In today’s app landscape, a mix of experience and industry trends often drive decisions about product onboarding. Many companies look to their competition for guidance, aiming to replicate success rather than innovate. This can lead to an onboarding culture that feels more ritualistic than strategic, lacking a clear understanding of the underlying purpose of onboarding.
I wanted to create a more rigorous approach for making onboarding decisions that offers more nuance and truly considers the unique needs of each app and its users. So I’ve devised a framework for choosing a product’s onboarding capabilities, according to the following factors:
product complexity
customization level
user-experience familiarity
learning curve
Using this framework, you can score your product using these four factors, rating each factor from one to ten. More on this framework later.
Champion Advertisement
Continue Reading…
In this article, I’ll consider onboarding for a full range of apps—from those that are so simple they might not even need in-product onboarding to others that are so complex they need to go beyond digital, in-product onboarding.
What Is Onboarding?
Before I get into the framework, let’s take a look at what onboarding actually is. In my experience, some UX designers tend to overlook the business significance of onboarding.
The whole concept of onboarding is closely related to activation, which essentially is turning new users into power users. To do that, a product needs to do three things, as follows:
Initiate a setup moment. The system must provide a minimal amount of required information to enable users to extract value.
Elicit an Aha! moment. The system needs to educate users about its functionality so its value proposition is clear.
Help users start forming a habit. The system needs to assist users in integrating it into their lives so activation can reinforce retention.
Onboarding accounts for these three steps, which are shown in Figure 1. Onboarding is also a convenient framework that can help you ask the right questions. Rather than listing features in a carousel, you can take a more strategic, product-driven approach.
Now that I’ve broken down onboarding into its component parts, let’s take a look at some common types of onboarding.
Onboarding Types
Trying to list all approaches to onboarding is tricky. Although I’ve done my best to be comprehensive, these things aren’t always clear cut. Plus, some onboarding types can merge, as the line dividing them shifts. That said, the most common onboarding patterns include the following:
product carousels
interactive tutorials
guided tours
onboarding checklists
personalized onboarding flows
product tours
contextual Help or ToolTips
progressive onboarding
manual onboarding
Product Carousels
Product carousels are a Dribbble staple. A few screens cover the product’s main features. Carousels work well for products that utilize straightforward design patterns, while also providing value that’s very easy to grasp. Figure 2 shows an example of a product carousel.
Interactive tutorials engage users by letting them perform tasks within an app as they learn. This hands-on approach helps users understand key features and workflows through direct interaction, ensuring they’ll retain the information better. Figure 3 shows an example of an interactive tutorial.
Guided tours lead users through an app’s main features step by step. During onboarding, guided tours typically highlight an app’s important sections and functionalities, providing explanations and ensuring that users get a comprehensive overview of a product without feeling overwhelmed. Asana provides a good example of a guided tour during its initial onboarding flow. To help users get started, the application walks them through a wizard, encouraging them to fill in enough information to make the product useful to them. In Figure 4, you can see Asana’s guided tour.
Onboarding checklists provide users with a list of tasks that they’ll complete as they explore an app. This method encourages users to engage with various features at their own pace, giving them a sense of accomplishment as they progress through the checklist. Figure 5 shows an example of an onboarding checklist.
Personalized onboarding flows tailor the onboarding experience to each user’s specific needs and preferences. By asking questions or using data insights, the app can customize the onboarding process to highlight features that would be most relevant to the user, making the experience more engaging and useful. Figure 6 shows a personalized onboarding flow.
Product tours offer a broad overview of an app’s capabilities, often introducing users to its main features through a series of screens or videos. This type of onboarding is great for providing a quick, high-level understanding of what an app offers without going into too much detail. Figure 7 shows a product tour. Figure 7—Figma’s product tour
Contextual Help and ToolTips provide on-the-spot assistance as users navigate a new app. As shown in Figure 8, these small pop-ups or overlays offer immediate guidance or explanations of specific features or actions, helping users learn as they go, without interrupting their workflow.
Progressive onboarding gradually introduces features and functionalities that align with the user’s increasing familiarity and needs. Rather than overwhelming new users with everything at once, this onboarding method reveals more complex aspects of an app as users become more comfortable and experienced with it. For instance, upon the user’s first interacting with HubSpot, the application gathers data to personalize the experience and set up the system, as shown in Figure 9. Later, it also utilizes ToolTips, as shown in Figure 10.
Manually onboarding new users is by far the most labor-intensive approach to onboarding. This requires a company to schedule a call with leads or clients, then spend hours explaining the product to them. For example, this approach works well for products that have a very high loan-to-valueratio (LTV). Figure 11 shows an example of manual onboarding.
Table 1 summarizes all of the onboarding patterns that I’ve discussed thus far. My onboarding framework comprehends all of these onboarding types. When designing a product’s onboarding capabilities, you can select types of onboarding for each of the four factors that I introduced earlier. I’ve indicated the best use case for each onboarding type and provided some examples.
Table 1—A summary of onboarding types
Onboarding Type
Best Use Case
Examples
Carousels
Products with a clear value proposition utilizing common patterns
Wise
Interactive Tutorials
Complex products with many features
Adobe Photoshop, Trello, Salesforce
Guided Tours
Products with an intricate user interface
Google Workspace, Asana, Slack
Onboarding Checklists
Products with multiple setup steps
Dropbox, Canva, Mailchimp
Personalized Onboarding Flows
Products with customizable features
Spotify, Netflix, LinkedIn
Product Tours
New products or major updates
Airbnb, Shopify
Contextual Help or ToolTips
Products with complex features or terminology
Evernote, GitHub
Progressive Onboarding
Products with a steep learning curve
Duolingo, Sketch, Strava
Manual Onboarding
Products that are very complex, very expensive, or require a lot of customization
Haiilo
Evaluating Your Onboarding Options
Now that I’ve covered the major approaches that products take to onboarding, let’s consider the four factors by which you can compare them. While I’ve suggested a scale of from one to ten for each factor, if you don’t think all of these factors are of equal importance, feel free to use your own scale. Let’s consider each factor in greater depth.
Product Complexity
Product complexity relates to the number of features a product has, how intricate these features are, and how well integrated they are. For example, a simple flashlight app is straightforward, has minimal features, and needs little to no onboarding, so it has a rating of 1. In contrast, a complex product such as Adobe Photoshop has numerous tools and features and requires detailed interactive tutorials to help users understand how to use them effectively, so it has a rating of 10.
Customization Level
A product’s customization level measures the extent to which a company expects users to modify the product to make it functional. A basic calculator app, for example, offers little or no customization, so it has a rating of 1. Users can use it out of the box without any guidance. Salesforce, on the other hand, is a highly customizable platform that would benefit from personalized onboarding to help users configure the system according to their business processes, so it has a rating of 10.
User-Experience Familiarity
User-experience familiarity assesses how easy to understand your product is for new users, in relation to similar products they might already know. Specialized medical software for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans might be unfamiliar to most new users and could benefit from guided tours that would help them to navigate through a complex environment, so it would have a high rating. Conversely, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, although fairly complex, are generally familiar to many users in terms of their user interface, letting users dive in with less guidance, so they would have a low rating.
Learning Curve
Learning curve indicates the time and effort necessary for a user to become proficient. Simple tools such as Google Search have almost no learning curve and require very little, if any, onboarding, so have a rating of 1. In contrast, apps such as Blender or AutoCAD are known for their steep learning curve, would require progressive onboarding, providing users with ongoing support and learning materials as they develop their skills over time, so they would have a rating of 10.
Points of Reference
Table 2 shows the points of reference I’ve used to make sure all stakeholders who are involved with a product have a similar idea of what these numbers represent. Feel free to insert your own examples that might make more sense for your industry domain.
Table 2—Points of reference
Factor
Level-1 Example
Level-10 Example
Product complexity
Simple flashlight app
Adobe Photoshop
Customization level
Basic calculator app
Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
User-experience familiarity
Specialized medical software for MRI scans
Facebook or Twitter (X)
Learning curve
Google Search
Blender or AutoCAD
Choosing an Onboarding Type
Table 3 unifies everything I’ve covered about onboarding types. I’ve based the ranges I’ve provided for ratings on my own experience. If your experience differs, feel free to modify the table. My goal is not to impose these ranges on you, but rather to offer an approach that provides a way of streamlining your onboarding decisions.
Table 3—Ranges of ratings for specific onboarding types
Onboarding Type
Product Complexity
Customization Level
User-Experience Familiarity
Learning Curve
Carousels
2–4
2–5
1–4
1–3
Interactive Tutorials
7–10
3–7
1–5
5–10
Guided Tours
6–9
2–5
1–4
4–7
Onboarding Checklists
3–6
2–6
4–7
3–6
Personalized Onboarding
4–7
6–10
2–6
3–7
Product Tours
5–8
1–5
1–5
4–8
Contextual Help/ToolTips
7–10
1–4
3–6
4–8
Progressive Onboarding
6–9
2–7
2–6
6–9
Manual Onboarding
8–10
8–10
6–10
7–10
Working with this table should be easy enough. Having rated your product on these four criteria, consider which types of onboarding seem to fit best. You could easily adapt the process of making this determination into a workshop format.
On top of its being functional, this framework offers a way to include all stakeholders in the decision-making process and get them invested in the UX design process. This contributes to your company’s overall UX maturity, which in the long term, makes companies much better workplaces for UX designers.
Summing Up
In conclusion, the framework I’ve outlined in this article presents a more structured approach to making onboarding decisions that I haven’t seen widely discussed. By offering a simple but effective way of evaluating the four dimensions of onboarding features on a scale from one to ten, this framework can bring a new level of rigor to the onboarding design process, particularly for less experienced designers who might struggle in determining where to begin. This approach also creates an occasion for involving stakeholders in reaching joint UX design decisions and sharing ownership for them. While this approach is not foolproof by any means, it is definitely better than an unstructured approach.
Feel free to adapt and modify this framework according to the specific needs of your products or the unique characteristics of your user base. In this way, you can ensure that the framework best fits your users’ usage scenarios and offers maximal effectiveness in facilitating a smoother user journey. Happy onboarding!
Oleksandr has over ten years of experience in UX and product design. The projects he has led have received prestigious honors from Red Dot, Lovie, IF, Webby, and Awwwards. As a co-founder of the design agency Excited, he has played a pivotal role in Clutch’s ranking of the company as the #3 UX agency globally, based on client reviews. Over his career, Oleksandr has been involved in over 100 different design projects. In his spare time, he enjoys good coffee and wakeboarding. \ Read More
