UX learnings from onboarding experiences that stand out
Communicating core value right away ✅. Delighting users with beautiful aesthetics ✅. Personalizing the experience ✅. Giving users a reason to come back ✅. Some apps go beyond following these best practices for onboarding users. They deliver a unique experience that makes it memorable for the user and sometimes also helps the product stand out in the market.
Let’s steal some UX learnings from four such apps:
Superhuman — Create power users the high touch way
Know the feeling when you talk to a ‘typical’ customer support rep? You know they aren’t machines but they don’t speak human. They talk in templatized answers. Worse, they don’t listen.
Businesses that fail to properly train (or worse, train them to become robots) must experience the Superhuman way.
Superhuman is the fastest email app. Instead of troubleshooting when users have a problem, they start helping from the very start. Their onboarding is designed to help their users become ⚡power users⚡️ and they do it with what they call a ‘white-glove service’! It’s the most high-touch, famously exclusive, most appreciated, and most talked about onboarding experience.
Each user gets on a one-on-one call with a Superhuman rep. The user can choose a primary goal, like inbox zero, organization, fast response, etc. The call is personalized to help the user achieve that goal.
Instead of teaching about their product interface, Superhuman onboarding equips you with tips and keyboard shortcuts for faster browsing, searching, accessing, and responding to emails. The rep asks you about any specific challenges you face with emails and helps resolve those.
The white-glove service doesn’t end there. For the following two weeks, you receive an email from Rahul, their CEO, to show you features that they couldn’t cover in the call.
By making a real human connection during onboarding, Superhuman has proved that even in this digital age, the best of user experiences are high touch.
Canva — Simplify expertise for the non-experts
Design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator offer immense capabilities but involve a steep learning curve (1–3 months). Plus they end up hogging your hard disk space and memory.
Overcoming these challenges isn’t a big deal for professional graphic designers. But, it doesn’t make sense for non-experts who are interested in lightweight designing like creating invitations, book covers, business cards, mobile wallpapers, Instagram posts, Zoom backgrounds, and so on.
Canva is a tool that simplifies design for non-designers. Right from getting started to producing beautiful art, it reduces friction at all levels.
Canva is a design tool for non-designers. Onboarding is the best time to communicate this core value proposition.
Their onboarding includes a quick needs assessment (‘What do you need Canva for?’) followed by access to beautifully designed templates for all scenarios. These templates provide a headstart to the user to design anything.
Canva’s onboarding assures users that although it’s DIY, it’s almost done for you. They don’t have to think of ‘how to start’.
The user can customize a template entirely or make minimum tweaks. In any case, she has a strong starting point. The ability to start at the end is powerful, especially for the non-experts.
Duolingo — Love first, commit later
Which was the last app you used without signing up? It has now become a norm to ask users for their email before they start using a product. Registering a user is seen as the primary goal of successful onboarding.
Not in the Duolingo world.
Duolingo is a language-learning tool. Instead of starting with signup, their strategy is to make the user fall in love with the tool first! They start offering free and personalized learning right away.
Duo, the tool’s mascot is a cute owl with delightful animations. Duo also happens to run the onboarding process, striking a connection with the new user.
Onboarding includes understanding user needs and motivation for learning a new language so that they can offer a personalized learning path. e.g., It matters whether you want to learn Italian to talk to your remote team or to order food in a trattoria.
Learning a new language feels challenging. Duolingo makes the challenge approachable by offering daily goal options starting with ‘Casual 5 mins’ to ‘Intense 20 mins’. Anyone can afford (and commit) 5 mins a day.
Before you know it, you’ll find yourself translating words into a new language! Their questions are designed intelligently to familiarize you with new words and apply them soon after.
The signup prompt comes at a later stage. It’s positioned as a benefit for the user — Save your progress instead of Set up an account with us.
The idea of postponing registration for as long as possible might be scary to some businesses. For Duolingo, gradual engagement has worked like a charm. Users see the value first. By the time they are asked to sign up, they have invested enough time and effort to save their progress.
Grammarly — Learn by rehearsing
Grammarly is a digital writing assistance tool. It scans your text and offers suggestions to help improve your writing. Suggestions can include correcting common grammatical errors (like punctuation, spelling, etc.) to improving complex sentence structure.
The tool offers a lot of features to accomplish all of that. Users need to become familiar with all the features to make the best use of the tool.
Grammarly realizes that teaching users how to use the tool is crucial for the product’s success and the user’s progress.
While some products solve this problem by offering tutorials or by progressively disclosing capabilities, Grammarly trains its users with a perfect rehearsal.
The tool lets users practice on a ‘demo document’. This document includes all mistakes needed to show the user all that the tool has to offer.
The learning curve would be much longer if the user starts using the tool without practicing on the demo document.
As the user corrects mistakes and accepts the tips provided by the tool, she learns all the ways Grammarly can assist.
All of these apps—Superhuman, Canva, Duolingo, and Grammarly—stand out with how they onboard their users. If there’s one thing common, it’s their relentless drive to help users progress.
When product teams make it a high priority to help user progress like never before, they come up with unique ways to achieve that.
