11 Companies Show You How To Perfect Your Onboarding UX

First impressions count for everything! The need for effective UX Onboarding is essential for your companies reputation and growth. In this roundup you will learn valuable advice from companies that have tried and tested different approaches to achieve the best UX.

Anna Weingarten

Published in

Upscope

5 min readApr 9, 2018

1. Prodpad created a magically extending free trial and saw speedy sign ups

Prodpad began with halving their trial period to 14 days — this doubled their conversion rate.

Then they had a new idea….

‘’So what if we offered 7-day trial…but the more you use ProdPad, the longer your trial becomes?’’

In doing this they found that by the end of the trial users knew their way around Propad and were ready to use it — woalah their work is done!

2. Proposify created a guided tour of the entire workflow

‘We already know that users who send a proposal during their trial are 2x more likely to convert to a paid account.

And what we’re finding is that a user who completes our new tutorial is 3x more likely to send a proposal, and those who complete it are 7x more likely to become a paying customer.’

3. For Drift, ease of use and low effort got their users raving

‘We asked ourselves.. “How can we make sure each step (no matter how many there are) has such a low threshold of effort that users will fly through it?’

4. Uber focus on mobile onboarding to retain their users

Studies have recently found that 51.2% of people use a mobile or tablet to access the internet compared to 48.7% of desktop users.

The need for excellent mobile design is essential now more than ever.

Uber are ahead of the game with a new an improved streamlined design which allows their users to navigate their way around effortlessly.

‘We simplified the core design of the information collection process, leading to reduced cognitive overload and improved overall UX’

5. Darvinder Kochhar helped Fomo with their onboarding by putting a creative spin on things

He carried out analysis on why Fomo saw a drop in retention and onboarding during the sign up process.

‘Fomo is a SaaS platform which helps eCommerce platforms improve their conversion rates by using the concept of Fear Of Missing Out.

I helped them by leading a UX Design project to improve upon their onboarding flow and fix other ux related issues I found along the way.’

Read more: Fomo UX Audit

6. UX expert Sarah Leigh is WalkMe’s secret weapon for success

‘Feedback is probably the most important aspect of creating great UX. We talk to our customers often to ask them about their experiences, in addition to performing usability testing for all our new features.’

7. Wistia humanised onboarding with a user video experience

‘After a month, we pulled the data. Our new video had increased our main metric by 30%. Holy smokes. We were thrilled.

We ran the numbers through a statistical significance calculator and shared high-fives after we saw the numbers were valid.’

8. Should that feature be in the onboarding experience? Craig Morrison reflects on UX mistakes.

‘You can apply UX best practices, and build your design to the best of your ability, but you’ll never get it right on the first try.’

‘Positive user experiences lead to increased word of mouth, higher engagement rates and faster growth’

9. Smartsheet experts explain how to use psychology but without ‘dark pattern’ trickery

Ahley Karr and Andy Cargile, the UX Principal and UX Senior Director at Smartsheet give us an insight into how they shape their UX from the ethics they practice to their new design strategy.

‘Often overlooked, Karr thinks ethics are an important design consideration and key to building customer loyalty over time.’

You can use human psychology triggers to shape human — meaning buyer — behavior, and I think it is important to be careful about separating people from their money using trickery. In UX, they are called dark patterns, and it is possible to to use deceptive behavior in interface design.’

10. Twine focused on the dialogue of their onboarding to instantly minimise their dropout rate

‘Bad UX was hurting our revenue.

So, we got to work and re-designed the onboarding process from signup to support. Since launching the new onboarding, we’re now running at a 30% dropout rate.’

11. Crashlytics built a product that people loved by a UX that evoked emotion

‘Our first-time experience was like nothing developers had seen before. They Tweeted about it. They told their friends.

Eventually, by the time Twitter acquired us, we were already on 300 million devices. Today, we’re on almost 3 billion monthly active devices.’

‘People are very aware of time … which means, if you’re able to have the user’s mind focus on something else, time will move faster. And boring things like waiting — for a dashboard to populate, for example — will feel much shorter, which makes a user feel engaged and more likely to stick around.’

Related: See the best onboarding emails of 27 companies