Better Onboarding

Photograph of Krystal Higgins speaking on stage with a slide from the Better Onboarding presentation in the background
Image from the Better Onboarding talk at PUSH UX

This talk and workshop series helps teams understand how to build better user onboarding experiences for their products and services, and includes insights from my Better Onboarding book. This series has been featured at events like PUSH UX in Munich, An Event Apart in San Francisco, UX Fest in London, UX Australia, CPHUX in Denmark, and Button.

Want me to do this talk or workshop for your event? Reach out!

About the talk

A good onboarding experience welcomes new users and guides them from their current situations to lasting success. But it often gets reduced to a one-size-fits-all, front-loaded piece of instruction. This talk covers why teams need to move past front-loaded instruction and instead embrace guided interaction.

Key takeaways from the “Better Onboarding” talk:

  • Understand what guided interaction is, and why it’s a better onboarding strategy than front-loaded instruction.
  • Learn the basics about mapping user onboarding journeys.
  • See how the baseline design of your product and its content creates a foundation for better onboarding.

The “Better Onboarding” talk is available in a 30 min, 45 min, or 1 hour format (not including Q&A). Contact me if you’re interested in having me give this talk.

About the workshop

Photograph from the Better Onboarding workshop with people working in the foreground and an instruction slide in the background
Photograph from an in-person version of the Better Onboarding Journeys workshop

The workshop, called “Better Onboarding Journeys,” provides strategies for designing user onboarding that guides new users from different situations to a destination of success. It suits UX designers, product managers, content strategists, startup founders, and anyone on a product team. The strategies are flexible to all stages of product maturity, from evolving the onboarding of an existing product to creating onboarding for a brand new one.

Through a mix of presentation and hands-on activities, participants learn how to:

  • Define the start and end points of onboarding
  • Map the actions that bridge people between those start and endpoints
  • Break down each action so that teams can see how guidance can be applied to individual actions while still linking them to a broader journey.

The “Better Onboarding Journeys” workshop has been run virtually and in person, and runs in both a half day and full day format. Contact me if you’re interested!

Onboarding for the Long Run

“Onboarding for the long run” was a presentation series about designing onboarding that helps users beyond the first run. While that can sound daunting, I used the presentation to help break things down into actionable chunks. First, I outlined the different opportunities across the customer journey during which onboarding techniques are helpful. Then, I presented a diverse toolkit of onboarding methods that teams could use to help users in different situations, leading to long-term benefit in our products.

This talk was shared at:

  • UX Lisbon, 2020
  • UX New Zealand, 2019
  • UX Days Tokyo, 2019
  • UX Days Seoul, 2019
  • UX Australia, 2018
  • UX London, 2018
  • An Event Apart San Francisco, 2017
  • An Event Apart Seattle, 2017
  • Hosted on UIE’s All You Can Learn Library

New users matter, too!

“New Users Matter Too” was a presentation series I created as part of First Time UX, my personal research project on onboarding design. I gave this talk in a variety of lengths, from 15 minutes to 60 minutes, and occasionally as a 90 minute workshop.

I’ve presented and run workshops on this topic at An Event Apart, WebdageneSXSW, UX Australia, the Bentley University in San Francisco, Groupon, and Google.

Watch a video of the presentation from Webdagene 2015 and from An Event Apart, Orlando, 2016.