Features of a Good Onboarding Process
For the context of this post, I am referring to ‘onboarding’ as the process a user takes when deciding to sign-up for something online. For example, the information you need to submit when you sign-up for a Netflix account.
Your onboarding process is the first impression you are giving a new user. That’s why it is critical that you make the process as smooth and user-friendly as possible.
Recently, I completed a project where I had to create a prototype for an onboarding process. During the creation and user testing, there was a lot of small, but critical aspects of the journey that I didn’t even realize were main components to the user experience until I had to create it myself.
Here are some small things that I learned:
The idea I brewed up was an onboarding process for an app which allowed season ticket holders of a sports team to easily sell or not sell their tickets. During the onboarding process, the user was required to submit information like the league & team they have season tickets to, and contact and credit card information.

Allow the users to backtrack easily
Hopefully, your onboarding is straightforward enough that they will not need to backtrack, however, everyone makes mistakes or changes their mind (maybe they want to use a different email or phone number) and it is critical that the user has the ability to change previously changed information entered during the onboarding process.

In the onboarding for my app, I do make it possible for users to backtrack to different steps in the process by clicking on the icons at the bottom of the screen. However, during testing, I quickly found out that this option for the user was not obvious. To be completely honest, I designed it that way purely for aesthetic purposes, but I would have served the user better if I had a clear back arrow or swipe interaction.
Users want to know how long the process is going to be
Don’t send users into the black abyss. Although, most people have a general idea of what an onboarding process may include, you want to give them insight upfront on how long it will take them to complete the onboarding process.
Again, I leverage the icons at the bottom of the screen to let the user know how many steps there will be (4).
Your users will want to know what stage they are on in the onboarding process
If you have given the user an idea of how long the onboarding will take, make sure to give them obvious visual queues to represent progress as well.

On the prototype I created, I made this clear by having specific icons show when the stage was complete (first icons indicated league selected, the second icon indicated which team was selected) a blue circle indicate the stage that you are currently on and an empty icon for stages that have not yet been reached.
Avoid unnecessary information
I remember in one of my original prototypes, I had a question that asked: “How many games do you plan on attending this year?”.
After doing a few tests, I realized that A) The user may not be able to answer that question at this stage B) This question could be asked AFTER they have completed the process.
Don’t insert anything that could potentially act as a roadblock and prevent the user from completing the onboarding.
If you really want to include it in the onboarding process, then at least make it a ‘skippable’ or not necessary to finish the entire process.
Give users the opportunity to review their inputs
This is a bit of a controversial recommendation. You could argue that by inserting this step, I am contradicting my last comment about avoiding unnecessary steps. However, I believe that by adding a ‘review’ step you are:
- Reducing the possibility of inaccurate information
- Increasing the chance they are using active profile for their sign-up (For example, an email that they are actually going to check)
- Verifies the potential active users

