Onboarding posts

The new year is the perfect time to explore new ways of building effective and human-centered user onboarding experiences. Here are 5 onboarding design strategies you can explore this year, whether you’re building for devices, apps, services, platforms, or anything in between.

Discussion about user onboarding often focuses on teaching new users how to use a product’s interface. There are dozens of third-party plugins that offer various ways to point out product navigation, features, and affordances. However, this only scratches the surface of what onboarding can be about. The biggest opportunities for onboarding happen at higher levels. 

Similar to how The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that employee onboarding can happen at multiple levels, user onboarding can also be tiered. Here’s the 4 levels of user onboarding that I currently think about, from lowest highest level: interface orientation, process onboarding, new meanings onboarding, and systems understanding. 

…it’s this classic: rely on recognition rather than recall. 

It’s Clippy’s birthday!

On November 19, 1996, Microsoft announced the release of Office 97, and the famously overzealous paperclip assistant was born. Here’s just a little bit about Clippy (full name: Clippit) and it’s relationship to onboarding.

There’s a term used in the product development world that has started to make me cringe, even though I know I’ve used it before. It’s unavoidable if you work on any experience that even remotely touches user onboarding. But it can have a negative impact on human-centered product design. The offending term? “User education.” 

Over the years, I’ve encountered a variety of posts, books, papers, and talks that have expanded my thinking about what goes into good user onboarding. That’s because user onboarding is a blend of many educational, behavioral, human resources, design, and business practices, rather than a separate instance of design.

Over the last few months, I asked different people who work on products in services, in a variety of industries, to share their perspectives on user onboarding. While I’ve heard from many people over the years, I wanted to ask a few pointed questions. Via questionnaires and interviews, 48 people* shared with me the challenges they faced in trying to create a good user onboarding experience, the goals they felt user onboarding needed to achieve, and how they defined the scope of it. My goal was to understand the range of perspectives different people have about user onboarding, and find common themes. In the spirit of sharing, this post is a lightweight recap of what stuck out most from these conversations (and I’d love to hear if your perspective is similar or different!).

This piece was written together with Joe Macleod and also published as part of UXLX 2020.

When we design products and services, we focus a lot on the core user experience, or what we envision seasoned users to be doing day to day. But a good product or service will be bookended by a strong beginning, and a strong end.

When people think of user education in products, they’re often thinking of certain set of UI patterns. In some cases, these patterns can be helpful. But, in most other cases, the patterns are overused and applied inappropriately to many situations. They quickly become anti-patterns.

I’ve illustrated that slippery slope by drawing these “patterns” as if they were Pokemon evolutions. You know, when a seemingly harmless pattern can turn into a formidable beast.

The final seasons of fantasy TV series Game of Thrones were considered a complete flop, with character arcs reaching conclusions that seemed rushed and contrary to the paths they were on in prior seasons. Of the many discussions about why the end of the series felt so wrong, one critique from Twitter user @DSilvermint caught my eye. He attributed the cause to two different writer archetypes: “plotters” (those who start with a detailed outline and clear ending before writing a story, but which allows for less organic character development), and “pantsers” (those who “fly by the seat of their pants” by developing the characters and story as they write, seeing where it takes them, but because of that it can feel like the story doesn’t have a planned endpoint).

“New users aren’t discovering our features. Can we make them watch a video or do a tutorial before they get started?”

This is a question I’ve heard many variations of throughout my career. Chances are, if you work in product design, you’ve heard it too.

In an earlier post, I covered how onboarding is more than just a one-time event in a customer’s journey. In this post, I’ll be making the case for applying more than one onboarding method. Just as students will fail to learn if taught with a one-size-fits-all approach, trying to onboard every user in the same way is bound to fail.