The Very Best Onboarding UX Patterns
Nov 28, 2024
In a world where subscriptions are all the rage, what are the best ways of successfully onboarding users?
I've gone down a rabbit hole of looking at different onboarding UX patterns. It started out of boredom at 11pm one night when I couldn't sleep. I downloaded a flurry of mobile apps to my cellphone to go through different ones. The only thing that stopped me was my phone telling me my storage was full!
In a world where subscriptions are all the rage while users simultaneously hate them, I wondered what the best ways of successfully onboarding users could look like.
Some quick facts for you. Did you know that 1 out of 4 users will abandon a mobile app after using it just once? 95% of users will eventually churn over a three month period. That's crazy!
User onboarding is the process of guiding new users to find value in your product so they can become familiar with how it works and start using it consistently.
The goal of onboarding UX is to make it simple for new users to start using your product, reduce your product’s time-to-value, build habits, and drive overall product adoption.
Types of onboarding UX patterns
Product tours
Product tours virtually walk new users through the platform and showcase the basic features step-by-step. This happens through an assortment of images, videos, and flows users can cycle through.
Interactive walkthroughs
Similar to product tours, interactive walkthroughs take users through the essential flows and advanced features with embedded step-by-step instructions.
Onboarding checklists
User checklists are a list of to-dos a user needs to complete as part of the onboarding process. This helps break down your product's main features and gets the user familiar with them.
Hotspots
Hotspots are those little glowing dots that draw attention to unused features, issues, and alerts without distracting users (that's debatable if they are or are not distracting…). As the name implies, hotspots use a flashing mechanism to attract a user’s attention. There can be multiple on the same page.
5. Pop up alerts
The bane of my existence. I hate this type of user onboarding. Even worse is when the pop up alert is an auto-playing video. Ugh.
Pop up alerts are usually programmed to be triggered by some action your user makes: clicking a button, signing up, trying out a feature, or trying to exit the page. You can use third-party video hosting like YouTube or Vimeo to embed them on your website.
Creating an effective user onboarding flow
Users are going to go about using your product in different ways. Think about something such as Excel or Google Sheets. It's used by office workers for organizing large data sets but is used in everyday life by people for budgeting, meal planning, to do's, and more.
You need to create user flows and user personas for all the different users that may use your product. During testing, analyze how each of them interacts with the product and responds to user flows.
If you're wanting to continue learning about onboarding UX, I did find a book called Better Onboarding by Krystal Higgins. She even has a really great talk about it on YouTube.