You’ve invested in building a user portal but after launch adoption is less than expected. allow us to assist you increase portal user adoption by watching seven big steps you’ll fancy to encourage portal adoption.
Imagine this scenario: after months of diligence, development, and testing, you’ve finally launched a fresh web portal. You’ve poured time, money, and development resources into it. you think that you’ve created something which will finally address a big pain point that’s been plaguing your employees or customers. You’re excited—your portal is close to giving your business an enormous boost.
And then…it flops. After the launch, the amount of individuals using your portal is less than you’d hoped, and your big investment isn’t paying off.
So, what are you able to do to extend portal adoption once you end up during this situation?
In this post, we’ll offer you some answers thereto question by covering the seven big steps you’ll fancy to encourage portal adoption.
We’ll start with the low-hanging fruit: ways to interrupt down the barriers which may be hampering user engagement, from complicated registration processes to terrible user experiences. Then we’ll advance to ways to teach your users about the way to use and enjoy your fresh portal. and eventually , we’ll tackle the advanced moves: the subtle tweaks you’ll make to nudge your audience toward deep engagement together with your portal.
1) Simplify the Registration Process
Before you create drastic changes to the portal itself, your top priority should be to lower the barriers-to-entry which may be deterring your portal users.
The registration process should be your first port of call here—not only because registration is the first hurdle that your potential users will encounter, but also because complex registration requirements are a very significant deterrent for would-be users. A 2012 study conducted by Blue Research found, for instance , that 86% of users were bothered by registration requirements on websites, which 54% said they might abandon any website with a time-consuming registration process.
But where an internet site could be ready to get around registration requirements (by allowing users to continue as guests, for example), user registration is more or less unavoidable with a portal. so as to supply users with the proper access and tools, your portal will need users to register and supply key information about themselves.
Luckily, though, there are belongings you can do to streamline the registration process. Start by reviewing your registration process and ablation any unnecessary questions. Then, reduce the quantity of data that users need to provide upfront while they’re registering. they will always be prompted to fill in important missing pieces once they’re registered—but you’ve got to urge them through the door first.
2) Improve the User Experience
A second significant barrier to portal adoption is poor user experience. If your portal is unintuitive, difficult to use, impossible to navigate, or unresponsive to the requirements of your audience, it won’t get much traction.
So, addressing UX issues should be a top priority. Start by identifying obvious pain points within the user journey by asking yourself some basic questions:
- Is each element of the portal useful and necessary?
- Is the portal easy to use without training?
- Is the portal navigable? Will users be ready to find what they’re trying to find quickly?
- Does the user journey make sense? Is it intuitive?
- Is all of the content within the portal accessible for people with disabilities?
- Is the portal’s interface well-designed and attractive?
- If you’ve got UX designers on staff (or if you’ve got the resources to usher in a UX consultant) this is often the time to leverage their expertise. But even without dedicated UX experts, you and your team members can do a radical walkthrough of the portal user journey so as to spot any glaring problems.
You can also solicit valuable UX feedback from your users—more thereon arising .
3) Educate your Audience About the Unique Benefits
Even if the use-cases and benefits of your portal are crystal clear to you, your target users won’t understand exactly what they’re.
Fortunately, you’ve probably done tons of research on the precise, measurable, and unique benefits that your portal offers your target audience—otherwise, you wouldn’t have bothered to develop it.
Your next step is to obviously communicate these unique benefits to your users.
Give some thought to your best communication option (Email? Face-to-face? a proper written resource?) Then use this channel to teach your users about exactly how they will enjoy using your portal.
Try to be specific: if you’ve got metrics that show that your portal will save users time or money, improve their job performance, or make their interactions easier, use these as concrete evidence for the advantages of portal adoption.
4) Provide Training, How-Tos and FAQs
Beyond educating your audience about the unique benefits of your program, you’ll also work to teach them about the way to incorporate the tool into their workflow or lifestyle .
If you’ve designed your portal to serve your employees, one among your best options here is to supply training opportunities—think workshops and formal training sessions—that will get users up to hurry on the way to use the new software effectively. Offering this support is additionally a pleasant thanks to get your team on board, and it can offer you early insight into any problems which may have to be addressed.
If you’ve developed your portal to serve customers or clients, you’ll offer more remote support and training tools. you’ll use how-to videos to show users the talents they’ll have to navigate the portal or to steer them through the key functionalities of the software.
For both of those audiences, it’s also an honest idea to develop an FAQ resource that users can draw on to troubleshoot common issues quickly and independently.
5) Use the Portal as a Communication Tool
Most portals accompany some great communications features which will be wont to streamline mass communications, facilitate direct interactions between users and repair providers, or maybe just to chop down on the quantity of email that your employees receive.
You can leverage these communication tools to nudge your users towards portal adoption, especially if you’ll make your portal a mainstay of your communications.
If you often use your portal to speak essential info to users or to conduct normal business, your audience will naturally find themselves logging on to the portal more and more. Basically, the key here is to form the portal, a key source of important information, in order that users who avoid portal adoption will eventually find that they need no choice but to urge on board.
6) leave Personalization
A great portal should offer many opportunities for users to customize their experience.
Not only does the power to personalize improve the portal user experience—by allowing users to shape their portal to suit their specific and unique needs—but it also can boost portal user adoption.
Here’s how.
While you’ve probably begun to style a portal that responds to the broad needs of your audience , it’s important to recollect that no two users are exactly alike. Say you’re a multi-location company and you’ve developed a portal to streamline communication and document-sharing between your two offices. This may help all of your employees to collaborate more efficiently. But your sales team is sure to have different specific collaboration needs than your accounting team. Allowing each group of employees to personalize the portal to suit their unique needs will make portal adoption tons more appealing.
7) Solicit Feedback (and cash in of your metrics)
As long as your portal is active, it’s an honest idea to still reflect on how your users are interacting with the portal (and, of course, trying to find opportunities to enhance their experience.)
That’s because initial portal adoption isn’t enough to make sure that your users make the foremost of your portal. You’ll also have to make sure that your users stick around once they’ve been on-boarded.
One way to extend user retention is to solicit regular feedback from your users. this may not only assist you to refine your portal, but it’ll also foster a stronger sense of user attachment. If your users have a chance to voice their concerns and shape the longer term development of the portal, they’re more likely to feel bought-in to the portal.
You can also use in-depth metrics to spice up your portal user retention. These metrics can tell you everything from what percentage pages your users are viewing, to how often they’re using particular portal features. By keeping tabs on these numbers, you’ll be ready to see what elements of the portal are working for users, and what elements need improvement.
The Takeaway
Developing a robust portal doesn’t always mean that your audience will flock thereto .
As with any new piece of tech, it is often a true challenge to urge portal users to interact deeply right off the bat.
Your audience may need trouble seeing the unique value that a portal offers them, or they could struggle to be comfortable with fresh user experience when they’ve gotten wont to old systems. Maybe your portal features a hidden UX problem that’s driving users away. Maybe it just takes too long for users to check in .
But luckily, there are concrete steps that you can simply fancy to solve these problems and boost portal user adoption. During this post, we’ve outlined seven of our top tips for doing just that.
