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What do workplace orientation sessions, carousels, instructional videos, a peppy paperclip, and user manuals have in common? They’re all attempts to onboard people to new spaces. And in a new book, I illustrate how we can do better when it comes to educating our new users about our products.

I’m excited to announce “Better Onboarding, two years in the making, which is a book about designing, well, better user onboarding experiences. And I’m even more excited to say it’s published by the amazing team at A Book Apart! You can get your copy here.

What’s inside?

The structure of this book will take you through the various stages that all teams go through as they define, design, and maintain user onboarding. 

Are you still working to get your team “onboard” with designing better user onboarding? The first two chapters of this book will set a clear definition of user onboarding, the importance of onboarding beyond the first run and how that’s best achieved through guided interaction, and share some strategies to get your team ready for new users. 

Is your team bought in, but you’re trying to understand how to plan and implement better user onboarding through interaction? The middle chapters will guide you through understanding the onboarding journey in your product based on different user situations, breaking down the key actions on those paths, and then understanding what parts of and patterns in your product might bring guidance you provide to life. 

Are you working with an already-designed onboarding experience, but want to understand how to move forward from there? The final chapter of the book touches on how onboarding can fit into a longer-term strategy for your product beyond the initial onboarding of new users. 

And why…a book?

If you’ve read my past work on user onboarding, you know I encourage an “interact, don’t tell” approach. I know. I am using a book, a manual-esque device, to help you build better user onboarding. But my goal is for you to use this as just one of many resources that plug into different parts of your team’s unique design process. And it’s also why I published with A Book Apart: Known for practical, concise content, we worked together to condense years worth of experience, research, examples, and activities into this book while also making sure it doesn’t overwhelm you, the reader, with information…just like how you don’t want to overwhelm your new users.

This book won’t be the only tool you use to design better onboarding, but I hope it can be a reference you can return to whenever you need.

You can get more information, and grab your copy, over at https://www.abookapart.com/products/better-onboarding.