Onboarding is the first direct experience a new user has with an application. And first impressions are everything.
This is the phase where users sign up, set preferences, and learn how to use your product. Their experience here will set the tone for their entire relationship with your company.
A good onboarding experience will make a user feel comfortable with your product and trusting of your brand. A bad experience could make them feel confused, bored, annoyed, or even upset about privacy concerns.
Fortunately, there is a lot that you can do to ensure that the onboarding process is a positive one. Read on to learn about our best practices for designing onboarding experiences that engage users with digital products.
Imagine you show up to your first day at your new job, and everything is a mess. None of your office equipment works properly, you have to spend hours filling out paperwork, and your boss only explains things that are irrelevant to your role.
That's what a bad onboarding experience is like. It wastes time and leaves users feeling drained.
A good onboarding experience, on the other hand, is like an effortless transition to your new job. Everything works the way you expect it to, getting started is easy, and the instructions you get are clear and helpful.
Onboarding serves multiple purposes:
Setting up an account. A user's relationship with a company formally begins when they first make an account. This usually means supplying information like name, email, phone number, and more. It also may require passing security checks, like CAPTCHAs and email authentication.
Explaining the purpose of your application. Onboarding is an opportunity to sell people on the value proposition of your product, list important features, and highlight why users should return.
Personalizing the experience. Onboarding is often the first chance a company has to get and make use of personal preferences for their customers. Right at the beginning, customers can choose what they want to see and how they want to see it.
Collecting information. Once a user signs up, that means that their behaviors and preferences can be tracked directly. Onboarding is also a good time to ask survey questions quickly, as users will already be in that state of mind.
Establishing a relationship. Onboarding is really the first chance users get to interact directly with your product. That means it is an important opportunity for getting users to know and trust your brand.
Beyond this, you may have other goals for onboarding that are specific to your product. For example, a social media app might have the goal of finding people to follow or connect with to start. An educational app might have the onboarding goal of assessing existing knowledge. And a nutrition tracking app might need to ask some basic questions about the user's medical needs.
It's important that the onboarding process be intuitive and understandable to users. It is, after all, the very first thing they do; if a user gets confused now, they might have a hard time using the rest of your product.
This is especially important for startups. In a crowded market, having good UX is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from competitors, many of whom may be offering similar features.
Show users how to use your application with videos, images and short animations. Icons like arrows and bells can point to and highlight the most important UX features. And ideally, it should always be clear what the next step to take is.
Founders sometimes think of onboarding as an afterthought, but this is a mistake. It's good to think about the UX for onboarding while developing the UX for the application as a whole, so that the two work together seamlessly.
Individual best practices fall into the following categories:
In software engineering, the KISS Principle stands for Keep it Simple, Stupid.
Generally speaking, less is usually better. Users don't want to waste any time clicking buttons or handing out their information. They want to use your application.
Here are some best practices for simplifying the onboarding experience:
Only ask for the information you need. Anything else might seem intrusive, or a waste of time.
Prioritize features to introduce. You want to highlight the core value proposition of your product throughout- the specific feature that made users sign up in the first place.
Use simple language. Nobody wants to read complicated instructions. Stick to active voice, use short sentences, and avoid jargon.
Onboarding is often the first chance you get to directly ask users what they're looking to get out of using your product.
The kind of personalization you should pursue will vary according to the type of application you build. A social media app might ask new users what kind of content they want to see, while productivity or office software might ask new users what company role they have.
Here are a few best practices for personalizing the onboarding experience:
Provide choice. Users often prefer selecting from a small number of options, rather than answering open-ended questions.
Allow users to skip. Not everybody wants the same level of personalization.
Offer language options. If you plan on launching your application in multiple different countries, you should accommodate users who speak different languages.
Offer preset customizations. When it comes to personalization, most users don't have all day. They might like the idea of using a pre-built theme or template. These presets can be based around the user personas you created in the initial segmentation of your user base.
Using an app or a website is a highly visual experience. There are buttons to click, forms to fill out, and icons and pictures to see.
You should aim to show users how to use your product, with videos, images, and short animations. Icons like arrows and bells can point to and highlight the most important UX features.
Here are some best practices for optimizing the visuals for onboarding:
Adapt visuals to each device. Make sure, for example, that animations render properly on mobile and web, if you expect them to play on both.
Use universal symbols and icons. There are many UX standards and commonly recognised symbols. Utilise them and make sure to not confuse users with unexpected outcomes and icons.
Avoid clutter. The goal is not to be eye-popping and catch users' attentions. Rather, the goal is to be unobtrusive, quickly onboarding users to your application without overwhelming them.
There are many reasons why you might want users to complete as much of the onboarding process as possible: collecting information, personalizing their experience, ensuring they understand the application, and more.
However, users often want to jump straight in to using your application. They would also feel uncomfortable if you pushed them too hard to complete onboarding tasks.
The solution is to gently nudge users towards doing onboarding tasks by using gamification. By turning the experience into something of a game, where each completed task brings rewards, you can increase the likelihood that users will actually do them, without being forced.
Award points for completing tasks. Humans like seeing numbers go up, whatever those numbers happen to mean.
Show a progress bar indicating onboarding completion. People like to see that they have completed things 100%. Seeing an unfilled circle that says "72%", on the other hand, leaves them feeling like they might as well check the last few boxes.
Offer awards or badges. Simple digital achievements like these can be surprisingly motivating to people. They are even more so if users can show them off proudly to other users.
Make the tasks intrinsically worthwhile. Actually useful experiences are worth even more than arbitrary points or badges. If your tutorials clearly and concisely explain useful features of your product, that will be a reward in and of itself.
Nobody wants to sit through a boring lecture. Simply telling users what to do is often a waste of time- they don't really process the instructions, and instead feel like they are being held back.
Instead, strive to make onboarding instructions as interactive as possible. With each feature you introduce, consider introducing it with an interactive demo version that lets users see what happens when they try.
Implement sandboxes. These are little "demo" versions of a feature you want to explain that give users a chance to do whatever they want with it. This motivates users to play around with their own creativity.
Add tooltips. These are little bits of contextual information that users access by hovering their mouse over a feature. This helps users find and discover new features while using your product.
Add toggles, sliders and pickers. Let the user play around with some of the core settings.
People like having a choice. Even if they know they would benefit from following onboarding instructions, a lot of people would rather skip them and try to figure things out for themselves.
That's why it's a good idea to give users a lot of flexibility in how much of the onboarding process they actually complete. Additionally, users should be able to easily go back and resume onboarding wherever they left off, in case they get stuck using the app and don't know what to do.
Here are some best practices for enhancing flexibility:
Make skip buttons obvious but nonintrusive. You want users to know they are there, but not be distracted by them if they want to continue the instructions.
Ask users about their prior knowledge first. This can help with removing redundant material from onboarding. Some users might even be returning prior users, and would appreciate it if you let them skip the instructions altogether.
Split instructions into chapters or chunks. By doing this, you can let users identify what they are already familiar with, and what they are not. They can skip ahead to the next chapter they want to learn.
Onboarding is one of the best times to collect data about the users. From demographics to the reason why they use the app, you can learn a lot about your people in a non-intrusive way.
Implement data trackers. You always want to know which parts of the onboarding are the weakest ones and where the users drop off.
Make feedback optional, but encouraged. Onboarding can be a lengthy process but a friendly question at the right time might help you learn about your users.
Track onboarding completion. You might notice some patterns. For example, perhaps users fall off dramatically after one particular instruction video that turns out to be too long.
Onboarding is one of our most common projects and we've helped startups build and refine dozens of onboarding experiences. We knew that it's often the user's first contact with the product and helping them have a great experience massively improves retention, helps the Founders understand their users more, and ultimately drive growth.
Our approach relies on combining the principles discussed above. We aim to make onboarding simple, personalized, interactive, and flexible. We also aim to add thoughtfully designed visuals and gamification elements where appropriate.
Do you have a digital product you want to bring to life? Let's talk!
