Have you ever been on a boat? A cruise, perhaps? There’s a definite moment when you’re on the boat, just like there was a definite moment when you were not on the boat. The moment you find yourself on the boat, you’re aboard. You’ve onboarded.
(I’ve learned my wicked editor’s ways. I know he thinks I’ll end this post right here and he’ll cast reams of curses in my direction. I’m going to aikido that petty fool and keep writing.)
While my topics have been known to stretch far, wide, and in some unpredictable directions, this post isn’t actually about anything too nautical. The boat is a metaphor, if you didn’t see that coming. Yet as a person of far-reaching pirate repute, I have a thing or two to say about sea-faring vessels.
Whether the boat you’re boarding is a little dinghy or a 20-storey cruise ship, there are a few steps you need to go through in order to walk that plank aboard. Unless you sleep on the pier, you probably had to take a trip to get out to the water, possibly pack some stuff, buy some duty-free champagne and day-glo spring break t-shirts, etc. If you think the sole moment you’ve onboarded is when you take your first step on the ship, you’re ignoring the heaps of effort that’ve gone into getting yourself there: physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. I would expect that your first step upon boarding would be to unfurl your Ouija board and start casting some divinations. Chart out the local icebergs, if nothing else.
Getting on board involves a whole whack of preboarding to allow you to step into the shimmering light of your state-of-the-art floating city without pesky annoyances like proving your citizenship or history of vaccinations. If you want smooth sailing before the smooth sailing begins, there are loads of steps to go through, to prime and prepare your passengers.
For those of you in the back having trouble understanding why you’re still reading about getting onto a boat, let me connect the metaphor more explicitly: whenever you begin a new experience – whether that’s a job, going to a festival, making a sacrificial offering to the full moon, you name it – there’s a distinct moment the event begins, but there are a bunch of preparations to make, long before it begins. You make the beginning more of a capital-B Beginning, with each of those preparations: both in significance, and in smoothness.
If you’re starting a new job, it might be taking care of all the legal paperwork, learning about the company’s mission and values, reading some curated posts on their blog, understanding the typical employee’s daily caffeine intake. You name it. If you're conducting some occult ritual at the full moon, you need to cast your spells on your candles, sharpen your knives… I mean I’m not writing any of this from experience but you get the idea.
Some of these steps are strictly functional, like having a sharp knife, or IT knowing you’ll be arriving on Monday so they can have your computer glistening and ready with your name on it. In the case of a cruise ship carrying 5000 passengers for a week, you may really need to know that everyone is immunized against polio, and sorting that out in the first moments of their arrival is just a bad use of time. Yet as much as these are functional, they’re important from the lens of experience design. The entire discipline of marketing teaches us the impact of effectively priming peoples’ expectations, and an identical experience can impact participants in wildly different ways depending what prior steps occurred to create anticipation and excitement. And assuming there’s a social dimension to the experience you’re designing (and it’s rare that there isn’t a social dimension) you can prime people to arrive in a state so they feel they’re with their people even before they walk the plank.
Don’t waste your time or energy with onboarding. Because today we’ve seen how much needs to happen in preboarding, to set onboarding up for its potential. It’s like the soft service toss of the tennis ball, as it hangs silently in the air before a racquet with 50 lbs of string-tension smashes into it, propelling it faster than a highway-speeding car in less than the blink of an eye. The racquet is coming. But for now, we’re just considering the toss – getting the ball where it needs to be before the moment of impact.
Preboarding needs to happen well so onboarding can happen well. Onboarding needs to happen well so everything after that can happen well. These first few minutes, hours, days, and weeks of a new experience (like a job) will dictate almost everything. Really. Almost everything. If you do it well, you’ve picked some of the highest impact, lowest effort items that almost always get missed, but amidst our chaotically busy lives, they’re so easy to miss.
So here’s your call. Look at the lineup of people eagerly waiting to board the Icon of the Seas, or Dr. J’s Pirate Ship. Look how excited they are. Realize all they’ve done to get to this point, and make sure that you aren’t relying on luck for things to go right, because you wouldn’t do that for the rest of your experience, or the rest of your business, would you?