Onboarding UX Guides And Decision Trees. Practical techniques for better onboarding UX, design patterns, kits and Figma templates — on mobile and desktop ↓
🚫 Users often skip tutorials/walkthroughs entirely.
🚫 Never block the UI with full-page onboarding modals.
🚫 Avoid long multi-step tutorials with 5+ steps.
✅ Ask customers what goals they are trying to achieve.
✅ Allow users to hide walkthroughs and restore them later.
✅ Focus on bringing users to first success moments fast.
✅ Structure your onboarding suggestions in bite-sized chunks.
✅ Explain features when users slow down or make mistakes.
✅ Show features when users lose time with repetitive tasks.
✅ Prevent failure with an early warning system for new users.
✅ Collapsible checklists work well for onboarding.
✅ Personalized onboarding works even better.
✅ Design sets of filters, templates and empty states.
✅ Show starter kits based on user’s profile and interests.
✅ Consider short video guides and email drip campaigns.
Good onboarding can’t be generic. It has to be relevant and valuable. Define your user segments first. Design a set of presets to help them get to success moments faster. Think of the questions you need to ask to customize their experience. Think about filters and presets they might need.
Onboarding tutorials often appear once and get instantly dismissed, nowhere to be found again. Allow users to find them when they need it. Bring them up when users slow down or make mistakes. And test the discoverability of your features continuously. If a feature is obvious, you might not need to explain it at all. And if it isn’t, perhaps onboarding won’t solve this problem either.
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✤ Useful resources
How to Choose Onboarding Methods and Components, by NewsKit 👍
Methods: https://lnkd.in/eWn5FPWA
Decision Tree: https://lnkd.in/e8TmMDFf
Design Patterns: https://lnkd.in/ed7HjzkW
Designing For First 30 Seconds, by Wojciech Wasilewski
https://lnkd.in/dN6CwBwC
Writing The Onboarding Experience, by Nick DiLallo
https://lnkd.in/dVYg6r6z
Onboarding UX Playbook, by Eleana Gkogka
https://lnkd.in/edcDfMFG
Onboarding UX Guide (free eBook), by Intercom
https://lnkd.in/eAxT6ZM4
Onboarding Best Practices, by Taras Bakusevych
https://lnkd.in/eRwr2tEc
How To Organize Onboarding in Figma
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ei434tqq
Shopify: https://lnkd.in/dbzCt8pr
Mobile Onboarding Wireframe Flows (Figma template)
https://lnkd.in/eAzAA3bU
