The Best App Onboarding Is No App Onboarding
Perhaps because initial onboarding screens are so ubiquitous (or because app development often comes out of marketing budgets), many businesses think of initial onboarding screens as a feature. More often they represent failure of design. The best way to engage new users is through a real, successful, satisfying interaction without delay. An app that respects its platform conventions, leverages familiar design patterns, guides users in-context, and offers value, will succeed — as long as its potential users don’t abandon the app during onboarding.
As a product designer, I strive to create familiar, intuitive, intrinsically-rewarding experiences that require no initial instruction. If, at the end of that effort, we have to add even some delightfully animated screens to get users started, I’ve failed.
Of course, the term onboarding is pretty broad. It can mean instructions for using the app, getting the user to create an account, collecting essential data, or permitting device access that the app needs to provide its value.
But, according to Google research, 25% of users abandon apps during onboarding — that’s a huge fraction of engaged, mobile customers to lose before they’ve even tried your product.
I aim to defer instructions and requests until they can be presented in the context of a user-initiated activity. People will give you everything if they think it was their idea (we’ll even gleefully provide our kids’ images and data to Facebook for a few likes). You’ve just got to be patient.
Don’t ask for anything up-front. Allow users to discover the value of your app without their data — or even creating an account. They’ll create an account to save their work in the app, or to make a purchase, and they’ll want to do it.
That goes for location services and other platform-level permissions like notifications or camera and microphone access too. Wait to present the request in the context of a user-initiated activity when they’ll perceive the obvious benefit.
Some system-level requests can be made only once. A good strategy is to use a “pretty-please” screen to explain the value of allowing that access prior to presenting the required system dialog. If the user says “no,” to the pretty-please, you can save the system request for a subsequent opportunity.
Nobody reads onboarding copy, and if they do, they’ll forget any instructions by the time they need them. A few words of instructive text in context are much more helpful to a user of your app.
And, finally, value-proposition onboarding is ridiculous! By the time someone arrives at your first onboarding screen, they have already researched, discovered, compared, downloaded, installed, and launched your app — why interpose more marketing — you’ve already closed the deal!
Gratuitous onboarding screens are the mansplaining of mobile apps.
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