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.

Keep reading for essential guides to:

• Why user onboarding matters
• User onboarding UX best practices and principles
• The best onboarding UX/UI patterns for your app
• Onboarding UX for mobile apps
• How to measure and optimize your onboarding UX
• Great user onboarding examples from real companies

Why user onboarding matters

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:

1. Why user onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey by 2.6x
   The numbers don't lie: User onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey because it sets the stage for everything to come. 
2. Tomorrow is too late: Why user onboarding should be a top priority for your SaaS company
   High churn rates, low free-to-paid conversion, a large volume of support tickets—all are symptoms of bad onboarding. Why wait to fix yours?
3. 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.
4. Why do bad user retention rates happen to good mobile apps?
   Here are some not-so-fun stats about mobile app abandonment—plus, what you can do to improve your app's retention rates. Hint: Onboarding plays a big role.
   

User onboarding UX best practices and principles

5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 3 fundamental user onboarding lessons from classic Nintendo games
   Find out the surprising things that classic NES games like Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and Contra have to teach us about user onboarding.
8. Minimum viable onboarding: The 3 essentials to great user onboarding
   Great user onboarding doesn't have to be complicated. To create an onboarding experience that engages and converts, you really just need to accomplish 3 things.
9. How to design goal-oriented user onboarding in 4 steps
   How to design user onboarding experiences that help new users achieve their goals.
10. The power of discovery: How to use self-directed learning in user onboarding
    Sometimes being helpful means telling your users to go figure it out for themselves.
11. How to create an omnichannel onboarding experience
    How to go beyond multichannel strategies to create a cohesive onboarding experience that shortens TTV and helps new users find success.
12. 5 ways to personalize your user onboarding experience
    There's more to personalization than adding a {First name} token to your emails. Here are 5 ways to personalize your onboarding UX.
    

The best onboarding UX/UI patterns for your app

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:

13. Choosing the right user onboarding UX pattern
    Should you choose an annotated, embedded, or dedicated UX pattern for your onboarding experience? 
14. Tooltips: How to use this small but mighty UI pattern correctly
    We love a good tooltip around here. Learn how to use this versatile UI pattern the right way to delight users and add value.
15. Big, bold UX—using modal windows for in-app user engagement
    There's a fine line between being big and bold, and downright annoying. Here's how to design modals your users will actually enjoy.
16. Complete guide to product tours & walkthroughs
    This comprehensive guide includes 30+ links to original content with everything you need to create your own effective product tours.
17. What is the best UI pattern for your product tour?
    How and when to use 4 popular UI patterns to create product tours that will shorten time to value and delight new users.

Onboarding UX for mobile apps

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:

18. 4 powerful stats that reveal why mobile onboarding is so important
    We all know user onboarding matters. But you might be surprised by how big of an impact it can have on your mobile app's success.
19. How to simplify complex user onboarding for mobile
    Smaller screens demand simpler onboarding. Here's how to streamline your mobile onboarding and improve your app abandonment rates.
20. The essential guide to mobile user onboarding UI/UX patterns
    Best practices and best-in-class examples of all the UI/UX patterns you need to create an exceptional mobile onboarding experience.
21. Asking nicely: 3 strategies for successful mobile permission priming
    Users grant mobile apps permission to access their data based on trust. Reduce abandonment by gaining their trust with permissions priming.
    

How to measure and optimize your onboarding UX

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:

22. A beginner's guide to user journey mapping
    Learn how to map your users' journeys more effectively and create UX flows that get users where they want to go.
23. The ultimate guide to getting your users to their aha moment
    You know your product's value, but do your users? Learn how to get them to their aha moment—faster than ever before.
24. 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.
25. How to identify your product’s activation metric
    To improve activation, you first have to identify your activation metrics. How? This guide breaks it down into 4 easy-to-follow steps.
26. 13 product and behavioral analytics tools to help you understand your users
    Which product or behavioral analytics tool should you choose? We took a close look at 13 of the most popular and promising options.
    

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.

27. The 5 best user onboarding examples
    These 5 user onboarding experiences stand out from the pack for all the right reasons.
28. The 5 best walkthrough examples for web apps
    These 5 best-in-class walkthroughs teach new users how to perform the specific actions that they need to succeed.
29. 6 best-in-class examples of user onboarding checklists
    Checklists break complex processes into simple steps and keep users motivated during onboarding. 
30. How Pinterest perfected user onboarding
    Casey Winters explains how Pinterest achieved user onboarding greatness through clever experimentation and iteration.
31. 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. 
32. 5 ways Slack’s user onboarding strategy has evolved since 2014
    We compared 3 different versions of Slack's onboarding—from 2014, 2016, and 2019—to understand how their onboarding strategy has evolved.
33. 9 top-notch examples of feature tours and prompts that improve adoption
    Consistent feature adoption (starting at onboarding) = high retention/low churn = a healthy company with a long, happy future. 

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. 

‍

‍