a user’s shoes. Develop that empathy muscle 💪 If you have 96 onboarding screens, you need to take some breaks from all questions ▪️ Reinforce value with social proof ▪️ Use partnerships with other big brand names to show your credibility 🔨 Hammer home your value prop to differentiate yourself ▪️ If a user completes onboarding without understanding why you’re different, you’ve failed 😰 ▪️ “Noom creates long-term results through habit and behavior change, not restrictive dieting” (They’ve got 5+ screens with different variations of this) 💑 Pair social proof tactics with stats to make each one more effective ▪️ Noom pairs social proof with a stat from a study for the emotion and logic 1, 2 punch combo 💰 Show tangible, specific value to your users before they pay ▪️ Noom predicts when you’ll hit your goal weight ▪️ They have a “quiz” where they teach you your “behavioral profile” to help you understand yourself ▪️ They give you quick tips about eating and dieting What your user will say: “If you’re this helpful before me giving you money then I can’t wait til I pay!” Do you have other products to cross-promote? You’ll reach the highest amount of users if you do it in onboarding. ▪️ You’ll 100% have to test this one because it goes against common thinking. Promoting products to new users can often decrease the conversion of your core product, so most people wait until a user has converted for upsells ❓ Change the style of the question ▪️ Noom has multiple question styles to keep things fresh and fight visual fatigue 🤏 Keep text in small, digestible chunks ▪️ Noom does a great job of having a conversational approach by including one sentence max per screen so you can tap through and read at a glance 🆓 User BOGO: Can you get 2 users for the price of 1? ▪️ Noom has their refer-a-friend flow as part of onboarding ▪️ They first try positioning as your “accountability buddy” and then they try again by asking if you want to gift a 2-week free trial 🙋♂️ Don’t forget your “How did you hear about us?” question ▪️ Huge for acquisition to understand where users are really coming from (and where users think they’re coming from) 🫸 💢 People need a nudge to convert ▪️ Don’t be afraid to use persuasion tactics ▪️ Noom starts a countdown timer once you land on the paywall ➡️ ➡️ See the full article on Retention . Blog

Are you optimizing your onboarding for activations or for retention, engagement and outcomes? In many conversations I've had with product people, the focus is often on optimizing for funnel conversion - a simple, low effort way to get users to sign up for the app. And this makes sense, because you're trying to get users to sign up when you haven't had the chance to prove yourself yet - so increasing the amount of effort they need to put in to getting in that front door means increasing the dropoff through your onboarding funnel. But like so many things in life - making choices that favour one side of the equation means sacrificing things on the other side of the equation. A quick and easy onboarding might increase your activation rates, lowering your CAC, but you might be sacrificing the quality of those conversions - and if your app is intervention and outcomes-based, quality matters. If your product is being judged (or if you're being paid) based on outcomes and your users aren't sticking around long enough, or engaging enough, to achieve those outcome benchmarks - then CAC may not be the most appropriate metric. Instead of customer acquisition costs, you might need to start thinking of improved user acquisition costs. If you're optimizing for lowering your CAC on activations alone, your "improved user acquisition cost" might actually be much, much higher - especially because churn rates are highest after signup. Across all mobile apps, a benchmark of 25% for 1-day retention has been recommended (that's a whopping 75% of users you're losing on Day 1), and Statista recently reported Q3 2023 statistics showing that 30-day retention rates for Health & Fitness app is a mere 2.8%. So maybe requiring a bit of a commitment, or even effort, from your users during onboarding isn't a bad thing - if you're being judged based on retention, engagement, and ultimately outcomes. You can also leverage behavioural science to introduce some ways to increase commitment among your new users, without introducing high levels of effort (for a great example of this, check out ahead app's onboarding).

70% of patient apps fail within 60 days, even when they check all the boxes on compliance, design, and tech. - 60 days in, usage starts slipping. - 90 days in, internal teams default to older workflows. - By month four, adoption is below 20% What breaks is rarely the product. It’s what happens next. Across hospital systems, virtual care platforms, and specialty clinics, it’s the same pattern that repeats. - Nurses are unsure how to use the tool during patient intake. - Support teams unaware of new flows. - Ops leaders are getting no feedback loop from the field. This turns into missed metrics - Patient sign-ups plateau. - Manual workarounds resurface. - Support load climbs. And beneath all of it, the hidden cost builds fast. Each stalled deployment can cost up to $500K in missed usage ROI and re-training cycles across departments. In the end, the app stays technically live but functionally sidelined. In one implementation, we traced 60% of the early churn to missing training for care coordinators. In another, 70% of incoming support tickets were tied to role confusion. This is where we put structure in place early - Super user systems tied to clinical roles - Training modules mapped to specific responsibilities, not just general overviews - SOPs delivered in formats teams use like short videos, step-by-step workflows, task-level triggers When this is in place - Adoption reaches 80 percent within the first 60 days - Support loads stay stable - Field-level input helps shape v2 features while the app is still gaining traction. If a patient-facing app is part of your roadmap, make sure the system knows how to run it, not just at login but across teams, shifts, and workflows. That’s where adoption holds or slips without warning! #healthcare #app #appdevelopment