This document discusses user onboarding and provides best practices for designing an effective onboarding experience. It describes different onboarding approaches like walkthroughs, joyriding, and setup flows. Examples are given of both good and bad onboarding from apps like Digit, Acorns, Clear, and Join.me. Key recommendations include demonstrating value over explanations, progressive onboarding, maximizing empty spaces, defining success, and making it fun. The document aims to help users overcome apathy and guide users to their expected destination in the product.

1. All Aboard!
Transporting people to their promise land, the UX way
Andy Schultz
10/23/2015

2. What is onboarding?
It’s welcoming people to your product
and guiding them to their expected
destination.

3. Background
Walgreen’s
Balance Rewards for
healthy Choices platform
WebMD’s
health coaching
platform
+ = One
platform

4. Pre-launch Messaging Drove 3,296 New Users
300 per day before post-message
Post Launch

5. Communicate
Onboarding success is contributed to strategic
communications and UX

6. 5 Min Design Exercise
1. Team up in groups of 2-3
2. Sketch an onboarding story to buy
a high speed toy train
3. Present your ideas and include
value principles

7. Exercise take a ways
What did you learn?

8. Onboarding design must overcome
apathy and distraction working
against you every step of the way.
The elements of User Onboarding - Samuel Hulick

9. Onboarding Approaches

10. walks the user through the features of an app
or highlights the key features.
It’s great because it clears up a lot of confusion
up-front. Often the go-to approach.
Joyriding

11. Homesnap
Homesnap shines with a minimalist and traditional onboarding
approach, yet misses the opportunity to make it part of the
interaction. It dilutes the experience rather than enhancing it.

12. asks the user to make the first move resulting
in immediate engagement. Common for apps
that curate personalized content.
Do Something

13. Trunk Club
Trunk Club asks users to select the fashion they wear with a
dash of “aspiration” style. Clothing sets, picked by a
professional stylist are boxed and shipped to your door.

14. has users “setup” their account rather than
teaching how to use the product. This approach
assumes that onboarding is trickier than the
app’s usability.
Setup

15. Digit, is an automated
savings app and all its
complexity is in the
welcoming approach.
Everything else is
mindless savings.
Digit

16. Welcoming Principles

17. Be more intelligent than your users
Build in logic to ease points of friction

18. Acorns, a micro investment app
reinvents password verification.
Checkmarks indicate when
password rules are met.
Acorns

19. Demonstrate the value, don’t explain it
Avoid long up-front tutorials and screen-by-screen walk-throughs

20. Clear, a to-do list app pushes
users through a 7-screen tutorial
before they can start using it.
It’s a lot to absorb when you
haven’t interacted with the
functional part of the app yet.
Clear

21. Polar, Luke W’s polling app has
you diving into the content.
Onboarding is masked through
your interactions with it.
Polar

22. Make onboarding contextual & progressive
Deliver onboarding elements at the point of value for interactive moments

23. Join.me, offers a four step tutorial before beginning your
presentation. It’s a quick and easy overview of the app for new
users. For regular users, it’s an annoyance.
Join.me

24. Maximize empty spaces
Eliminate dead-ends or the absence of content by demonstrating the value of your
content

25. Redbox
Clear calls to action maximize empty space, but the value
proposition is barely noticeable. Why not populate the page
with a few movies, you’re logged in!

26. Start with the end
Define what success means to your customer and create the strategic steps to
get them their

27. iPhone 6s
Apple’s fingerprint setup combines
visual feedback and physical
interaction. Three parts of your
finger is scanned and displayed
when each part is completed.

28. If its tricky, spell it out
Take a ways
Context is king
Make it fun
Wow people

29. MK Cook
http://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/design/ux-flows-onboarding
Tristan Plank
https://blinkux.com/blog/up-running-3-tips-for-an-awesome-onboarding-ux/
Whitney Hess
http://uxmag.com/articles/onboarding-designing-welcoming-first-experiences
Samuel Hulick
https://www.useronboard.com/onboarding-teardowns/
Sources

30. Andy Schultz
Ande.schultz@gmail.com
@_AndySchultz_