Onboarding UX Playbook

Onboarding UX Playbook (https://lnkd.in/eiKcTgZd), a practical guide on how to design better onboarding, common mistakes to avoid and some practical guidelines — along with decision trees and Figma templates below. Neatly put together by Ben Shih.

Ben highlights a few valuable points that are often forgotten or overlooked. In many interfaces, onboarding ends after just a few of tooltips or onboarding tutorials, leaving people on an empty page without guidance. Yet good onboarding shouldn’t end until the user forms a habit of using the product.

Wes Bush noted that the main goal of onboarding is to help users hit their first strike — to get to the first success moment and understand the value quickly. That means balancing different cases and customizing onboarding for user’s needs.

Good onboarding can’t be generic. It has to be relevant and valuable. So define your user segments and profiles first. Design presets to help them get to success moments faster. Think of the questions you need to ask to customize their experience. Think about defaults, filters and presets they might need.

Onboarding tutorials often appear once and get instantly dismissed, nowhere to be found again. So allow users to find them when they need it. Bring them up when users 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.

Useful resources:

Complete Onboarding UX Guide (free eBook), by Intercom
https://lnkd.in/eAxT6ZM4

Choosing Onboarding Methods and Components, by NewsKit
↳ Figma: https://lnkd.in/eWn5FPWA
↳ Docs: https://lnkd.in/ed7HjzkW

Onboarding Case Studies, by Andrew Pacholik
https://onboarding.study

Onboarding UX Decision Tree, by NewsKit
https://lnkd.in/e8TmMDFf

Product Onboarding UX Playbook, by Eleana Gkogka
https://lnkd.in/edcDfMFG

UX Onboarding Patterns, by Eve Weinberg https://lnkd.in/e7_M4kDv

User Onboarding Best Practices, by Taras Bakusevych
https://lnkd.in/eRwr2tEc

Guide to Onboarding, by Phil Byrne
https://lnkd.in/esEavgw7

How Spotify Organizes Onboarding in Figma
https://lnkd.in/ei434tqq

Mobile App Onboarding Practices, by Alita Joyce
https://lnkd.in/eaKF3Crq

Mobile Onboarding Wireframe Flows (Figma template)
https://lnkd.in/eAzAA3bU