When it comes to user onboarding, it doesn't matter how beautiful your app design is—your onboarding experience is useless if it doesn't hold users' attention and help them unlock the value of your product.
Of course, aesthetics matter, too. Everyone loves a beautiful app. But remember: “[A]rt asks questions, while design answers them.” Great onboarding UX design shouldn’t just look good—it should answer the key questions your users have about your product, before they even know to ask them.
That’s because effective onboarding isn’t just about welcoming new users. It’s about showing them around, pointing out how the most important things work, and making sure they’re set up for success once the training wheels come off.
To help you create the best onboarding experience for your own app, we’ve compiled a must-read list of articles, including: guides to onboarding UX best practices, the most effective UI patterns, top onboarding examples, and ways to measure and optimize onboarding metrics.
Chances are, if you’re reading this article you probably already know onboarding is important. You don’t need convincing—you need tips on how to get this critical part of the user journey right. But if you still need some persuading (or have key stakeholders that do) the following articles lay it all out:
7 reasons even great UX needs user onboarding A product designer explains why your great UX still needs onboarding, and how humble learning patterns can make your best UX even better.
User onboarding best practices Learn from our comprehensive guide to user onboarding best practices—based on years of research and practice. This will be your go-to-guide for user onboarding strategies.
User psychology: 6 principles for better UX design Exceptional user experiences are rooted deep in cognitive and behavioral psychology. Here are 6 of the most important principles in user psychology that UX designers should understand.
Your user onboarding doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Any design problem you're tackling has probably been solved before tried-and-true onboarding UI/UX patterns. Here are a few guides to familiar patterns that you can put your own spin on for a creative experience that converts:
Just because you’ve mastered onboarding for your desktop or web app doesn’t mean you necessarily know what it takes to onboard users to the mobile version. That’s because with smaller screens comes greater responsibility—every misstep can seem that much bigger in comparison when design real estate is limited. The following articles lay out some of the challenges of designing onboarding UX for mobile, along with tips for getting it right:
If you’re not tracking and measuring your onboarding UX, how do you know if it’s successful? And how do you improve if it’s not? Identifying the right onboarding metrics—and factoring these goals into the design—is an important step that no product manager should forget. Below are a few must-read guides to onboarding metrics:
How to shorten time to value You'd be amazed what even a few seconds saved on a user's journey to value can mean for your activation and retention rates.
Great user onboarding examples from real companies
There's no single formula for captivating onboarding UX—every product and app is different. But that shouldn’t stop you from drawing inspiration from real companies that have done it well. The following resources break down onboarding UX examples from popular apps, with tips for implementing the learnings in your own product.
How Pinterest perfected user onboarding Casey Winters explains how Pinterest achieved user onboarding greatness through clever experimentation and iteration.
5 best mobile app onboarding experiences of 2019 In an ever-expanding mobile market, staying competitive requires a seamless, best-in-class user experience—and that starts with exceptional app onboarding.
An effective user onboarding strategy is good for business
Let’s face it: There are some bad onboarding experiences out there. Bad onboarding isn’t just a design problem—it’s a business problem. When users have a negative onboarding experience, they don’t think"this is bad onboarding." They think, "this is a bad product." The stakes are high.
An effective onboarding strategy involves cross-functional collaboration between your design, product, and marketing teams. It also involves email campaigns, in-app messages, user testing, and analytics. That’s a lot of balls to juggle at once. Lucky for you, we’ve put together a list of tools that can help.
We also encourage you to check out ReallyGoodUX—an ever-growing library of excellent UX examples from popular products. Subscribe or check back weekly for UX inspiration.
Ready to start building a better onboarding experience?
We’re here to help. Appcues makes it easy to create, edit, and iterate on user onboarding flows. There’s no coding required after installation, which means non-technical folks on your product and marketing teams can get to work right away, without relying on dev cycles.
Facts & Questions
Why is user onboarding so crucial for product success?
What are some essential onboarding UX best practices?
How do I choose the right UI/UX patterns for my onboarding?
Are mobile and web onboarding strategies really that different?
If retention is the goal, multi-channel messaging is the key
Retention starts with a connected user experience—both in and out of your product. Appcues helps SaaS teams engage users seamlessly with in-app messaging, email, and push notifications, guiding them to value and turning them into champions.
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