An Onboarding Funnel tracks the progress of new players through their first few minutes of gameplay in an experience. During those early moments, players are expected to take actions as they engage with the experience’s core loop for the first time. For example, in a fighting experience, players may be expected to equip a weapon, defeat other players, collect rewards and invest in better weaponry.
Because players leave onboarding experiences early for many reasons, like lack of interest, confusion, and bugs, fewer and fewer players complete each step of the process. By tracking player progress through the steps of onboarding, developers can gain valuable insight into which aspects of the first few minutes of gameplay are clear and engaging, and at which specific points players leave the experience. These points can then be addressed to increase D1 retention, or the number of new players who play a game for the first time and return to play again the next day.
To understand how to use funnel data to understand player behavior in the onboarding process and identify areas of improvement, continue reading. For instructions on how to set up an onboarding funnel, see Funnel Events.
Let’s see the value of a funnel in practice using the example game, Plant. Plant is a game where players plant seeds, water them to make them grow, harvest and sell the produce to earn coins, then invest those coins in additional seeds and pots. As they progress, players can purchase larger pots and the seeds of more valuable plants.
Onboarding Funnel for Plant
In the funnel above, Step 1 (In Farm) represents the players who spawn into the experience for the first time. 100% of players who enter the onboarding funnel begin at this step. At the bottom of the funnel, less than 3% of those players complete the final step, Step 9 (Return to Farm). While it is expected that fewer players will reach the end of the funnel, that amount of loss is significant and worth investigating.
The largest single drop happens between Step 1 (In Farm) at 100% and Step 2 (Plant Seed) at 29.52%. This loss of 70.48% indicates that the majority of players fail to plant their first seed. There are a number of potential reasons:
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Players aren’t interested in the gameplay. They enter the game not realizing that it’s about planting, and quickly leave after joining because they were not looking for a planting game. While it’s possible that a small number of players experience this confusion, it’s doubtful that it explains the majority of the drop because the game’s title, description and icon accurately represent the experience. Uninterested players are unlikely to enter the game at all.
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Players are blocked by bugs or performance issues. It should be possible to confirm, or rule out, this issue by playtesting and gathering player feedback.
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The goal is unclear. If players don’t realize that they need to plant a seed, they might not figure it out before they become frustrated or bored and leave the game.
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The planting process is unclear. Players know that they need to plant a seed, but don’t understand how.
Barring any game-breaking bugs, these last two points have the most potential to explain why players fail to plant a seed. The developers should consider whether they need to:
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Communicate the goal more effectively. This could be as simple as on-screen text or an in-world visual element, or more involved, like NPC dialogue or a quest.
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Improve the planting UX to remove confusion or points of friction. Observing players as they play may reveal where and why they struggle.
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Employ additional onboarding techniques that walk players through the planting process, if addressing the previous points fails.
Seed-planting icons in Plant
In the end, the solution that effectively guided players through the planting step was simply adding an icon over the players’ pots to indicate that seeds can be planted inside.
This process of identifying where players fail to complete a step, diagnosing the issues, and iterating on the onboarding experience to address those issues, is an important part of supporting a live game. By reducing drop-off in the onboarding funnel, developers can increase D1 (day one) retention so that more players experience what the game has to offer.
Step 1: Identify Drop-Off Points
Although it is normal for fewer players to complete each successive step in onboarding, data can reveal larger than expected drops from one step to the next. When drop-off is significant, that’s an indicator that there may be an issue with the design or implementation that is thwarting player progress.
Identifying drop-off points is easiest when data is visualized in a graph, like the one above. Look for steps where a significant number of players fail to complete the objective. Each of those points represents an opportunity to improve the experience and retain more players.
Step 2: Diagnose the Issues
When diagnosing the cause of drop-off, consider the factors surrounding the step. What are players expected to do? Is that expectation clear? What can go wrong? Develop hypotheses about why players fail to complete the step and consider corrective action. When possible, playtest and observe new players as they work through the onboarding experience to gather more information and validate hypotheses. Developers understand their own experiences so well that it can be difficult to play with the perspective of someone without that experience, so recruiting fresh eyes is often beneficial.
While every experience is different, there are some common sources of drop-off:
Boredom: Players find the gameplay uninteresting. That will always be the case for some number of players, but it can also be the result of players not having enough to do or an appreciation of why they should be doing it. Goals may be lacking or uninteresting, or the payoff is unclear.
Confusion: Players don’t understand what to do or how to do it. Goals may be unclear, the UI poorly designed, points of interest in the world difficult to locate, etc. Observing players as they attempt to complete objectives can reveal where the confusion comes from and suggest improvements, like UI and level design changes.
Frustration or Blockage: Players understand what to do, but accomplishing their goals is frustratingly difficult or impossible. This is often the result of balance issues in gameplay (eg: an enemy is too challenging) or the economy (eg: resources are too scarce).
Bugs: Players understand what to do and how to do it, but are prevented from accomplishing their goals by buggy gameplay or poor performance on their device. Observing players and taking feedback from the community can help identify these issues.
Edge cases: Players find themselves in a bad state, where they are unable to make progress, because of circumstances that the developers did not anticipate. For example, if fishing rods are sellable items, it may be possible for players to sell their rod before they’ve earned enough gold by fishing to buy a new one. Players in that state are stuck, unable to earn gold or make further progress. Edge cases generally affect a small number of players, but can result in those players being blocked altogether.
Step 3: Prioritize, Implement & Iterate
The next step in the process is to prioritize the short-list of changes to improve the onboarding experience and retain more players. Look for updates that are:
- High impact:These are the changes most likely to result in the greatest improvement.
- Inexpensive: These improvements require relatively little time and effort to implement, so they can be released quickly.
- Reusable: These changes can be applied elsewhere in the experience, for further benefit. Adjustments to UI layouts and UX flows, for example, could potentially improve the player experience throughout the game.
Releasing the inexpensive changes as quickly as possible can help to stem the bleeding of players from the onboarding experience while the more intensive fixes are in development. Beyond that, team bandwidth and capabilities will dictate which fixes are made, and how quickly. The team’s update roadmap should also be consulted to determine whether other planned releases should be pushed out. Because the onboarding issues limit the number of players retained in the experience, it is generally recommended that fixes for drop-off points be prioritized over content updates and other, less-critical release types.
After the updates have been released, monitor the funnel carefully to see whether the implemented changes increase the number of players completing the onboarding experience. If they do, improvements to the drop-off points should be visible after a few days. It may become apparent that there is still room for improvement. Continued iteration might be needed to find the right changes to the drop-off issues. However, fixing those issues will lead to a better onboarding experience with more player completion. Because those players will have enjoyed the experience more, they are more likely to return and play again, leading to an increase in D1 retention, concurrent users, and monetization potential.
More Complex Example
Now that we’ve taken a look at the process for identifying, diagnosing, and addressing drop-off in the onboarding funnel, let’s dive into a more complex example experience. In the fictional game Feline Fishing Fun, players catch fish, sell them, and upgrade their fishing rods so that they can reel in more rare and valuable catches. The experience’s onboarding process might look something like this:
- Spawn in the world
- Equip fishing rod from inventory
- Use fishing rod to catch a fish
- Sell a fish to earn gold
- Spend gold to upgrade to a level 2 fishing rod
- Use the more powerful rod to catch a shark
If we create data hooks for each of these events and track them with analytics, we can gain insight into which objectives players are failing to complete and begin to investigate why.
Onboarding funnel in Feline Fishing Fun
So what’s going on with Feline Fishing Fun? In the onboarding funnel pictured above, there are a few drop-off points to investigate. Let’s take a look at each step of the funnel.
Step 0: Spawn in the world - This represents all of the players who enter the experience for the first time on a given day.
Step 1: Equip fishing rod - This is the first step in the onboarding experience. For players to engage with the experience’s core loop, they must equip their fishing rod. Only a small handful of players fail to complete this step, so there appear to be no issues to address.
Step 2: Catch first fish - Once players equip the fishing rod, the next logical step is to use it to catch a fish. Again, few players drop off at this point; the majority manage to catch a fish. No action is needed.
Step 3: Sell fish - After successfully catching some fish, players are expected to sell their catch at the Fishing Shack to earn gold that they will use to upgrade their fishing rod. The number of players dropping off at this step is significant, necessitating investigation.
There are a number of possible reasons why players may struggle with this step:
- The objective is unclear. Players do not understand that they can or should sell fish to earn gold. More explicit messaging around this goal may be required, such as a quest objective: Earn 250 gold by selling fish.
- Players know that they need to sell fish, but don’t know where to do it (the FishingShack) More detailed messaging could help here, too: Earn 250 Gold by selling fish at the Fishing Shack.
- They have difficulty locating the Fishing Shack in the world. A mini-map or in-world tutorial arrow could assist players in locating the shack, but changes to the level design should also be considered: if the shack is hard to find or inconveniently located, perhaps it should be moved.
- The process of selling fish is confusing or inconvenient. If selling is unclear or requires too much effort, players will be blocked from participating in the economy and making progress in the experience. The best way to assess whether the interface is part of the problem is to observe players as they attempt to sell fish; if they struggle, adjusting the selling flow to be more clear and convenient could alleviate the issue. To learn about best practices for designing user interfaces and experiences, see the UI and UX Design article.
Step 4: Upgrade rod - Once players have earned enough gold by selling fish, they are expected to spend that gold on a Level 2 fishing rod, which will enable them to catch more rare and valuable fish. Rod progression is key to providing engaging goals, retaining players, and keeping the game’s economy healthy. Unfortunately, very few players complete this step. Why is the drop-off so significant? It’s possible that:
- Players don’t know that upgraded fishing rods can be purchased. One way to address this issue is to add a quest objective that explicitly tells players to upgrade their fishing rod after they have earned enough gold. Another option is to surface the full spectrum of progression by placing each of the fishing rod in the world outside the Fishing Shack, with signs indicating price and tier.
- Players don’t understand the benefits of upgrading their fishing rod. More messaging could solve this problem, as well. An in-world sign displaying all of the available fish and their odds of being caught by each fishing rod could be enough. If players still don’t understand, more explicit tutorial-style messaging may be needed.
- The purchase flow in the shop is confusing. Observing players attempting to make the purchase could reveal points of confusion or friction to be addressed with UI/UX improvements.
- The Level 2 rod is too expensive. It takes players too long to catch the fish required to earn enough gold to purchase the rod, so they give up. Balance issues like this can be avoided by modeling how long it should take for players to accumulate a given amount of currency. For more information on this topic, see Balancing Virtual Economies.
Step 5: Catch shark - Players who complete Step 4 and upgrade their fishing rods mostly seem to complete this step, as well; however, there is enough drop-off to merit a closer look. Perhaps there are surfacing or balance issues:
- Players don’t know how or when sharks appear. Perhaps they only spawn in the deeper waters off the pier, not along the beach. Surfacing this requirement could be as simple as placing a warning sign telling players to watch for sharks on the pier, implying that sharks can be found there without explicitly telling players where to look.
- Shark spawn rates are too low, so even players using the correct rod and fishing in the right place still struggle to find one. The spawn rate may need to be adjusted to increase players’ likelihood of seeing one.
- Players are managing to hook a shark, but once it’s on the line, its odds of escape are too high. This variable may need to be adjusted, as well, to increase players’ odds of success.
- As designed, the shark is intended for more advanced players. Rather than adjusting the shark’s spawn and flee rates, perhaps there is a more appropriately-balanced fish for players to catch during the onboarding experience.
Once hypotheses have been developed, it’s smart to validate them as much as possible through playtest observations and player feedback. Doing so can reveal new options for improvement, eliminate others, and help with prioritization.
Improved Onboarding funnel in Feline Fishing Fun
As the new funnel above illustrates, using event data to identify specific areas of dropoff allows developers to make informed choices to improve the player experience and increase D1 retention.
