User Onboarding Principles

The first time experience a user has with an app is often the most important. Many users abandon an app within the first few days of using it. Our onboarding needs to be rock solid, showing our users the value we’re going to provide to their lives, helping them achieve some small wins and setting them up for future success. Below are some principles to help guide this process.

Note: I originally created this many months ago as internal documentation. As such, I don’t remember which are my own words and which are not. I can say that almost all of this content comes directly from Samuel Hulick of UserOnboard and I do not take any credit for it.

Align with the user’s success

• People don’t start their day fired up about learning how to use your software; they’re frustrated with their current way of doing things and are willing to take a chance that investing their time in your product will lead them to a better place. The best onboarding experiences are very closely aligned with getting people from point A to point B in their lives, not just point A to point B in the product.

Highlight the value you’re providing

• New users signed up because they were interested in the value that you promised to deliver. Your aim with the first-run experience should be to give them a taste of that value by guiding them as seamlessly as possible towards their first small win.
• That small win should be something related to the overall improvement your product provides. Giving new users a real taste of the sweet life you provide — even a small one — will make them much more likely to come back.

Present in a human-like way

• So much of onboarding (and product design in general) is stilted and almost accusatory in its tone. As a rule of thumb, try to make your software speak & behave as you would if you were serving the customer directly.

Aha Moment

• Not sure how to unlock the “aha moment” ahead of time? Contact a potential customer and try to convince him or her to start using your product using only the material on your marketing site. If that alone isn’t enough to convince them, remember what else you had to say to seal the deal, and add it to your copy accordingly.

Prime the person before an ask

• Before sending the person an alert asking them to accept something (location service, push notifications, etc.), prime them with information about how this would benefit them or why it is integral to the app.
• You can even add a pre-ask, so that they if say no (for example to push notifications, iOS only lets you ask this one time) then you’ll have an opportunity to try later.

Ask when it’s necessary and contextual

• Only ask the person to do something (add their contact information, change a setting, add a profile photo, etc.) when it is necessary for them to do it.

Learn by doing

• Rather than an image illustrating an interaction, let the person try it out (maybe with some instruction text or an animation) in a safe sandbox.

Preview the interface

• An example: You can overlay the tutorial on a preview of the interface, this helps the person become familiarized with it.

Handle your blank states well

• Blank states — the times when the parts of your interface are empty or unused. Instead of starting your design process by fleshing out a dashboard with six months worth of data in it, design it for what things look like on the very first time that you log in. Or after one day’s worth of use. Or one week’s worth of use.

Don’t rely on overlays and tooltips

• If your product is so confusing that people can’t understand how to use it, and that you need to layer on more interface that literally just repeats what the interface it’s pointing to says, you need to rethink your interface.